Yesterday, I ran a live masterclass on marketing and advertising. I was joined by just shy of 50 gym, clinic and fit biz owners from the Alley-Oop.
It was a big affair — it ended up going for nearly four hours with only a single break to run to the loo.
After getting through exactly 117 slides, one lesson resonated more than any other.
Just like anything worth pursuing in life…
Your marketing efforts compound over time.
Right now, you might think that you’ve heard all this before and are considering hitting the back button and getting on with your day.
But if you give me a minute, I’m going to completely reframe how you can think about your advertising and marketing and potentially set you on a path that completely reshapes your whole business (seriously, that’s precisely what advertising has done for us now we’ve got a handle on it).
This story starts in February, when we were approaching advertising as most of us do — we dabbled in Google Ads, played around with FB and IG, and did what we could to maintain our organic following.
Things were ‘ticking along.’
But on a strategy day off-site, Jordi, Lachy and I agreed that our messaging was stale. It’d lost its spark.
We knew and acknowledged we needed to be more active — especially given how fast the media landscape was changing and the emphasis now on video storytelling.
So we put an ad out for a videography intern (full-time but at $22 per hour), and we found a strapping lad called Dan.
Dan was 21. No Uni degree, none of that entitlement that comes with a 4-year arts degree, and a ripper attitude.
He was a perfect fit.
Despite doubling our advertising cost each week (from $700 a week in ads to $1500 a week with the addition of the wage), we didn’t see any immediate change.
- No increase in leads.
- No increase in sales.
- No increase in reach.
But just like investing in the stock market, we knew our efforts would compound if we gave it a chance to do its thing.
And since it’s pretty common knowledge that no one invests in the S&P on Monday hoping for a major return on Tuesday…
You’d think we’d all take the same-long term approach with advertising.
Except, most of us don’t treat it that way — we treat it as cause-effect and expect our advertising efforts to magically open the flood gates to more leads than we can handle. Unlike every other form of investment, we expect advertising to give us an immediate return.
But advertising has never been cause and effect and it only immediately blows up your business in the rarest of occasions.
It’s far more nuanced than that, and the results take far more time to come to life… because it involves human behaviour and we’re damned complex.
So fast-forwarding to yesterday as I was showing everyone what we allocate to advertising today and what our returns are, it dawned on me just how much advertising had compounded since then:
- We sign up an extra 3 athletes per week, which generates an extra 20k of extra revenue… every week.
- Our media team has expanded. Dan has since brought in his mates Phoenix and Dom too (after getting a well-earned payrise). They are like the three musketeers, and they GSD.
- The strength of our media team has allowed us to enter a whole new market of Athlete Management with confidence because, in this day and age, so much of an athlete’s success is their brand off the field and video is the future of personal brand.
- Plus, we even get paid for content production by affiliates and partners now as well, for a sum I’m not allowed to disclose.
All of this has come about from deciding to double down on advertising even though we knew it would not give us an immediate return.
So while we spend just over 250k a year on advertising (between staff and ad spend), it’s now responsible for about a million dollars per year of new revenue in the business.
That’s a 400% return on the investment.
$1 in.
$4 out.
Better than any stock I know of right now.
Food for thought, right?
If you want to find out how to get started with this, then the best place to start is not to miss out on these trainings in the future.
For that, you’ll need to subscribe to the Alley-Oop newsletter because only subscribers have the chance to join these trainings.
URL link below for those that want to jump on board.
– Karl Goodman
