Some believe that there’s no such thing as overspending on marketing. But the truth is, the right offer can save you time and money while attracting new leads and helping your studio grow.
Running a studio involves much more than holding sessions and providing a direct service to your clients. There are many challenging aspects of this business, including creating marketing campaigns, driving lead generation, and new member onboarding.
These areas, especially marketing, are challenging for many studios mainly because they fall outside what studio owners generally perceive as part of their jobs.
However, marketing and its related activities aren’t necessarily only challenges. They can also represent valuable opportunities for growing your business.
In fact, the solution to these challenges might be easier than it seems, especially for those studio owners who understand and leverage the concept of the self-liquidating offer.
In this article, we’ll explain what the best type of offer is and how you can put your marketing in line with your overall goals.
Why You Want a Self-Liquidating Offer
A self-liquidating offer is a special method of marketing that functions so well, it’s a wonder most studios aren’t using it. Essentially, this offer type functions so that your leads actually give you the money to reinvest back into your studio’s marketing.
In other words, you create a system that allows for an unlimited marketing budget while creating a base of engaged leads who become the following legendary members of your studio and community.
But how do you construct such an offer?
The answer is by bringing in the right people.
Furthermore, this is possible because you don’t present your offer as a studio owner. Instead, you present it as a doctor.
When you go to a doctor, they don’t try to sell you stuff, right? They simply prescribe what you need based on their diagnosis, and that’s it.
You can do the same thing if you get involved with the right people. Instead of selling, you can prescribe the solution to the problem they’ve got – the solution they can find in your studio. At that point, everything else becomes much easier for you, your team, and your leads.
Keep in mind that the entire thing is much more detailed than these general principles. Because if you want to create a self-liquidating offer, you have to get accustomed to some key numbers.
The Numbers You Need to Know
The business aspect of running a studio consists of several crucial areas. You have the CPL, or cost per lead, which represents how much it costs you to get a lead from a market. This number turns into cost per acquisition and, finally, into cost per member.
All these numbers lead to another crucial piece of data, which is the LTV, or lifetime value. This number represents the value of each of your clients when their entire time spent with your studio is taken into account.
Now, the LTV for most studios is about $2,000, and that involves holding onto a member for around six months and charging realistic prices. You can think of this number in terms of how much your studio gets out of a client during their involvement.
The way you construct your offers ties directly into all these essential numbers. And if you think about it, the regular gym model is actually broken in that respect because it includes free trials during the acquisition process. And those free trials cause them to lose money.
Worse, it isn’t just about those studios not earning money – they’re actively losing it because, on average, getting a lead costs about $20.
You might think that that’s not a huge number on its own. But when you take into account that only about 30% of leads convert, it becomes alarming. It can mean that the cost per member for most studios can be upwards of $150.
It’s clear that in order to make the most out of your marketing and onboarding processes, your studio should abandon the idea of free trials.
Instead, you can leverage the concept of magic offers that make all of the calculations work for your business rather than against it.
How to Have An Arsenal of Magic Offers
With everything said so far, you might think that creating a magic offer would be some overly complex process. But the truth is…
Creating a magic offer for your studio is effortless!
And this process starts with a very straightforward exercise that involves building your magic offer map.
You’ll need to create 12 boxes, one for each month of the year. The first box can contain a proven offer type, for instance, a 28-day kickstart. And the main thing about this first offer is that it should include plenty of segments, like training, induction sessions, a tank, or VIP passes. After all, this offer is meant to open a new year.
Then, you’ll need to come up with various other offers over time and never stick to the same offer for too long. Because if you persist at a single offer, the market can get fatigued and start to lose interest.
Here’s where it gets interesting:
Your variety of offers doesn’t mean you have to invent something entirely new.
In fact, the point of the magic offer exercise is to try and come up with several variations of the same basic program of your studio. This way, you can create an entire arsenal of magic offers that won’t tire out the market. For example, you can use variations of the core program for Valentine’s Day specials, New Year – New You programs, and countless others.
Remember, variation is the essence of your magic offer.
You’ll undoubtedly be able to think of a number of different iterations of one core idea. And that will become the foundation of your studios’s marketing and lead generation.
You Can Create the Perfect Marketing Model
Once you get into the concept of creating a self-liquidating, magic offer, you’ll find that there’s no need for excessive marketing expenses in your studio.
Your offers will become much more attractive and varied, driving a more significant number of leads your way. Best of all, you’ll have something unique to present to the market every time, and you’ll avoid falling into cliches.