Don’t overcomplicate your marketing.
Paid marketing is the fastest path to money for any business owner, and Facebook is the best platform for most small business owners.
It’s easy to learn, and campaigns can be spun up and scaled quickly.
When I started my second gym in 2014, I used a tiny Facebook ad budget to open the door with over $200k in membership pre-sales.
The success of that campaign caught the attention of Jack Wheeler, the founder of 360 Fitness Personal Training—a gym with two locations that are each doing over $100k/mo.
He cold-called me, and we’ve been swapping ad strategies ever since.
What I admire most about Jack is that he doesn’t fall into the trap of constantly seeking novelty. He has been using the same offer and ad structure for 10+ years.
Why?
Because it works.
And today you’ll find out why Jack’s simple Facebook ads scale so well.
Simple scales
If you’ve been in the fitness industry for a while, you probably guessed that Jack’s evergreen ad campaign is the (in)famous 6-week challenge.
The copy, offer structure, and delivery may look familiar too:
Campaigns like this are run by 1,000s of gyms around the world.
So why does Jack get a better ROI than 99% of gym owners?
- He nurtures his leads. That means he calls & texts them fast (ideally <5m after opt-in) and calls & texts multiple times daily for the following 3 days.
- Jack uses a TON of social proof, which helps him charge a premium price. If you check out his GMB listing, it’s hard to find photos of the gym because he has so many testimonials on his page.
- His 6-week challenges are framed & packaged differently throughout the year. In May, the challenge might be the “6-week Summer Slim Down,” in December, it’ll be called something like the “6-week Slim for the Chimney Challenge,” even though the service is identical. This keeps the offer feeling fresh.
6 Week Challenge Intro Video July 2020 from Jack Wheeler on Vimeo.
Lead magnets
Gone are the days of $2 leads on Facebook. Jack says his cost per lead for the 6-week challenge is north of $30, so Jack generates more demand by running traffic to a lead magnet.
He has 12 different lead magnets that he rotates throughout the year. These lead magnets bring in 200-400 leads each month & they cost 1/6th of a 6-week challenge lead.
While that traffic is colder, he nurtures and retargets them throughout the year.
25% of his ad budget goes to the lead magnet and 75% of his ad budget goes to the 6-week challenge.
And that’s the whole system.
What can gym owners learn?
If you’re one of the many gym owners that think:
1. “Facebook ads don’t work.” → They obviously work. Jack is living proof of that. A better question to ask is, why aren’t they working for me?
Is it slow lead nurture? A bad offer? Cheap pricing? Poor retention?
Get to the source of the problem.
If I had to take a guess:
2. “6-week challenges aren’t my brand.” → A lot of gym owners don’t want to run challenges because “they promote unsustainable habits.”
That may be true, but if you want to work with a client for the long haul, you need to earn their trust. And the best way to earn their trust is to get them results—even if they’re unsustainable.
Also, short-duration fitness challenges are easy to sell. That’s why they’ve existed for 30+ years.
Zumba is arguably one of the most successful fitness businesses of all time. They’re backed by some of the most sophisticated business people on the planet, and they made a killing by selling directly to consumers during the infomercial era.
They just announced their first D2C program in 10 years, and they called it the Zumba 6-Week Transformation Program.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Tl;dr: Resist the urge to overcomplicate your marketing—instead, find something that works and keep doing it.
Want to know more?
If you want to dive deep into Jack Wheeler’s marketing and how he built two 7-figure gyms, watch his Gym World interview.
