Why Test Weird Marketing Ideas

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What's up, everybody? This is going to be sorry for my crap in the back. This is going to be very, very cool. And one of the things that so I am a business coach for gym owners, but I also still own my gym. And one of the coolest things of still owning my gym is the marketer in me gets to dabble, gets to test things, gets to try things. And when I find something that works really well, I'll usually I'll teach it. And I usually teach it first to my mastermind clients. But sometimes if I have something really cool, I'll share it to you guys here on podcast and YouTube. And doing my best attempt to do a video that also serves as a helpful podcast. We'll see how it goes. So believe it or not, uh recently I did uh a newspaper ad. And I took a full page ad out in a local newspaper. And I think not all publications are created equal. I think that there are some publications like magazines and things like that that are, you know, they're glorified ads, right? That the the magazines are pretty much 90% ads and like a couple articles. And I think a lot of people have, you know, burned a lot of money on those things because they're typically pretty expensive because they're kind of like nice-looking publications of magazines. Now, what I found is that there are other local print types of you know publications uh that are very, very local-based, meaning there's lots of local news and there's ads in them, but they're not like all ads. There's like a lot of actual stories and articles, preferably of like almost like, you know, the boys, uh the this person got to the Eagle Scouts, or you know, the rescue squad hired a new person and like stuff like that. Like people read that stuff. So I think that's so my my point in telling and sharing that to you is not trying to you know position you to like you have to do print, you have to do print. And some for some of you it's not the right thing. But in my case, it it was and it's actually working really well. Uh but what I want to kind of share with you today is why it's working well and how you can take the same concept and use it without doing a print ad. Okay, so that's kind of what I'm going to share with you. So, what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna share with you the newspaper ad. So bear with me while I share my screen here. And I want to pull up the actual ad that I used. Okay, and so this was a story from my gym, and you know, this is a woman named Helen, and this story happened actually shoot, it was a while ago. So just know that if you have really good stories and they happened a long time ago, it doesn't mean you can't tell it like it happened a week ago. Okay, you want to say that you don't want to say it happened a week ago, but many of you are sitting on good stories of past that you're not telling anymore, and they're still really good stories and they still work. Okay. So this was a story about, and actually we changed the headline uh to 48 because I realized I made a mistake, she wasn't 56, she was actually 48 at the time. But this is a story of, you know, in a nutshell, a woman named Helen came to our gym and she was out of shape and blah blah blah blah blah. And her daughter was about to get married, and she got in really, really good shape for her daughter's wedding. And the the way the story goes is if you can see this picture in the middle here, if you're listening on YouTube, it's basically a picture of a woman with a with pretty like close, not fully backless, but like a very exposed back, and and her back looked jacked, right? And it was just like the all of a sudden she got back from the wedding, and there's this picture that emerged of her back, and like the other people are talking about Helen's back, and then the entire thing, I was like, How did she get that back? Well, well, she got that back from Gabriel Fitness, right? Right, and so the the whole thing kind of went I don't want to say viral, like local viral, but at the end of the day, what happened was it was a really, really good story that captured a lot of attention, and it wasn't something that we actually used in our in our marketing until today, almost a decade later, right? So I took this story and I wrote the this article about it, okay, and this ad. And so I think that the one thing is when you're looking for like a really good testimonial, what you want to be looking for is something like this. It's like there was kind of an event that happened. In this case, it was the wedding. Maybe it's someone coming back from an injury or a doctor's scare or something like that. But if you're gonna tell like a really you know good story, you want to try and find something that's almost newsworthy, right? Like that's why I put it in the newspaper because this is like if you look at the the head, the headline reads she was a 56-year-old mom from Berkeley Heights. So that's important. I put the town, uh name of that town in the headline. Terrified, which is a power word, to wear a little black dress at her daughter's wedding until this happened. So it's kind of a play on a very famous headline. The the famous headline is he sat down. Everyone, the famous headline is everyone laughed when he sat down at the piano, but when he started to play, and that was the headline, that was one of the most famous headlines I've read. So it's kind of like I copied that format of she was a terrifying 56-year-old mom from Berkeley Heights, terrified to wear a little black dress. She was terrified until this happened, right? And so then what it leads to maybe wanting to read the story. Okay. And basically, what I've done is I I tell the whole story here in this newspaper ad, and I'm not, I'm not gonna read it to you there, but you can see there's QR code throughout. I talk about the program a little bit, but mainly it's a news article at the end. And we've been getting many, many, many scans to the QR code here, and then uh many also conversions from the page. I think we're operating at like close to a 30% conversion rate from the page to opt-in, which is phenomenal for a cold newspaper landing page is actually phenomenal. If you know what some statistics, right? And so I took this concept and now I wrote this article. I didn't use ChatGPT to write this. I sat down, I was like, I put my marketing hat on, and I'm like, all right, what do I need to say in this ad to get someone to scan a QR code and then fill out a form? Well, you gotta say a lot. You gotta say a lot of things that gets people inspired. But the big thing that got me to get to the point where I'm doing a video on this is this one thing that's started to happen. Mike, who is fielding the leads from this ad, he is telling me that people are showing up. One, we have a hundred percent show rate from people that booked consults. 100%. Not one person that booked a console has not showed up. And he said the second thing is when he's getting on the phone with people, they're saying, Oh my God, this story was so good. This story inspired me. I and they started like saying, like, I really want what Helen had. If you guys can give me what Helen had, I'm in, right? And they they started to do uh say things that the marketing is designed to do. Write this down. Your marketing is salesmanship in print. And so what that means is that the newspaper ad, this ad that I wrote, was started doing the heavy lifting of the sales process. And what we normally do is we sit down, we sit down with someone that's cold, they don't know us from a hole in the wall, and then we got to sell them on a gym membership. Well, this marketing is doing the selling for them, it's doing the job, it's overcoming objections. Like even uh in here, if you look at the PS, okay, the PS I use some overcoming objections. PS Many people reading this article will be inspired by Helen, yet still still feel hesitant to try the program. Okay, with anything new, there's always uncertainty. Boom, I'm calling it out right in front of them. I'm I'm mapping, I'm I'm meeting them where their objection is with uncertainty, especially with something like a new fitness routine. Okay, calling out the obvious. But if you're not working out right now, which is a very, very important thing, I'm gonna tell you ransom, when you say if you're not working out right now, what that's a trigger because here's what people know they know they should be working out, and most people are not right, and so it's like if you're not working out right now, it's like boom, that just hit them right in the mouth. Yes, you're I'm not working out right now. That is true. I'm not working out right now, and I know, and then that the the caveat to that is I know I should be. So I just call the situation right where it's at. If you're not working out right now, or you've been inconsistent like most people, okay, right? So now I'm not shaming them, I'm saying they're like most people. You've read the exact article you need to read today because boom, and now I go into you know how we've been helped thousands of people in the community in the past 18 years. For some, the program has had a life-changing effect, and many members have stayed for nearly two decades. A large number of them are now in the best shape of their lives and two decades older. So, what I'm doing is I'm talking about like as these people are getting older, they're getting in better shape. Okay, but they all started in the same place as anyone reading this and considering starting their fitness journey. If you're still hesitant, visit our website to give it now, give them a different link. So this is the downsell. Ideally, I want them to scan the QR code, but I also want a secondary option. Okay, and the secondary option is I need more proof. And so I send them to a page that has testimonials laced with testimonials. Sent them to that. But the ideal thing is they scan the QR code and it takes them right to an opt-in page for a 14-day free trial. So it's a really good offer. And again, you got to be good on a newspaper ad. If you're not, if you don't have a good offer, if you don't have a good copy on a newspaper ad, you're gonna you're gonna burn a lot of money. So it's gotta be good. Okay, now, so that's the the overall premise of this is working, this is why it's working, but that is not even close to what I want to share with you today. Okay, what I want you to do is understand that I wrote this article from my 20 years of experience and marketing mind. I didn't pop this into ChatGPT. I sat down, everything I know about marketing, everything I know about sales and persuasion, and I put it into this article. But I realize that a lot of you are not marketers, a lot of you are not, you know, copywriters, and sometimes we need just some to do things faster and help and support. I realize gym owners are busy. And so I did this for my mastermind clients. I was like, how would I make this an article like this that's working so well be easy to duplicate or replicate by another gym owner? Okay, and so that is what I did, and I want to share my screen again. I apologize if you just bear with me here. Share my screen again. And I created in a program called Claude, which I really actually like Claude over ChatGPT, uh specifically for writing. I'm not gonna get into why, but I basically created a testimonial email builder. So I took the concept of this article, right? This newspaper article where I had to go deep, where I had to go big, and I had to really use everything I needed to get someone from a printed to an and uh a landing page and then a landing page to a call and then a call to a consult and a consult to a close. A lot has to happen, right? But I realized that you know an email is an easier thing to write. It's easier to write a 200-word or a 300-word email than it is to write a thousand-word full-page newspaper ad, as I know most of you won't be doing. And so what I did is I took the the newspaper app that I wrote that's having success, that's winning, okay, and know it's winning, and I put it into Claude, and I created a testimonial email builder. So essentially, what you do is you take a testimonial that you've got and you put it into this builder, and then what happens is you can create an email similar to what the article that I wrote from your story. Okay, so now what I'm gonna do, I'm going to show you exactly how it's done. Okay, so I'm gonna click start, so bear with me here, but you'll see kind of how to do it. Okay, so I'm gonna click so start building my email, and so you would put the client's first name. So you would take pick a story that you've got from your gym. I know you got lots of them, okay, and you would put what is their first name. Okay, and so I'm just gonna put my stuff in here. So I'll put Helen in here. So I just type that, and then I would click next, Helen. Okay, then it asks them how old are they and what stage of life are they in? Let's call it, I'm gonna call it an active professional. Okay. What neighborhood or city do they live in? Because we want to show that it's a real person in a real place. So I'll just put Berkeley Berkeley Heights. So you just put your town or the town they live in. How would they have described themselves before joining? Let's see. So now we're looking at, you know, what was the what was the before bike? Let's put in constant pain. We'll just put that. Right. And you could also click more than one of these if you want to put in constant pain and embarrassed by their body, you could do that as well. Okay. We're still on the before section, right? And the next question is what were their specific physical complaints before starting? Let's call it low energy and back pain. Okay, how did they feel about themselves emotionally? Let's just call it, they feel like they lost themselves and depressed. What did they try before? I always like to pick personal training elsewhere, like they tried personal training, or they tried the same thing like you do at home. And then another one you could put is like solo workouts at home. Like they try to do it on their own, they just know they can't. What finally made them walk through your door? Let's call it this one an upcoming event. Uh, like that. That's a big one for people. What were they afraid of when they first started? Like now we're getting into the fears of that not being able to keep up and being judged in out of place, which is a big one. What surprised them most about your gym or program? Let's put not safe, let's put yeah, how quickly they saw results, right? Because there's a lot of people are afraid of like how long it's gonna take. How did they train and what coaching, what did coaching look like for them? Let's follow smugger personal training. That's what we do. Did community coaches or accountability play a role? Coaches noticed, but okay, there you go. Coach noticed when you didn't miss a session, and then let's put you know, fellow members became friends, something like that. Now the results, what specific physical changes happened, included numbers of possible, a loss of significant pain, and eliminated chronic pain. Was there a specific moment when they realized how far they've come? Let's call it a special event. Look kind of almost like Helen. How is our life different now? Inspired others and their families to get healthy, more confident, work in school. Boom. What direct quote from a member? I always like this one. I feel better at 50 than I think we did at 40. Something like that. And then boom. What is your gym name? I'll put Gabriel Fitness for mine. Okay, who do you serve? Adults boom. Free drawers, we'll put 14. Okay. Personal training experience.

unknown 15:48

Okay.

Prompt Structure Plus AI Writing Taste

Social Proof Principles Beat Shortcuts

Consistency Strategy And How To Get It

YouTube Link And Final Wrap

SPEAKER_00 15:49

And then what URL phone number just put like your website, GabrielFitness.com. Build my email. Okay, so now what happens is if you're if you're not watching it, if you're on YouTube, or if you're on podcasts, you can't really see this. I strongly suggest you you go to the the YouTube video to watch out. So essentially what I have just created by answering all those questions is the prompt. That didn't create the email, that just created the prompt. And I'll read this out. It's basically the prompt is created, right? It's you are a direct response copywriter who specializes in writing story-based testimonial emails for local fitness businesses. Your emails are warm, conversational, and read like a compelling feature story, similar to the newspaper ad that I wrote. Not a sales pitch. They make the reader say, That's me, right? And this is literally my words, that's me and inspire action without feeling pushy. Using the member story details, and again, I'm reading the prompt right now. Using the member story details below, right? A 300 to 500 word testimony email. Now, you can change that if you want it to be 200, if you want it to be 800, you can kind of give them the guide. You can tweak this how you want it. And you email with this structure subject line, opening hook, below before, the turning point, the transformation, the bigger picture, the offer, the qualitation, and PS, which is basically all the main components of really good direct response marketing. And then the tone is conversational, warm, and then it gives you all the stuff on the bottom. It gives all the stuff that you created. Okay. So what you would do is you would click copy, copy to clipboard. So click that. And now what you can do is once you copy the clipboard, you can put this into any format, right? You can put it into Claude, which is what I prefer, but you could put it right into Chat GPT. Since I know most people use Chat GPT, I'll just show you. You know, I'll put it into ChatGPT, and then I'll just show you. Boom. That's the prompt that I just copied. And then I click generate the email. And then it shows me the email. Now again, I like Claude much better than ChatGPT. I kind of almost don't like writing anything in ChatGPT. Because here's why I hate these stupid, like short sentences. Nobody like writes like this. This is so dumb. And they're all like these one short sentence thing. I just I don't like it. What when you write, it needs to flow. There needs to be some longer sentences, followed by some shorter sentences, followed by some really long and then some really short. The way they do it is terrible. Okay, so I'm just telling you right now, I'm not a huge fan of ChatGPT, but I would definitely use Claude for this. But you can see like it puts together a pretty good testimonial in a short you know period of time. So you can kind of start to see how this could be really hey, now if I was pushed to do you know one testimonial-based email every week, that gets overwhelming, right? That's like, oh my god, I now have to interview somebody after this, but you could literally go to your Google reviews and you can probably take a Google review and put it in the information from the Google review into this you know format and this platform or have a conversation with somebody and then create a pretty simple email. So it's it's something I'm super excited about. It it's something that you know my I showed my mastermind members the other day, and they were like, Oh, the cut the con the chat the chat botch was exploding with OMG. How the hell did you do this? Like blah, blah, blah. But I kind of just figured this out. Like I was like, I didn't know how to do a test, like an email builder, like I knew how to create prompts, but I didn't know how to do like the builder stuff. And so this was one of the first times I've done something like this uh before, but it came out pretty good. And I think if you use Claude, it probably will come better now than the email that we just produced on Chat GPT. But understand that, you know, I think AI is fine, and I think you should be using it. Obviously, I'm giving you something right now or sharing something, you know, uh of how to use it, right? But it doesn't replace understanding principles, right? And understand this there's there's six laws of persuasion that Chaldini talks about. The most powerful is social proof. If we know that, then we know we want to use social proof more in our marketing. We know we want to put out more testimonials, we know we want to get lots of good Google reviews. We know that, and and that's the foundation. So you want to start understanding principles of marketing, not just using AI to just do everything for you. You still I I don't create this testimonial email builder if I haven't had the background and the knowledge, right, to you know, build that first ad that's generating leads from a newspaper. And so I think this doesn't what what I'm gonna share with you today doesn't replace your should be what you what should be your thirst for knowledge of how to be a better marketer, right? That's part of part of your jobs is as a gym owner to understand, you know, and how to win you know the game in marketing. So that that's essentially what you know I wanted to share with you today. And really what I want to do is give you an opportunity to get the email builder. And so the way I'm doing this, I have a feeling that there's gonna be a good amount of people that reach out uh to send me the so I'm I'm actually purposely making this a little more difficult. I'm not giving you a link to go and download it, going to essentially say you need to email me personally. And my email is vince at gabrielfitness.com. And if you put in the subject email builder, I will send you the email builder right from from there. But you I'm gonna make it a little bit more difficult for you because I realize a lot of people are going to want this, and and you know, this is a really cool tool, and I think it helps a lot of gym orders. I try to do too, is like there's a lot of stuff I do that I don't share here on YouTube or podcast or anything like that. A lot. Okay, I give it to my members, and you know, they're paying me a good amount of money to do that. But there are things that I think I've created that are pretty good that I think will help a Lot of people. And I know there's a lot of people out there that you may not be ready for mastermind. You may not be ready to do any coaching programs with me. But hey, if I could help you write a testimonial email once a week that takes you four minutes to do, I think that's a good, you know, use of your time. And it's something I'm willing to share. I'm not willing to share everything, obviously I can't, but this is something that I think will help a lot of people out there get content out, share the stories of the people. Because that's the thing. You know, you're you're you're you're basically in the storytelling business. And that it why this is also important right now is AI is going to generate a lot of content for you. If you can create an easy article about why someone under 40, over 40 should should work out and all the reasons why, and all stuff about facts about GLP. What's harder to replicate in these types of platforms is the stories. So now you have to create the stories. That's not my job. Okay, this tool just helps you capture the stories. And if putting my marketing hat on in the next three to five years, storytelling is going to be storytelling will always be important, right? But even now, where everyone's trying to like, you know, drown each other out with information and content and exercises and all this bullshit, you can win by telling really good, inspiring stories that get to to what's happening in my gym right now. Well, people are calling and they're like, oh my god, the Helen story really inspired me. I really need to get going. That's happening right now, and that's from a newspaper ad. And so what if you could do this at your gym? If you could give yourself the challenge, which is not even a challenge anymore, because I just gave you the prompt, right? No, not even the prompt, the builder, the tool, to do this once a week, right? To do this once a week. Now, I will caveat with this, and I told this to my guys on the mastermind. Don't think that just because I gave you this tool and it's really cool and it's really helpful and it doesn't take a lot of time to do, that all of a sudden you're gonna have this flood of new people if you write one email. It's not about that. It is this works when it's consistent. Let me give you an example. One of our members uh was talking about a bring a friend day. And I was like, Well, how many clients do you get from a bring a friend day? And he's like, Two. And at first you're like, oh, two clients from a bring a friend day. And I said, Well, how many of them did you do last year? And he said, 12. I was like, Oh, you do one a month. And he's like, Yeah. And I was like, How many did you get? He said, Two every time. And he's like, Oh. So you got two every time. So you did twelve, you had twenty-four new customers last year from something that cost you almost no money. So it wasn't the two, it's not the send, the one send. It's the consistency, right? It's like every Wednesday you show up and you have an email about a customer that's doing well. And you can take that same email and you can create a social post out of it, right? It's so easy to do that stuff. Take a picture of the person and create a social post out of it. So you can put a Facebook post, an Instagram post, and you have an email. Right? Um, but but the key is that is the consistency on it. And you know, maybe your first email doesn't get any customers, maybe you get no replies, maybe it wasn't a great story. If it's a great story, it probably will get some replies, and especially if you can link in a really good offer at the same time. Okay, but hey, if all of a sudden every Wednesday you have you can take seven minutes and put in my email builder in and create grab a story from your gym and do this every week, once a week, and you do this 52 times over the next course of the next year. I I haven't bet that you're gonna get at least one customer from it. And it costs you next to nothing to email people, right? And if you get one customer from it, it's probably a really good use of seven minutes times 52. I don't know, a couple hours, yeah, more than that. I should actually figure out what it is. Like put this all in to do an email every week would cost you in time. So hopefully that's helpful. I know if you're listening to this on podcast, it was probably a little hard to follow. So that's why I strongly suggest uh actually, if you're listening on podcast, what I'm gonna do is also put a link to YouTube so you can watch it on YouTube so you can see the article and then see the me kind of walk everyone through the builder. But if you're listening to this and you want the builder and you want me to send it to you, you just send me an email, vincegabrielfendus.com, and put I don't remember what I said, I think uh testimonial email builder in the subject, something like that. I I I'll figure it out. But then what what I'm gonna do is I'm I'm gonna field these responses myself. Like I'm not just going to you know put it on my sales guy, like so understand that you know I'm I'm gonna rip it back to you and give me some some time to to do this. I'm not it's not an automated response that you know will come back, uh although I probably should do that. We'll see actually. If I get inundated with these responses, I'm pretty sure that I will probably have to put some kind of an auto response in there to give it. Really, I'm just gonna shoot back the link and and give it to you. So if you just shoot me an email, vinsacaperfitness.com, put testimonial email builder in the subject line, and then I'll know you got it from this podcast, and then we can go from there, or YouTube or whatever. So hopefully this was helpful. If you're watching on YouTube, I put my email below. If you are listening on podcast, there's my email below, but also there's the link to the YouTube to watch it so you can actually see me go through the testimonial builder. So hopefully this was helpful. I got I stayed up really, really late doing this. I found it really fascinating to you know to work with Claude to create something, you know, like this. That's pretty cool. I'm gonna be doing more of this lately, and hopefully this was helpful for you. And you get the builder. All right, talk to you soon. Peace.