When you sign up for this app, clients that have been in your facility in the past two weeks will be sent an email invitation to connect with your business on Facebook.

If they accept (it’s opt-in) each time they are checked into a class in MBO we will automatically check them in to your business’ Facebook page.

The number of check-ins on Facebook is a form of social validation letting people know that there is a lot of activity at your facility.  A business that has had thousands of check-ins appears more popular, established and viable than a business with only a few check-ins.

Second, each of these check-ins shows up in your clients’ activity feed on Facebook and can be seen by their friends – kind of like an ad impression but even better because they are in your client’s feed.

Since our clients (like most people on Facebook) have about 100 friends each these were potentially seen over 43,000 times on Facebook.

Over 15% of our clients at NorCal have opted to use the app on FB, and each month we get hundreds Facebook check-ins.  Our clients who have signed up like that they have an easy way to let their friends know they are going to work out, and we are happy because it is driving traffic to our Facebook page, increasing the social exposure of our brand to our clients’ friends, many of whom are our best prospects.

A friend of mine looked into running an advertisement for his gym and Facebook would have charged him a $2 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) to target the same set of people.  To get these same 43,000 impressions via a Facebook add would have cost us $86…instead we got those same impressions free with this app!

To top it all off it’s EASY!  You sign up once and Skilled Athlete will automatically invite all clients who have been in your facility in the last 2 weeks.  Anyone who comes in after that initial invite (old clients or new) will also be automatically sent an invite.  There is no further action required on your part.  Also, if they so desire, your clients can opt out at any time by simply uninstalling the app from their personal FB profile.

A couple of things:

Just like the FB schedule app, your business needs to have a FB page (not a personal profile) to utilize this.  You can read more about the importance of having a page for your business here.

If you already have the Skilled Athlete Facebook Schedule app installed just send an email to support@skilledathlete.com , and we can turn on the FB check-in feature for you.  If you don’t yet have the FB schedule app installed you can do that here.

And stay tuned…in late January Skilled Athlete will be releasing an iPhone app that will allow you and your trainers to check clients into classes directly from your phone.

Tracking attendance is important and this app is going to be a super helpful if your gym or studio doesn’t utilize key tags or self-sign in.  But, if like NorCal Strength & Conditioning, you DO use key tags the app is still going to be helpful since your trainers can check to make sure their roster is accurate at the start of each class and don’t have to double check that all clients signed in at the end of class or the end of the day.

The app will also allow you to take client photos with your iPhone and push to their MBO profile (read this article if you aren’t yet in the habit of storing client photos in their profiles), email and phone clients directly from the app and much more!

Again, wishing you all a very happy and safe holiday!

If you missed my post about the awesomely free app that Skilled Athlete just launched that will post your MBO schedule to your FB page you can catch that here.

First things first!

We’ve had some of you try to install the app without first logging into MBO to get your API credentials.  We need those in order to pull your class schedule from MBO and post to Facebook.  Directions for how to find your API credentials can be found here…and btw you must use the “owner” login to get these.

Here also is a screen shot of those directions

Once you get your SourceName, API Password, and Studio ID from your MBO account write them down….you will then be ready to click “install now” on the Skilled Athlete site.  After entering your credentials and selecting your Business Page on FB you will find a link to the Skilled Athlete App on FB where you will click “add to my page”.  Then you are done!

A few folks have had difficulty for the following reasons:

1) didn’t get proper MBO API credentials before attempting install

2) didn’t have a FB page.  Read this and convert it to a page and you’ll be good.

3) tried installing the Skilled Athlete App on FB without first going through the install process from SkilledAthlete.com (and entering in MBO API credentials).

If you have any other trouble please don’t hesitate to contact support@skilledathlete.com.

Cheers!

If you answered yes to all three questions you are in for a special treat!  (If you answered yes to the first two, but not the third then read this post I wrote last week and get your gym’s FB profile converted to a Page and you’ll be good to go).

I am a founding team member in a company called Skilled Athlete, which includes several former Expedia developers.  Over the past few months we have been working on a suite of social media and CRM (customer relationship management) tools for gyms, most of which can plug right into your existing MindBody account.  We have several very cool tools in the works and we will be releasing them as they get developed.  Some of them will be free, like this one, and some won’t.  (Skilled Athlete will only be charging for tools that will have a direct positive influence on your bottom line!).

This first one is a Class Schedule App for your Facebook page.  Now your clients can find your class schedule simply by navigating to your Facebook page and clicking the “class schedule” link below your business’ page photo.

Then voila! Your class schedule appears!

Clients can click on the class times to show the instructor for the class as well as “reserve” a spot in that class if your gym has that feature enabled in MBO.

If you’d like to check out the Schedule App in action you can see it live on our NorCal Facebook page here.

When you’re ready to deploy your own Mindbody schedule on your FB page just head over to Skilled Athlete.  The set up process is pretty simple and again it’s free!

Oh, and one more thing.  If you aren’t yet using a business management solution like Mindbody Online, then you might want to head there first!

You may or may not know this, but FB profile pages where you collect “friends” are strictly for individuals to use.  In fact entities and organizations, like businesses, caught using individual profiles can have their profiles deleted per Facebook Terms of Use.

From Facebook:

Since profiles are for meant individual people, they aren’t suited to meet your business needs. Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures, which you can learn more abouthere.

Further, maintaining a profile for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your profile to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile and all of your content.

Aside from FB rules there are several advantages for a business to have a PAGE and not a profile.  I’ll touch on some of the main points here:

• First and foremost a profile page is limited to a maximum of 5000 friends. Why would you want your businesses exposure to be limited to the first 5000 people you come across? If you’re in business you want unlimited exposure. Period.
• Only friends of the profile can view the profile.  Whereas even folks who aren’t yet Fans can view your Page. Again, you have more reach here.
• FB pages are indexed by search engines.  Fb profiles are not.
• With a page you can put Like buttons on your business web site and direct site visitors to your FB page and get more Likes.
• A page can have multiple Admins.  You can have your trainers or managers be Admins and all of you can be posting content (photos, videos, wall posts) to your page, keeping it fresh and dynamic.
• Your Fans that are actually customers can “check in” to your location page when they visit your business.  If you notice on the left hand side of a Fan page there is listed the number of Likes as well as the number of folks who were “here”.  The more people who “check in” to your business the more socially visible and credible your business becomes.  Also, when a person checks in to your business it posts that they are at your place of business on their wall.  Their friends can now see they are your customer, can click the link and go to your page, and are more likely to be interested in your services themselves.  Word of mouth marketing, Facebook style.
• Metrics.  You get a weekly summary email from Facebook showing the weekly activity of your page.
• More metrics.  There’s a nifty Insights button on your page that will show you all sorts of great information about the people frequenting your page, from user demographics to which wall posts had the most interactions.  Lot’s of fun stuff to geek out on here.

I’ve mentioned networking and my involvement in our local Le Tip chapter in earlier blog posts. Regardless of whether you join a similar lead generation oriented group, a service organization like Rotary, or even a church, networking with other professionals is an absolute must for the success of your business.

Case in point: I joined Le Tip in March of 2006. We had been in business for 2 years with a failed business model (inadequate pricing, no entry points aka the come one come all approach, and no system to progress people through our business among other mistakes that are all too obvious in hindsight.) In December of 2005 we literally fired 65 group clients and moved to a private training only model (again in hindsight we would have handled that differently…but at that point we were fairly burned out and not making any money, and apparently not thinking as clearly as we could have). Hindsight reverie aside, within 1 month of moving to a private training gym we were grossing more than we had with the 65 group clients (That should seriously highlight the veracity of my statement that our pricing was indeed inadequate!)

I knew that if we were going to turn our business around I needed to do something. Joining Le Tip was a way for me to get our business name in front of a group of professionals week after week and utilize the power of networking.

It took about 3 months for me to get my first lead or “tip”. It was from the President at the time, Lou Maraschiello aka “Lou Mars“. Lou trained with me for about 2 months as a private client and in doing so singlehandedly gave our business a great gift. First, he is a dynamic and charismatic speaker. As president he would make various comments at the meeting about his training with me. He would tell the waitress that “I’d better order the salad, my personal trainer is watching” and other similar comments. Essentially he endorsed me each and every meeting. He came to our warehouse of a gym to train with me and he shared stories with the meeting at large each and every week. His endorsement ultimately led to subsequent “tips” and clients from the group, folks that are still training with us to this day.

Fast forward 3 and a half years to the present. Lou was a professional drummer in his former life and toured with bands that opened for Social Distortion among others. He recently decided to attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records “drumming marathon by an individual,” a record currently set at 120 hours! And guess what? We are doing his training! And guess what else? The event will take place in our gym beginning January 14th! Local media crews are coming out to our location on Monday to interview us and we will likely see much more of this closer to and during the event! In fact the Guinness Book folks are likely to be filming the event for their media resources.

So, my point: you never know what opportunities will come of relationships you make today.

You can read more about Lou Mars and the event at our norcal blog here and here.

We both did some blog posts about a month out and drummed up some good ole smack talking. One of my favorites, from one of David’s athletes:

In the style of “Yo mama jokes”

I heard that Norcal’s athletes are so weak….

…that they chipped a tooth eating yogurt.

… that they lost a fight with the mild salsa.

… that they couldn’t even lift their own spirits.

Alas, it looks like Brooklyn was better at talking smack than doing Jackie, but we won’t rub that in here ☺

We had a great time and our folks really got into the competition! And there were some amazing performances!

Dutch is featuring a more global, yet similar monthly affiliate challenge on his blog! This stuff works! It gets people excited to pull together to represent their team.

Details
I had 1000 postcards printed offering 10% off of either the On Ramp class or 12 sessions of private training with an expiration date of April 30th.

Trainers needed to put their initials on the back and then hand them out wherever they wanted (they gave them to their hair stylist, tanning booth, flower shop, current clients to give to friends, etc)

Contest duration March 5th-April 30th

$300 cash awarded to the trainer whose initials were on the back of the most postcards brought in and redeemed (signed up). (Double incentive…cash to the winner and new clients to train in general.)

Results
2 of our trainers really went after it and were neck and neck until the final day, with the end result being 26 new clients via the postcard contest in 7 weeks. Not too bad. What is that, a 2.6% return? Better than direct mail. If any of you give this a shot be sure to report back your results!

I belong to a business networking group called Le Tip.  It’s an international organization with groups in almost every city.  The basic premise:  you are the only individual representing your profession and as a group you aim to refer potential clients to each other.  I am the only fitness professional, there is one chiropractor, one lawyer, one real estate agent…you get the picture.  If one of my clients needs a mortgage, I will have them talk to Pam in my group.  It’s a nice way to further help your clients (building relationships and helping them get what they need) and it’s a great way to build your business!

Perhaps even more important, however, is the fact that you surround yourself with other professionals and you become a better professional yourself.  Each week you are called upon to stand up and speak about what you do…just a short 30 sec-1min commercial for your business.  And, about 2-3 times a year you have the opportunity to speak for 10 mins.  It’s great exposure and a great way to hone your ability to communicate what it is that you do!

Now, there are admittedly a few cheesy aspects of being in Le Tip…some fines, and quirky club badges you have to wear…much like Rotary or Kiwanis or other similar clubs, but all in all it has been great for our business.

So back to becoming a better professional…The real estate agent in my group called me last week to see if he could come out to see our new facility.  He’s not a client (yet) and so he hadn’t been by our new location (we moved last August). He wanted to see exactly what we do and learn how he could better refer people to me.  I spent about 30 minutes with him chatting about CrossFit and training, our clients, etc. Today I received a hand written note card in the mail from him thanking me for taking the time out of my day to speak with him.  He mentioned that he and his wife have CrossFit NorCal on their list of things they want to take up after they pay for their daughter’s wedding. He signed it by saying to please let him know if there was anyway he could be of service.

I know stuff like this is the hallmark of a service professional…and it got me thinking. We CrossFitter’s are all about recognizing our client’s achievements via our blogs…but how cool would it be to have some note cards with your business logo on them and write a short handwritten note to a client and dropping it in the mail?  It could be the simplest note: “Congrats on your first pull-up!  I knew you could do it!”

Laurie Bowler from Rainier CrossFit has sent me a personalized notecard with the Ranier CrossFit logo, as has Michael Rutherford of CrossFit Kansas City.  Do any of you do this?

I’m not the best at letter writing, but a quick compliment or congrats is something I can do.  It’s also something our trainers can do…helping them become better professionals as well.  Next stop…note cards!

Collateral is a term I first learned when we attended Mindbody University in March of 2008.  Essentially, collateral refers to any materials you use, typically brochures/postcards/flyers/mailers, etc, to promote your business.  At MBU they highlighted the use of the postcard…something that we have been using quite successfully since. 

 We use GotPrint.com and will typically print 1 or 2 different postcards per month, depending on what we have going on.  We use postcards to highlight upcoming On Ramp classes and upcoming Open Houses, Workshops, etc.  GotPrint is affordable, easy to use (especially if you have someone to do the design for you and they give you the file as an eps file) and nice because you can print in small quantities if you wish.  We typically print 250-500 of each postcard.

Now mind you, we don’t use them to do direct mail.

Instead we:

·      Give the postcards to clients and ask them to give them to friends/family/coworkers

·      Give the postcards to chiropractors and other professionals (who are clients) and they keep them on display in their offices and give them to their patients/clients.

·      Give them to prospective clients that walk in off the street (it’s nice to have something concrete to put in their hands).

·      Give them to our teacher clients to put in the staff room.

·      Take them to Le Tip and give them to the other members of the group.

You get the point!

I recently received an email from Todd from CrossFit LifeSport asking about flyers and how to choose images to market the message of CrossFit. I think this is an important question, because many of your best clients are going to be those who initially might be intimidated by images that you and I are excited about.  They will be excited about them as well…in time.  In the meantime however, we’ve found it’s easier to get folks in the door with less burly images (Think FUN! And Smiles!) If it’s an action shot try to find one that is low on the intimidation scale. 

Now I know some of you are thinking ”we don’t want a lot of pussies in our gym…I want to attract hard core clients.”  If that’s the case, by all means do whatever you want to do. It’s just been our experience that “hard core” typically means broke ass student or unemployed bachelor.

All of our clients are “hard core”…now.  They didn’t think of themselves that way when they started however. Oh, and most of these “hard core” clients are women who could kick the ass of any of the so-called “hard core” men you might be trying to attract to your box.  Which brings up another question:  Would you rather have a gym full of “hard core” women or “hard core” men?  Answer:  The women, cuz they talk more and have more friends! Oh yeah…and we’re easier on the eyes!

Here are a couple of examples of postcards we have used:

WWLTHW #1 (What We’ve Learned The Hard Way)

You definitely don’t want to scare folks away by featuring shirtless dudes doing overhead squats with a boatload of weight!  Seriously, some of the first flyers we made featured Robb sans shirt doing OHS…not super effective!  In fact the first version of our website featured Robb without his shirt doing OHS, rope climb and pullups!  I’m going to drum up a collection of some of our failed marketing efforts for a future post…it will be comic relief if nothing else!  How I love hindsight.