What Is an Acquisition System?
Let's start by getting on the same page. Building a solid acquisition system goes beyond just lead generation. While lead generation is key, true acquisition also involves building awareness, trust, marketing, nurturing and conversion.
Many focus solely on leads, leading to short-lived results and jumping from one trend to the next. It’s time to break that cycle, empowering yourself to control your business growth and know which levers to pull for your desired outcomes.
Why Most Lead Generation Services Fail
There's no shortage of marketing options making big promises without substance. While quality services do exist, many fitness businesses aren't setting them up for success due to foundational gaps: unclear ideal clients, lack of unique offers and unfocused strategies. This disconnect results in marketing services doing more testing and taking longer to show ROI, leading to frustration and misplaced expectations.
You’re not alone, though — it’s important to clarify and break these unproductive habits for better growth. Let’s dive in!
The Difference Between Tactical and Strategic Solutions
To build a complete and sustainable acquisition system, you first need to understand the difference between tactical and strategic solutions. Lead generation issues, like a lack of leads or quality, aren’t the main problem — they’re symptoms of a larger issue. Fitness business owners often get caught up in patching symptoms, but these only surface when deeper problems reach a tipping point.
Lead issues usually indicate a lack of an effective strategy, which includes clarity around ideal clients, offer positioning and messaging. Without a solid strategy, tactical solutions like lead-gen tools won’t be effective. It’s similar to telling a client to do random exercises and hoping for results: if you don’t have a workout plan, how do you know which exercises, weights and intensity levels to choose?
Addressing the strategy first ensures the tactical pieces fall into place and deliver real results.
Step 1: Put Together Your Brand Conversation
Establishing your brand conversation is fundamental to building an acquisition system that lasts and achieves desired results. A clear brand conversation aligns seamlessly with your target audience and represents what your brand stands for.
For example, imagine engaging a lead generation service that uses photos or methods contradicting your core values. Without clarity on these values, you might be drawn in by promises of success, but this approach can actually damage your brand.
With clarity, you make informed decisions, creating a productive system that adds long-term value to your business.
Here are the 6 core areas that make up a complete brand conversation.
1. Brand Purpose: This includes building out your vision, mission and primary goal of the brand.
2. Self-Reflection: Identify your 3-5 core values. These will provide a narrative that forms the basis of your brand pillars.
3. Guiding Principles: For each of the values you chose, define a guiding principle that guides your actions.
4. Personal Philosophy: Clearly define what your personal philosophy is. What are the beliefs, values and principles that guide your life and decisions?
5. Identify Intrinsic Motivators: Uncover your core motivations and create a unique self-definition that encapsulates your essence.
6. Market Research: Understand your audience and industry to remove personal bias.
This isn't just corporate jargon but your pathway to making the correct decisions that lead to consistency within your business. Building a business that provides time and financial freedom has no other choice but to build this foundation.
Step 2: Follow The Bullseye Framework
Now that the foundation is set, let's get into the actual process of building your system from picking the channels, testing and gaining traction.
The 6 Phases to the Bullseye Framework
1. Brainstorm: This is the phase where you go through each possible acquisition method using this questioning process to help evaluate which ones to focus on first.
- Debate, discuss, think about, research (but all very, very fast) reasonable ways you might be able to use EACH customer acquisition channel.
- Put your inherent channel biases to the side for the time being.
- Think through:
- How likely is this channel to work?
- Can I quickly run a test to prove my assumptions?
- How quickly will my inventory of customers from this source run out?
- How much hard costs and time will it take to acquire a customer?
2. Rank: You want to rank each channel based on how easy it is to test and how likely it is to build traction. You want to end with having a clear top three to focus on first.
3. Prioritize: Building on the ranking you just completed you now prioritize them from most likely to work to least likely.
4. Test: Now you enter the testing phase. It is important to keep consistency between how much you spend on each test and how much time you give. This will allow you to see a clear winner. Remember the point of the test is not revenue growth, but channel traction showing early indicators that pushing harder into this will be productive.
5. Focus: Stay focused on the top channels you are testing and cut out all other distractions. If posting on social media is not part of the test, then stop doing it and put all your attention to executing the test.
6. Repeat: This process can be repeated until you find a winner. The goal is to see early traction.
15 Traction Channels to Work From
1. Viral Marketing:
a. Pro: Free and organic growth.b. Con: Much harder than it looks.
2. Getting Press:
a. Pro: It is external validation of social proof.b. Con: Less effective than it used to be, hard to turn on when you need it.
3. Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
a. Pro: Immediate access to customers that are already looking for your solution.b. Con: Keyword competition can be stiff making it expensive.
4. Social Media Ads
a. Pro: It will create demand for your service when they are not aware of you.b. Con: It is not cheap and isn’t a set it and forget option.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
a. Pro: Same as search ads but no cost.b. Con: A lot of work required, some luck and time.
6. Content Marketing:
a. Pro: Branding and thought leadership which helps in SEO.b. Con: Arduous work with no early proof it will work.
7. Email Marketing:
a. Pro: Easily automated and scaled.b. Con: Unlikely to be the only channel you use to build this.
8. Targeting Blogs/Groups:
a. Pro: Same pros as press, but more highly targeted and easier to get access to.b. Con: Hard to scale
9. Business Development:
a. Pro- Can unlock more value than just finding one customer at a time.b. Con- Hard to track down partnerships and sell them on the value to have them participate fully.
10. Affiliate Programs:
a. Pro: The more scalable version of press.b. Con: Can be a pain to manage.
11. Existing Platforms (ex. Class Pass):
a. Pro: Can ride the wave of a new platform.b. Con- Your growth is restricted by what they allow.
12. Offline Events:
a. Pro: In person is the highest impression a business can make.b. Con- Hard to scale and promote.
13. Influencer Marketing:
a. Pro: Can be a very effective arbitrage of social media ads.b. Con: Harder to manage than it looks and understand the direct result.
14. Conferences/Speaking Engagements:
a. Pro: In person is the highest form of building trust.b. Con: Not a scalable approach and can require a higher skill level to pull off.
15. Retail: (Foot Traffic)
a. Pro: Capitalizes on the free in person traffic to build a demand.b. Con: Can be hard to create demand if it is not the right people.
Step 3: Optimize
Following your test of the top three channels, one should now be outperforming the others. At this point, stop testing the other two and focus all efforts on the winning channel.
Ramp up your budget and time allocation for this traction channel, shifting from seeking early traction to optimizing its performance.
At this stage, you should start seeing a direct impact on revenue from the optimized channel.
Step 4: Commit To Mastery
This is the hardest step.
It requires dedication and persistence to stay focused and avoid getting sidetracked. Over 80% of small businesses never establish a consistent acquisition channel, which is why many struggle to grow, merely survive or eventually close after years of grinding. This issue often comes from a lack of perspective and long-term commitment, with most jumping ship if results aren’t immediate.
Building a fully functional acquisition system takes 1-2 years to optimize. If you can commit to mastery, you’ll create a solid, scalable fitness business and experience lasting results.
If seeing that reality scares you or you think that isn’t true, then you will unfortunately stay in this loop of jumping from one lead generation trick to the next and never building a solid scalable business.
To build a truly great fitness business you just need one well-built acquisition system. Treating your fitness business like a real business and going through this process will lead to lasting results and a whole lot less frustration.
Justin Hanover entered the fitness industry at 19, driven by a passion for helping people and a mindset focused on success. Starting with a mobile training service, he quickly grew his business into a small studio and eventually expanded to a 6,000 sq. ft. facility with over 350 members and a team of 8. Along the way, Justin mastered leveraging his time and scaling his offerings. His success also extended to hosting a top 5% podcast. Now at Fitness Revolution, he helps gym owners build thriving businesses with the right tools and support.
