Awesome New Years Resolution Promotion That Converts

Christmas promotions have been the hot topic on My Business Is Fitness over the past few weeks (I still have a few ideas up my sleeve), but now it's time to start looking beyond December and how you're going to capitalize on the ultra, yet short-term New Years Resolution (NYR) crowd.

Before we get started, I want you to imagine that these New Years Resolution people are like graceful wild geese, migrating around the world in a huge beautiful flock and the only time you can hunt them is between mid January to around early March.

(For those of you who think hunting isn't cool and that this is a poor choice of metaphor you're probably right; but hang in there, because I'll make it up to you with an awesome New Years promotion idea!)

Keep in mind that there will be a lot of other hunters out there wanting a piece of the action as well, so if you want to catch as many of these geese as you can in the short window that's available, you need to start by doing two things:

1. Get yourself into a great position by planning and being prepared
2. Get yourself a big gun and our big gun is:

The Mother/Daughter Promotion - Personal Trainer Style

This is a tried and tested promotion, it's been around forever and the concept couldn't be simpler; Mother brings daughter (or vice verse) to the gym or training session; daughter or mother trains free...for a little while anyway.

This promotion targets your existing clientele by encouraging them to bring along their daughter or mother but it's also a great way to get a ton of easy to convert leads.

It's a great referral promotion that's not too obvious, because your message is about these women encouraging each other to finally change their lifestyle and to stop procrastinating and what better time than now?

Now that we have our message all that's left is to get your marketing material in front of the mother or daughters and create an offer they can't refuse.

NB: I also like to run a small competition (first 10 to sign up go in the draw, so each entrant has a great chance of winning, but try and get enough prizes for everyone) in conjunction with any reasonable promotion to create urgency. This is a great time to call up any favors or develop relationships with surrounding businesses like restaurants, movie theatres and beauty type businesses...gift certificates and freebies are what you want.

Like any marketing activity, we want to scatter your promotional material across quite a few channels specific to your target market, in this case women in their mid 40's, so things like:

• Internet: Blog, facebook and twitter updates for word of mouth and internal referrals from existing clients; you may even consider a small facebook advertising campaign for this one to entice even more fresh faces.
• Posters/marketing material: Stick up branded and clearly designed posters in your gym or fitness centre, local health food stores, hairdressers, beauty therapists etc. (offer them some training in return for their cooperation). Your message is simple so keep your posters that way.
• Local media: Send a press release to your community newspaper along with some images describing your promotion and associated competition. In your press release specify your unique selling point.

How long you offer free training to the guest is entirely up to you. I would suggest no more than three sessions for the super generous of you, but usually one is enough (technically they're only getting 50% off because someone is paying).

This promotion is really very easy to set up so there's still tons of time before the New Years Resolution rush starts calling, so get your thinking caps on and make it happen!

Happy New Year?

Ben

Additional Reading:

20 Christmas Promotion Ideas
5 More Christmas Promotion Ideas
How I Turned Two Hours Work Turned Into Ten New Clients