Increase the Quality — Not Quantity — of Your Leads

IMAGE COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK

Much like other businesses, the fitness industry heavily relies on the volume of leads and prospects to drive sales numbers. What most people believe, however, is that quantity is advantageous — in reality, it’s quality.

While it certainly sounds exciting to have hundreds, even thousands of leads, 100 leads that result in 25 sales will never beat out 50 quality leads that convert 35 new members. When you generate high-quality prospects, you’re likely to close a higher percentage of them. It’s also been observed that quality prospects raise member retention rates as well.

Read on for five ways to increase your lead quality today:

1. Establish a well-defined target audience. Take a good look at what your member base looks like. Next, dig into your ad platform’s audience — are these people similar? If not, refine them. Once your audience is refined, it becomes much easier to determine what content will work best to increase engagement, drive traffic and generate prospects.
2. Produce quality content. It’s important to stay up-to-date with what’s popular in digital advertising. Currently, video ads and animated GIFs are attracting the eye of many audiences. However, appealing graphics and engaging copy go far as well. Statistics show if your content isn’t captivating a reader’s attention in two seconds, you’ve lost them.
3. Understand where your prospects are coming from. Analyze where your best prospects are coming from to determine where your marketing team should direct their focus. If you keep putting effort into mediums that don’t produce high-quality leads, you’ll continue to see low rates of conversion.
4. Facilitate internal communication within your facility. It’s of utmost importance that your entire team is on the same page about which leads have converted, which haven’t, and why. Keep track of your leads in one space that’s easy for multiple people to access and run regular meetings between your sales and marketing teams to discuss the optimal approach for quality leads.
5. Nurture your prospects. Not every prospect will be a quick sale. By coming up with a sequence to nurture these leads over an extended period of time and providing them with relevant, timely messages, you’re more likely to convert them than if you cease communication after one or two attempts with the assumption they won’t later convert into a member.

Generating leads is a complex and unpredictable process. However, by putting an emphasis on emitting high-quality prospects, your efforts are likely to be rewarded with a large percentage of conversions.

David Steel is the chief viral officer at Sneeze It. He can be reached at dsteel@sneeze.it or 800.304.1150.