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In this episode, Andrew discusses the psychology and strategies behind successful lead generation and provides tried and true tips for generating more leads for your gym business.
Andrew Pawlak is the CEO of leadPops, a lead generation and marketing solutions platform directed towards mortgage brokers, loan officers, realtors, and insurance agents. Andrew understands the psychology and strategies behind successful lead generation and provides tried and true tips for generating more leads for your gym business.
Dan Uyemura: Welcome to The gymOS Podcast, helping fitness professionals become better business owners, one episode at a time.
Hey, guys, what’s up? Dan Uyemura here at PushPress, gymOS Podcast. How many of you guys have tried to set up proper lead funnels? I mean, it’s stuff we see all the time in the gym world. It’s the stuff you’ve probably paid a guru or thought of paying a guru for, to set up these landing pages that help you get people’s interest captured to dump them into a sales funnel and figure out how to turn them into a client. Well, if you’ve done that, you realize there’s a science to it. It’s not as easy as one would think. Anybody can set up a landing page, but to create a landing page that converts, there is a little bit of magic behind it, and you’re in luck because today we got Andrew Pawlak here, and his whole business is centered around getting these websites up for real estate agents and mortgage brokers that are built to convert. So if you ever gone on and searched for mortgage in your area and you’ve ended up on the landing page or a website, and you’ve typed in your name and some information about you to see if you qualify for a loan, that could have been Andrew’s web system that he sells to real estate agents, and he has spent a ton of time trying to understand the psychology of a person hitting these pages and what makes them go through the steps of filling out the form, and how do we get a lead all the way into the system and then training his agents and brokers on how to follow up with these people to get them, if they’re good fit, into the, sold into the matrix of products of these people are selling. So it’s a pretty cool inside because we’re gonna be learning from a person who’s working in an industry where every lead really matters, and the real estate industry is pretty cutthroat for leads. It might cost you $1000 for a lead in the real estate world because the payoff is so big. So I like having these types of guests on the podcast because in their world, this is such a high cost, high value thing that they’re gonna dial it in perfectly. Leads are expensive to most gyms and fitness studios, but nowhere near is expensive as they are for a mortgage broker. So without further ado, let’s jump on over to the podcast and listen to what Andrew has to say about this whole thing. And I’ll catch you on the other side of this.
All right, guys. Well, what’s up? Welcome to The gymOS Podcast, this is Dan Uyemura, your host here, CEO of PushPress, where we’re helping make fitness professionals better business professionals, one episode at a time. I’ve got with me today, Andrew Pawlak…I always mess up people’s names.
Andrew Pawlak: You got it man. I can’t. I can’t get yours right. So yeah, mine’s Pawlak, no worries.
Dan Uyemura: I always overthink. Andrew Pollack. For the record, my last names like W-a-y W-a-y-m-u-r-a. That’s what I always tell people.
Andrew Pawlak: Uyemura. Got it.
Dan Uyemura: Cool. So Andrew is the CEO of leadPops.
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, leadPops.com.
Dan Uyemura: leadPops.com, which is basically a lead generation system, landing page system for real estate professionals. Is that correct?
Andrew Pawlak: Yes. So our bread and butter right now is mortgage, real estate, and insurance. And mortgage and real estate are pretty heavily intertwined. So, yeah.
Dan Uyemura: Yep. So basically, Andrew’s working in a space where the cost of acquiring customers is pretty high…am I correct in assuming that?
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, the clicks are expensive on Google. The payoff, the ticket item is pretty high, you know, and when you sell a mortgage, you’re making anywhere from a couple $1000 to $6-000-$8000 on a loan. So it’s a high commission ticket item, so people are willing to pay a good amount of money to close a loan. They’re willing to pay a lot of money for clicks. They’re willing to pay a lot of money for leads relatively to get a deal, so it’s pretty highly evolved.
Dan Uyemura: Lately in our industry, I’ve heard a lot of groans, I don’t do any paid ads for my gym’s or I haven’t before I left the gym just because I sucked at it. That’s not to say it can’t be really effective, in fact, I know it can, but a lot of people who have been doing paid ads who had seen a lot of success in it, are now complaining and grumbling that the cost per click is getting more expensive. Can you tell me in your industry what people are paying per click?
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, so I was just doing a presentation for a mortgage alliance that I’m gonna be talking to next week, and it’s funny one of my slides is going over a specific keyword for a type of loan that that loan is VA loans, it’s a loan for veterans and military. The cost per click on that keyword is $79, so $79 bucks per click, not per lead, per click. That’s on the higher end. That’s an expensive keyword, but the average keyword is probably $8 bucks, $10, $12 bucks, $15 a click, depending on what specific iteration of it it is, but yeah mortgage keywords are really expensive.
Dan Uyemura: And those are Google keywords, not Facebook. I’m assuming.
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, Google keyword.
Dan Uyemura: Right. Okay, so $79 a click, astronomical. I would say $10 per click is probably a little more expensive than what gym owners are seeing, but now we’re talking more in line. The reason I want to bring this up is because you were saying just a second ago that the payoff for landing a client on this is couple anywhere from couple $1000 to $8000, that would be considered the lifetime value of the client assuming they don’t come back, correct?
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, well, if you keep getting that client, if you’re good at the follow up, I mean, you might, that’s on one loan, right, so you get one loan. The average mortgage professional average loan officer is, I would say, in most cases, not getting more than one or two deals out of the same client just because their follow up isn’t good, but the lifetime value would be considerably higher if you consider that the average person is involved with or influences multiple home purchase transactions or refinances over the life of their living in houses, so one deal, you might make two or three or five or $8000 depending on where you’re at in the country. If you got two or three deals out of that same client, you might make $25,000 off of that one client if you’re very good at the follow up, you stay in front of them and some of that stuff that you know, every everybody, no matter what the industry needs to be better at, I think.
Dan Uyemura: I agree, and that’s something we’ll touch on later in this episode. But the reason I wanted to bring that up is because for a gym, let’s assume that you keep your member for two years, which, honestly, I think a lot of gym’s on average, probably keep their members longer if they’re doing well at $150 bucks a month, that’s $3600. So we’re talking apples to apples here, for the most part, in terms of the cost of lead generation and the potential payoff for what they do. The one thing I think real estate and mortgages are way more sophisticated than the average gym owner in is they have a much more competitive space to attract leads, so they become better at it in terms of knowing how to approach the sale and knowing how to put up the proper landing page and all these kind of things, I think gym owners have a little ways to go in that, and that’s kind of what I want to broach upon with you here today. Can you tell us a little bit like the mechanics of a landing page, that’s your business, that’s what you do. What makes a good landing page?
Andrew Pawlak: All right, great questions. So well, yeah, you mentioned like, mortgage is pretty highly evolved, I would say it is definitely. There’s some really big companies, like $1,000,000,000 companies competing in this arena that a lot of them are actually just companies that sell leads. Most people don’t even know that when they think of a Zillow, they think of like a Lending Tree. These people think that all these are just like big websites like Lending Tree might even be like a bank that does loans, they’re not, they sell leads. That’s what they do. They sell people’s data. You go to Zillow, you fill out a form. They’re selling your information to mortgage companies. You go to LendingTree. They tell you, banks compete. You win. No, you don’t. You kind of lose because they’re gonna take your information and they’re gonna sell it to five or 10 or 20 banks, and now you’ve got your phone ringing. It’s insane. So these companies that have, like, bid up the cost of these keywords have spent a lot of money and time trying to figure out not just how to get traffic, but how do you convert traffic, that’s the big thing. Getting a bunch of clicks, it can easily turn on Google ads, Facebook, do emails, blogs, videos, all this and that and get a lot of clicks and get a lot of eyeballs, but the key is coupling that with the landing page that’s gonna convert leads for you and doing it in a way that’s gonna obviously be profitable, and that’s where I think a lot of people are just totally missing the boat.
You asked about, like the breakdown of a good landing page, there are multiple, multiple things that go into that, but, you know, just to start from the very beginning, making sure you’re picking keywords that are going to drive the right kind of traffic based on what you’re going after, if you’re doing Google ads or if you’re doing block content, you know, videos, whatever it is, I think you gotta look at tools like SEMrush.com, which is a great one. It’s going to give you the keyword volume or search volume about, you know, what people are looking for, what they’re typing into Google that gives you a really good starting point as to what you want to create content for, what you want to create blog articles and videos for, start at the beginning, and look at “okay, what are people actually searching for and looking for,” and create your keyword list based on what people want and what their, you know, what their interests are.
Dan Uyemura: All right, so I want to dive into that really quick. So for me and you, we’re kind of working with people on a national or maybe even international level. If you’re a local real estate agent or a local gym, how do you find keywords that are pertinent, like does it not matter the locality of it or are the keywords persistent across all?
Andrew Pawlak: Well, if you’re running Google ads, it’s great because you can localize the search, the geographic area that you’re getting traffic from, so you can say I only want to show my ads to people within 10 miles or 25 miles of my location. They can still be typing in a topic you know, based on whether it’s diet or nutrition or fitness or workout sessions or anything you know, gyms near me or personal trainers or whatever it might be. You could make sure that that ad is only showing to the people that are in that geographic area. So you know most of our clients and mortgage and real estate, for example, they’re not doing business outside of their local market, especially the real estate agents. They’re like, I’m not even gonna drive more than five miles outside of where I live to show houses. This is like my territory. This is where I do business. This is where people recognize me. This is where my signs are, my benches, all this, you know, all that stuff that they do and that’s their focus so they wouldn’t want to come up, like I’m in San Diego, no realtor in San Diego is gonna want to come up for Los Angeles or Orange County really, that’s not, they would never go that far. And a lot of them won’t even drive to other areas within San Diego that are, you know, 20-30 miles apart. So being able to geographically place your ads is a big part of any kind of campaign online, you know, whether it’s Google ads Facebook, you can pretty much target the areas that you want to show your ads to.
Dan Uyemura: Right? So let’s actually jump back to the original question that was about landing pages. So a lot of like a lot of gym owners, they’ll subscribe to systems which give them challenges or things to build an ad campaign around, and the reason for that, for those who haven’t kind of broken it down, it’s because a buyer who’s finding an ad online needs some type of motivation to actually make a purchase. If it’s kind of like you’re buying ads that just link to your homepage, there’s not gonna be anything to motivate someone to spend any money. It’s just awareness, which isn’t that effective. What can the gym owner do that could help them create an ad? Send it to a landing page? Like what type of an offer and what type of a landing page would be, what you would consider highly converting. I know you’re not in the gym space, but, you know, let’s try and stretch your boundaries here.
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, yeah, sure. So, okay, so real quick back to the keywords and the topics because this is relevant to the landing page. When you identify your keyword that you want to target, you want to make sure you’re driving people to a landing page that matches that keyword, so the ad copy of that search phrase matches. So if someone types in the Google search, it could be “gym near me,” you know, for example, they’re gonna place local gyms let’s just say in San Diego, if you’re one of those gyms that comes up, you’re gonna wanna have obviously references to “San Diego gym”, “best personal trainer in San Diego.” You want your reviews to be showing if you’ve got good reviews, that’s a really important part of this whole, this whole digital marketing strategy, no matter what, your reputation, is gonna be really important for people. So having a landing page that matches that search query or if it’s a specific nutrition plan or a specific diet or a specific training curriculum people are looking for, that people are typing into Google that you train on or that you teach, you want your landing page to match whatever that phrase is as closely as possible, so if I’m typing in a certain training style that I’m looking for someone being able to teach me or get involved in as a consumer when I hit your landing page if that’s that specific keyword that I typed into Google, it’s important to have a landing page that matches that specific training style or whatever, you know, that nutrition plan might be that people are searching for. If it’s something you’re offering, and it’s kind of a niche within your offering, your keywords need to match your landing page. It’s called AdSense. A lot of people, just inherently, they think I’m gonna have one website or one landing page, I’m gonna drive all of my traffic to it. The more landing pages you have, the better and the better dialed in the keywords in the landing page is to each other, the more closely tied into each other they are the AdSense stays very familiar for people, so as they click and they typed in something in a Google, they see your Google ad is coming up where you placed naturally in Google or whatever, maybe your blog post comes up. If they click and that phrase that they see in that ad is an exact match or a very close match to what they just typed into Google. The chance of them even clicking in the first place, goes up. So when they do the search, they see you come up, your ad copy matches what they typed in, these things start lining up, you start to see a higher click through rate, you start to see people are clicking on you, maybe more so than someone that’s even paying a higher amount per click. Google rewards your page score, and they’re looking at the fact that “hey, this page is getting more clicks, we’re gonna place a higher than maybe someone who’s actually bidding more per click because they’re they’re page quality is higher, and they’re getting more people to actually click on them because it’s lining up”. And now when I click on your page, the ad copy matching the keyword in the search that people are typing in is important versus just taking me to the homepage of a gym website. Having an actual landing page dedicated to that topic is important.
What a lot of people are also missing is a good call to action in the mortgage world. This is a huge problem for loan officers and mortgage originators, you don’t really have a call to action, it’s just a bunch of stuff to read, and it’s just kind of like hope and pray marketing. There’s nothing really directing you to take that next step, which is in most cases getting a quote, finding out if you’re eligible, seeing if you qualify, using the right wording to get people to click on what you want them to click on is really important, a lot of people are missing that it’s just stuff to read and a contact form like name email, phone number. What we find in the mortgage side of things is that asking more information, not just “give me your contact information and tell me where you live,” is a very important way to get people to interact and answer some easier questions first. So the setup typically is: good strong call to action, you direct people to do something you have like a nice fat call to action button. It should stand out.
Dan Uyemura: Give me example one for a gym so we can talk in their language.
Andrew Pawlak: Call to action for a gym…oh I wish you would give me one man. Find out if this nutrition plan is right for you or take this quiz to see if, you know, this weight loss plan that’s…
Dan Uyemura: Or qualify for a free consultation, things like, it needs to be very directive that they’re going to get some value out of the actions that they’re taking as opposed to, like, find out more, right?
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, learn more, stuff like that doesn’t really work. It’s always just, in most cases, it’s a lot of stuff to read, and we’re just kind of crossing our fingers, hoping that people are going to call us or they’re just going to give us their name, email, phone number, which a lot of people shy away from. If I just hit your website, I clicked on a Google ad or it’s, you know, a block post or a video that got me to your site or to your landing page. Most people don’t come to a website and just right off the bat look forward to giving up their name, email and phone number. So what we find is there’s a method to ask for information that doesn’t scare people off. You ask more questions about like, “Hey, what are your goals?” You know, I want to lose weight. I want to be more nutritious. I want to work out five times [per week]. You ask some really easy questions and you layer those questions on one at a time. You don’t ask him 25 questions at once. You might actually end up asking him 15 or 20 questions, there’s kind of a sweet spot we found on the mortgage side, anywhere from 12 to 20 questions is kind of the sweet spot. Too few questions. People aren’t invested enough. They drop out. They’re more likely to give you a fake name, email, phone number, too many questions, for obvious reasons, people will not go all the way through the process. But you ask a good enough number of questions and you present those questions in a way where I could just, if I’m on my phone, I could just tap my way through point and click, if I’m on my mouse, I can very quickly answer a whole bunch of questions that are useful. It’s gonna help you qualify your lead. It’s gonna help you, so if you got like, let’s just say two or three leads that came in at the exact same time and I had you answer like 15 questions before, and I can actually compare each of these side by side, and this one’s like, ah, man, this guy serious. This is my main question or one of my questions is, how soon are you looking to start your custom fitness plan: ASAP, 0 to 3 months, 6 to 9 months or whatever and this guy says sometime in the future, and this guy said 3 to 6 months and this one said ASAP, and everything else in that lead form that I have set up looks pretty good. This person looks like they’re serious. They’re willing to spend money. They may be one of my questions asks about how much they’ve invested in fitness programs in the past and what other kinds of fitness programs they’ve been involved in. Now I can see how this guy’s actually, he spent $1000 bucks already on other stuff, I can tell this is someone that serious, they’re not just looking for, like three reports about how to diet or something. some pill to lose weight, you know you can kind of, by asking certain questions, you can kind of figure out the mindset of the person or what kind of person is this. This is the guy that’s looking for a diet pill for $30 bucks a month or is this someone that’s really serious or oh, they’re looking to train for a marathon or something coming up. They’ve got a wedding later this year. They’re looking to lose 20 pounds. I can use that in my conversations with this person, as added motivation, because I understand there “why.” So you’re asking questions to learn about them, to qualify your lead, to glean valuable information, and it’s a lot better when you get a lead that comes in that you’ve got, like, 15 or 20 pieces of information versus just a name, email and phone number that this person might want to like join your gym or do like a free 30 days, whatever with you. We have a lot of good questions now, like okay, cool, now I know how to kind of when I call this person back, because that’s the next phase of this whole thing we can talk about, but now, when I call this person back based on their answers to these questions, I kind of know how to position the conversation or which way I want to kind of take things based on these answers. I’m a much better salesperson as a result of having this quick needs assessment come in along with their contact info, than I would be if I just had a kind of start from scratch, and I don’t have anything other than their contact information. Like in my world, most people want less good leads than more crappy leads, you know. I’d rather call 10 people and have 5-6 good conversations than get 100 leads and have 5-6 good conversations. More leads is not necessarily good.
Dan Uyemura: It’s about your time, right? Like 100 leads that come through is your time because you’re gonna have to talk to them all. And I think one thing that’s important to notice or to mention, and everything you’ve said is a lot of people that they set up their lead flow without, really, it’s without considering what they would want to do. And Nick talked about this, our CRO, in his podcast about setting up your sales process as if you were the customer. If you just came on to some random service companies website, probably the last thing you want to do without getting to know them is giving your name, email, address and phone number, right. But if you were asked a bunch of questions that were actually pertinent to what you need as a customer that’s more interesting to you like “Hey, what is your goal?” You know you’re training for something, can I help you with something, like if you’re actually diving down their needs, as opposed to just cramming what you do down their throat that becomes a compelling part of your story in terms of how you sell to them like you said. And it does help you when they come in the gym, you have something to talk about, as opposed to like “Oh, why are you here?” You already know you’re training for a 10k [race]. Great, this is what we can do for you, right? And that helps the whole sales process. Very good.
Andrew Pawlak: 100%. There’s a whole psychology behind, asking for information in a way that’s that’s more welcoming to clients than just “give me your contact info,” you know. It’s like a first date, that’s the easiest analogy is like there’s certain things did you don’t want to, like, do or jump right into unlike that first date if you want to strategically, like, you know, get to where you want to be with it. The same thing with the Internet, a lot of people, it’s crazy to me, it’s like they throw all tact out the window when you’re on the Internet, you especially gotta be on your best behavior and earn trust and make people feel safe like they don’t, you’re sketchy, you’re on the Internet, they don’t know anything about you. In real life, you’ve got a lot of cool things working in your favor. Hopefully, the way you look, the way you present yourself, the way you talk, your voice, inflection and all these cool things you can do to build trust and make people feel comfortable. You don’t really have much of any of that on the Internet, so you got to present yourself in a way that’s credible.
You know, you asked about the anatomy of a landing page, I think having a multi-step form built into it is going to really help you qualify the lead. It’s gonna help you convert at a higher rate. It’s gonna help you get a higher quality lead having your trust factors, your reviews anywhere you can have, like an “as seen on” or a publication or like a local business top rated in this market or in this area favorite, you know, consumer favorite. These kinds of things that you can kind of add to build trust and make people feel comfortable all work in your favor, you know?
Dan Uyemura: Okay, so to recap on your landing pages, I believe there’s a framework for everything, including, like you said dating, right. The framer for dating, in my opinion, not that I’m dating anymore, is you ask more questions, then you talk about yourself, right? No one wants to hear you talk about yourself, but everyone wants to have interest in them. And that’s kind of like the lead form, like you’re talking about, ask them a bunch of questions, don’t shove a bunch of information down their throat, but in terms of the framework, what do we got, we got probably a compelling message at the top, one.
Andrew Pawlak: Compelling call to action, absolutely. A big fat call to action button that stands out, that’s prominent. “See if you qualify”, you know, “get a free one on one assessment,” something that’s really going to get them to click. It should stand out. You don’t want it to blend into the page. So what you want, what we’re looking for, like yellow, orange, bright blue. If it contrasts with the rest of the page, an arrow pointing to the button seems a little cheesy, but these things work, they make a difference. A compelling trust factor, reviews, ratings, anything you can show if you’ve got, you know, a couple hundred 5 star reviews on Google, show that! You don’t want a link off your landing page, but you definitely want to showcase that on the page without a clickable link taking people away from your page. That’s another thing I see. Sometimes people will have their trust badge or a couple logos, but they make them actually clickable. So I could click onto this gym directory site that shows every other gym in your local market that also has decent ratings or whatever, things like that you never want to do, you want to keep people on your page as long as possible. Reviews are great, compelling call to action and what you always also want to do, I always tell people this, you want to link back to that page or to that quiz or to that lead form throughout your content, throughout your blog, throughout the sub or inner pages of your website, underneath your videos, that should be pretty prevalent throughout the site. Buttons and links, I always tell people are so simple, they overthink it, it’s just buttons and links. You load up your content strategically with buttons and links that pull people back, either directly to that landing page or just directly to the lead form, and you layer that in strategically into your content, so as people are reading along, it’s not just like one button on your homepage that takes me to this, and then, as they click into your site to other sections or into your blog, there’s literally no other way for me to convert into a lead. So now I’m just like reading your content, taking it all in, when I click off of your page and I get sucked into a yelp or some other site that you don’t control that either sells leads or that lead gets lost in the mix because they get, you know, distracted by all these other things.
So you always want to continually, as you put together content, as you add information to your blog, whatever, strategically layer buttons and links into that content as people scroll that pull them back into that lead form or back to that landing page, so it’s prevalent throughout all of your content. It lives in the sidebar of your blog, these are things a lot of people don’t think about. You look at a website a lot of times, it’s just a glorified brochure, it’s just a bunch of stuff to read, and you’re gonna cross your fingers and hope people call you or fill out your contact form. Your contact form sucks. People don’t fill that out in most cases. So what other ways can you strategically pull people into something that’s gonna ask for a lot of good information and do it in a way that doesn’t scare them off? So that’s just a really good way of combining the content that you have with that lead generation approach.
So you’re offering good information, but you’re strategically, the best value you can offer, I think, is make it really, really easy for people that you should be talking to, to give you some information so you can talk to them, and you can explain and educate and do all these wonderful things you can do in real life that your website can’t really do for you. So the ultimate goal of your site and the emails that you’re sending out and your blog posts and your social media should be to pull people into an area that’s gonna qualify them, and that’s gonna turn into an actual conversation.
Dan Uyemura: Right. So to try and, this a lot of stuff, but to try and sum up pretty much everything, Andrew said here, I think this falls into a few actionable things. I like to give gym owners actionable things to think about, mull over, and try to do: one, do keyword research using like, what were the tools you were saying?
Andrew Pawlak: I’m a big fan of SEMrush.com.
Dan Uyemura: Is that free or does that cost money?
Andrew Pawlak: They let you do a few searches for free, and then there’s another one called SpyFu, and I don’t have any affiliate links to share anything. It’s just SEMrush.com, another one called SpyFu, which is kind of like kung fu, but SpyFu.com is another good one. You can use Google keyword planner, but that’s only if you’re running Google ads. So if you’re not running those, Google keyword planner won’t work for you.
Dan Uyemura: Okay, so first thing would be to find out some keywords, and I think the tactic you were saying is I think you want to niche down a little bit, so if you’re trying to go for “gym near me,” a little bit harder, but if you’re gonna go for “CrossFit near me,” “keto diet plans,” things that are very niched, you can you can actually start writing content about those things and driving traffic to him. Then what you want to do, secondly, is built a landing page for each of those, so let’s say you bring someone in on the “keto diet plan,” “paleo diet,” “CrossFit,” “jiu jitsu,” whatever it might be, you’re gonna build a landing page that’s targeted and speaking directly to that type of customer because that’s how they found you. Then you’re probably gonna write a bunch of content, have a bunch of pages that are getting index and searched on your blog and or things that they can dive into from your homepage that talk specifically about those niches that they’re interested in with big buttons links and basically crosslinks over to these landing pages that will get people into that funnel, correct? Is that the simple version of what we’re talking about here?
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, you distilled it well, like I just did a quick search on “paleo diet” just in SEMrush on my end, and it says the search volume on that’s like 246,000 times per month on average, so it’s a popular keyword, you could get a lot of people interested in that topic. Maybe you write a blog post like “top three things you didn’t know or you need to know about paleo diet or mythbusters or is paleo diet really all it’s cracked up to be,” or whatever you, come up with some different ways to kind of position that keyword or that topic into a blog post or into an article or a video, and now you have something you can repurpose. You can do a Google ad campaign. You could do a blog post. You can share it on Facebook.
Dan Uyemura: Right and then from that blog post, you’re linking into your landing page, so you give people an opportunity to not just stumble into it, but again, it’s a framework, right? You’re trying to give people a manufactured opportunity to express their interest in this and the solution you’re providing for them. It’s a pain point that they have, that’s why they’re there. That’s a mindset shift everyone in the gym community needs to make is when someone’s on your website. They’re there with intent, they’re there because they’re looking for a solution to a pain that they have, and it’s up to you to express if you’re an authority in fixing that pain and then giving them an opportunity to talk to you. So that’s what this landing page concept is so important about,
Andrew Pawlak: 100%, and if I can share something of value, I know it’s in my niche world that I’m in, but it’s just so easy to see what what this actual example is and then say, “Oh, I can see how that would apply, and I could, with some small tweaks, make this something I could recreate for my gym in that world.” There’s a site called VeteransUnited.com. That’s not my website, I don’t make money off driving traffic to it, but it is a very well done mortgage marketing site. And when you go to that site, just on your own time if you’re listening to this, and you start to see like, “Oh, look at that big fat call to action, look at that big old yellow, frickin pulsing button on the home page, a big arrow pointing to it.” Then you click on and you start to see the interactive questionnaire that they present. That’s how you do lead generation, so if you can recreate something very similar to that flow, then you start to click around on that website and you start to see “oh, wow content mixed with buttons and lengths, no matter where I go on this website, they’ve got calls to action buttons and links layered into the content that keep pulling me back into this lead form,” very well done. Every business out there could benefit from creating the same kind of experience for their users where you have good information and good content, but that’s nothing for you as a business owner if you don’t have the lead gen portion, it’s like you’ve got your air conditioning on and you left all your windows open. We’ve got to make sure we’re combining that content with the calls to action in the lead capture, otherwise, you get all these clicks and people you should be doing business with just come to consume your content, they leave and somebody else gets their business because you didn’t set your mousetrap,
Dan Uyemura: Right. There’s also a concept that I like talking about, Ahrefs, since we’re kind of in the SEO world. Ahrefs.com does this in their blog really well, where the entire blog is about solving problems you might have doing SEO marketing or any of that kind of stuff, but somewhere in every blog, they actually solve it with their software. They tell you how to do it with their software. So you come in thinking like, “how do I find keywords,” and then they’re like, “Oh in Ahrefs, just go here and do this and this.” Gym owners could do this too, if you’re talking about paleo diet blah blah, you can you can introduce the ideas, the paleo diet, what are the myths of the paleo diet and then be like, “Well, if you’re a member of our gym, we have someone who is a consultant, you can always talk to her.” So it provides a solution that they unwittingly don’t even realize that they’re looking for. But once they read it, they’re like, “Ok, this is solved at the gym that I’m looking for as well,” right, and that’s a good thing.
One thing I want to pivot to actually, you talked about having their conditioning on with the windows open, and that made me think about something that I feel is a problem in the gym community and probably in your world, too, and that’s gonna be just the general sales process and lead follow up, how to nurture somebody and talk to them. I feel like a lot of people get leads and just let him die on the vine, just like let that fruit get stale and rotten, instead of actually talking to them. Do you have any tips or tactics on how to actually engage somebody and get them through the sales funnel and make them make a decision, right?
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, man. So that’s a big, big one. You know, people are, they all everyone wants leads, and then when they get leads they want these leads to close and they have to consider also that what you do and don’t do in your follow up is going to make or break whether or not the leads are any good. So you give one guy like 10 leads and he’s like, “Oh, these are money, I got like, five or six deals.” You give the same 10 leads to another person and they don’t close anything like, “These leads suck.” And it’s like, no, actually, I’m sorry to tell you, I heard that voicemail you left him. That was pretty bad. You need to go back to the drawing board because if you’re calling up your leads and those are the voicemails you’re leaving people and then you’re not getting any calls back there’s a way to do it. And I think in many cases, unless you are a well versed and experienced phone salesperson, which on the mortgage side of things there are definitely those people that are out there, but there’s a lot of them that probably shouldn’t be making that first contact. They are not good on the phone in terms of just a cold kind of call. I mean, it’s not a straight cold call, but it’s still a lead that got generated. It’s not like a referral or a past clients, so you gotta be on your a game with this kind of follow up methodology, and some people just aren’t really good at it. They stumble through those first conversations. They’re not recognizing hot buttons. They’re talking more than they’re listening like there’s a whole framework, and I think you should have a good script of follow up questions that you ask. You want, of course, if you’ve just taken that person through a multi step lead form like what we just talked about, which is what I recommend, you want to first confirm the answers to those questions. So let’s just say you got 15 questions answered. Okay, awesome, you kind of want to go through some of those and make sure that that is correct. And you’ve got something to work with there you want to clarify, but also, hopefully, you can expand on some of these things and learn a little bit more about the client. You build rapport, you ask more questions. There’s like a framework, there’s a little dance you’ve got to do and be good at and you gotta practice, and if you’re not really good at it, or you can put someone on the first kind of line of making those outbound calls and communications for you, that is good at it. That is ideal because these calls and these follow ups, if you’re not good at it and you’re blowing it, it’s not that these leads suck, it’s that you’re not really good at it, and you’re missing out on opportunities to close deals because you’re saying the wrong thing or you’re not listening or you’re not communicating fast enough or or often enough, they say the average sales made on like touch number 5 to 12. Most people don’t even try more than once or twice to call up a lead. So if you’re like one of those, I’m gonna call him once, didn’t get him, but it put him on my drip and I’m gonna put him in my newsletter once a month. That’s just like burning through opportunities. You gotta touch him multiple times. You know, speed to contact is huge. Really important to be that first person to talk to him. If they just submitted a lead form and it’s during business hours, you want to be able to get back to him like within a minute or two. Ideally, I mean, in the mortgage world, it’s like within 5 to 10 seconds because people are, it’s literally you hit a site, you submit your information, half of the sites out there are selling your information, so now you’re just getting pummeled by phone calls. It’s not like that, I’m sure, exactly in your world. But you know, the speed to contact, regardless is important to be the first person to touch base with and have a good conversation with that client. You can build rapport and establish a relationship. All these wonderful things you can do when you actually connect with them. But multiple touches, being quick to contact and follow up, not letting a lead sit around for two or three hours before you call him, by that time, they’ve probably already gone somewhere else or you call them and they don’t recognize the phone number. They don’t remember filling something out. Now you have this awkwardness of, you know, trying to explain why you’re calling. That’s all kind of a mess, like the quicker you follow up if I just filled out your form and now my phone is ringing within a couple of minutes, if I don’t recognize that number, I’m a little bit more likely to answer because I just filled something out and makes sense.
Here’s another trick in the mortgage world because the lead business is so big here is if they don’t answer and you just called them, a lot of people don’t answer that first phone call, hang up, call them right away, right again. The phone rings twice. They’re like, “Oh, wait, maybe I should answer,” I don’t recognize that number, but I’m more likely because that first call if I don’t recognize the phone number, think about yourself, my phone rings all day long, I do not answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number. Somebody calls me back to back, I’m more likely to answer, and I know the tricks that these mortgage people play, but it’s just an important thing to think about. And, you know, calling them back to back is something that if you are good on the phone and they do answer that second time like you should be able to talk your way into explaining why you called him twice without them getting upset about it.
Dan Uyemura: One thing I’m actually finding to be more of a trick because I actually have my phone set to not even ring when I don’t know the number because I get too many, but a lot of people will text me immediately and or leave a voicemail. Before, I would never listen to voicemails. But now that we’ve gotten to the point where robocalls are so crazy, I think texting is probably the best, so if they don’t answer, they probably are like me and don’t answer or like you and don’t answer unknown calls. Just send them an immediate text. “Hey, it’s Dan, you just filled out our form, I’d love to chat with you. Give me a call at this number.” Because I’ll always call someone back if they text me. But most of the time, if they just call and give up, that’s it. Because I won’t, especially if they don’t leave a voicemail, I won’t even know it was them.
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, 100 Agreed. Couldn’t agree more. We’ve got a company that we work with that does follow up and appointment setting on behalf of business professionals. They’re really good at this. They use AI and they use machine learning. But they’ve got real people staffed 24/7 to follow up with your leads for you.
Dan Uyemura: What company is this?
Andrew Pawlak: It’s a company called Verse.io, like bible verse, but Verse.io and they’ve expanded beyond mortgage and real estate, they’re doing a lot more these days. They’re really good. They’ve done a great job for a lot of our clients who are struggling with this important, important piece of the puzzle, but they do the lead follow up, and they’ve done a lot of research based on their millions of communications that they’ve done over the years, and they found that the text first approach is the best way to follow up with their leads. And, in fact, unless a client requests specifically that they call first, their method is text first. So definitely a great point there. And then also what they have found, which is kind of interesting is they text an open ended question. So and they give you two options, and they share this openly, so I’m not sharing their secret sauce. It’s pretty cool, just like with an email you know, with an auto responder email like, “Hey, when’s the best time to reach you?” A lot of times, people will send out an auto responder email that’s just kind of like a book, just stuff to read, and it’s just like, “Ok, am I supposed to do something here,” but if you leave it with, “Hey, when’s the best time to call you or when’s the best time to reach you?” People are more likely to reply to that auto responder. Same kind of thing with their text messages. But here’s the trick. Here is what they do. It’s really cool. They say, “Hey, got your inquiry.” They present themselves as your assistant, which they are, they say, like, “Hey, this is Alex, Dan’s assistant over at gymOS, got your inquiry just wanted to see, would you prefer we communicate via text or would you prefer I call? So you get two options. There is no third option. There is no take a hike. There is only do you want us to call or do you wanna chat via text? And they got it down to like it’s 140 or 100 whatever characters it fits in one text, it’s well done, but it’s basically that’s the option. They explain who they are, present themselves to make it clear who they’re following up on behalf of, then they ask you, “Do you want to do this via text or would you prefer I call you,” and the person is like text, I get off work at 5:00pm or whatever they respond. They’ll let you know like or call me now or call me after 6:0pm I’m at work or whatever. It’s pretty cool what that does for you, but it opens up the conversation that gives them an option that keeps them in control of the scenario, but you can kind of see what they prefer to communicate with, and, of course, like you were saying, people are so much more likely to respond to text messages than they are to phone calls, so that has been something we’re seeing on our end too.
Dan Uyemura: That’ll be the case until the robo-people figure that out and then fuck it all up for everyone else. Again, I’m sure that day is coming.
Andrew Pawlak: Cat and mouse, man.
Dan Uyemura: Yeah, so I mean, one interesting thing to say about that and this is why I’m so excited for gym owners to start turning this on in their brain that there are these frameworks and there’s these systems out there that work and that there’s a lot they can learn because this just plays to human psychology, like when you’re asked a question, something about the ego of human beings drive us to answer. So that’s why the very simple marketing tactic of just asking a a nine word question or the simple question without a lot of crap proceeding it usually works because people are not used to it, first of all, and second of all, they feel rude not answering. So that’s how you actually can start the engagement and start that conversation with something so simple instead of pounding them with, “this is what we do and this is where we are.” That’s why this is great, just be like, “How do you prefer to be talked to? Text or call. I’ll do either, your call.” It’s huge stuff.
Andrew Pawlak: 100%. Love it.
Dan Uyemura: So let’s…go ahead.
Andrew Pawlak: There’s one thing I want to throw out there that I think people overlook, and that’s just one of my favorite areas of opportunity just to think about is your thank you page. It’s a small, often overlooked detail that matters a lot. If I just filled out your lead form, what do I see next? Most of the time, it’s terrible. It’s thanks, a little message pops up, someone will call you or your information has been submitted, and that’s all you get. Sometimes you don’t even see it go off. It’s like it’s a little blip on the screen for five seconds and it’s gone, and you didn’t even, “wait, did my information go through,” like that’s a really, really good opportunity to optimize further. One of my favorite things we’re seeing clients do with great results is you take them to a thank you page that’s got a video of you introducing yourself, letting people know, “Hey, here’s the next steps. Here’s what you can expect. Here’s what we like to do. Here’s what you’re gonna get from us. My follow up. You’re going to get a text message typically within like a minute or two of you submitting your information. You’re going to see us follow up with a text,” you can start to set the framework of what’s happening next, and then what, of course, they’re tools that will automate that first text for you, for example, that while they’re still watching that thank you page video where you just told him they’re going to get a text, their phone beeps and they see “oh, shit, there’s that text message you just told me he was going to send.” You’ve already delivered on that first promise. You can also say, “and hey, check your email. I’ve sent you like my free bonus I like to do, a free top 10 fitness programs you should look at in 2020,” or something where you give them something of value for the time they just spent, and to keep them sitting tight like, “Hey, don’t go running off to a bunch of other blogs or websites, ok? I just sent you something really cool. It’s like my nutrition ebook for 2020 or whatever, go check your email, I’ve already sent that to you,” and auto responder can kick back something very simple, an attachment or a book or a downloadable ebook they can get from that auto responder email. So now they’re going back to their gmail to look for the email you sent them that if they didn’t know to go look for that, probably would have gone to junk. Now that you’re going to go look for that cool thing that you just promised to give him, you can also say, “Hey, by the way, check out below. I’ve included some of my recent client reviews from testimonials. This is what people just like you are saying about working with us, and when you’re ready, you can always book a time below,” and that could be a link to your calendar, so now linked to your calendar. So there’s certain things you’re doing, like you’re building the credibility, the trust, you’re giving them a little bit of a reward, your matching a face and the name with who’s going to be calling and following up with them, you’re letting them know what the next steps are, what to expect, you’re setting yourself up for success with that first follow up call in that first engagement with that person. By doing these kinds of things that are so simple it’s automated. Now, every person that ever fills out your lead form is going to see that video. They’re going to see the next steps. Some of them, I would say, maybe one out of every three or one out of every five are actually booking themselves into your schedule because they’ve got a link to your calendly. Now they’re setting up their own appointments with you, beautiful, this is all automation that moves things in the right direction.
Dan Uyemura: This is where, again, I always keep going back to the frameworks and what you’ve just explained this, if you’re listening to this right now, I want you to appreciate what just happened. Like Andrew just explained to you how to build your lead funnel, and he’s not a fucking gym owner. Like the techniques and the tactics of what he does for mortgage brokers applies 100% for you, and he knows nothing about running a gym. But he just laid out how you can build a better intake and lead funnel knowing nothing about it. So the point is, all this stuff is out there. All this stuff is attainable. This knowledge is out there. And you guys, if you spend more time figuring these things out, it’s gonna impact your business 100 times more, then if you get another kettlebell cert, and that’s my mission here right now is to try and turn you guys into, you already know the movement, you know how to coach a gym, you know how to coach a class, you know how to relate with people in the gym. You need to learn how to set up your marketing funnels, you need to learn how to sell, you need to create retention systems, you need to know how to get referrals, you need to learn how to do all of these other things that you were never trained how to do professionally. And you’re gonna transform your business into something that’s just nuts compared to what you got going on right now.
Andrew, thank you for your time, for stopping in. That was some great stuff. Hopefully if you’re listening to this you have a pen and paper out the whole time. I’m gonna preface the intro with get a pen and paper. There is a lot to learn, you dropped a ton of knowledge bombs. We appreciate your time so much. Andrew, where can people find you online? If they want to hit you up, learn more, engage you to talk. Whatever.
Andrew Pawlak: You know what best that’s gonna be? Our website leadPops.com to learn a little bit about us. We’re releasing some cool new stuff in the future that might be applicable to your world. I’ll share that with you, Dan, when it’s ready, but for now, leadPops.com by far is the best place to learn more and kind of check us out.
Dan Uyemura: Yeah. Wouldn’t it be nuts if you took all this information that you know about lead generation and you applied it for gyms? That would be crazy.
Andrew Pawlak: Yeah, we’ll talk about that, cause it’s not too far off.
Dan Uyemura: Yeah, I was giving a nice lead in there. All right, All right, guys, thank you so much for checking out and yet another episode of The gymOS Podcast from PushPress, until next time, Dan Uyemura signing off. Keep grinding on those businesses, guys. See you later.
Oh, yeah! What’d you think? Another episode done of The gymOS Podcast. We’re trying to make you a better business owner and hopefully checking out some of the stuff Andrew had to say, did just that. Lots of key things to take away about what it’s like to be going through the lead funnel and what types of questions to ask people and how to qualify them and get them into your sales funnel. Sales is such a critical part of a gym, I don’t think a lot of people realize, the people that you don’t even see show up in your lead list or the people you don’t even know who contact you to try out your gym are all the people you’re missing. And it’s one of those things where you don’t know what you don’t know unless you have proper analytics peppered through your site, and you’re paying attention to exactly how your sights are converting. You don’t really know how many leads you’re missing because you have bad wording or bad photos or you don’t have a direct call to action or things aren’t simple for people to get their information in. What I can tell you is if people are visiting your website, they’re interested in your product that I can tell you because they found it and they’re looking at it, especially if they’re hitting more than one page. But if you’re not getting a good amount of those people filling out a form that’s letting you know that they’re interested in them, then there’s a lot of optimization you can do, so bad news, you’ve been losing a lot of leads probably, good news, if you actually pay attention, what’s happening and figure out ways to make this work, then this is something that you can dramatically increase your business with.
We put out a lot of blogs and information on how to make a better converting website because we build websites for some of our clients. If you’re one of our clients checking this out and you didn’t know that or maybe you’re starting to realize that there’s a lot that you could do for your website to make it better, hit one of us up in the support chat. We only build websites for our clients because we tie it directly in with all of our offerings on the PushPress core side. So if you’re not a PushPress client, can’t help you there for today, but if you are a PushPress client chat to one of the guys in the support, one of the guys and gals in this support channel and we will send you the right direction with information on how to make this work as always.
Hopefully you had a good time listening to us. Hopefully you learned a lot, we’re trying really hard to bring intelligent people to you who know what they’re talking about in areas that will help your business. If you feel like this helped your business today, I’d really appreciate it if you gave us a like on whatever system you’re listening to, if you subscribe to us that way, the podcast starts showing up automagically right into your listening device, you don’t have to come back and find that all the time. I mean, talk about such an easy way to continually get information right on your doorstep that’s gonna help you run a better gym. We released new podcast episodes to subscribers on Fridays and we release it to the general world on Monday. I mean, what better reason to subscribe then to get this information and listen to it over the weekend when you’ve got free time. Perfect. All right, guys. So I hope you got a lot out of this. Get back out in your gyms, make some stuff happen, and I’ll catch you on the other side. That was the worst outro ever, but I’m gonna let it slide. See you guys later.
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