If you haven’t read it yet, bring yourself up to speed on the Publicity-Pulling Irresistible Offer Hook (it’s item #3 in yesterdays post) then come back here and read these best practices for implementing the strategy.

Best Practices

1. Determine what service you are going to offer. My suggestion is something with low fulfillment cost and high leveragability, like group training/boot camp. Obviously, most folks will want to pay as little as possible, so it doesn’t make sense to offer high-end one-on-one.

2. Essentially, people are “bidding” for your services with this offer, so your publicity should drive to a landing page where you have folks submit their contact info along with their “bid”. Now you have a lead…and a loose commitment from that person to buy.

3. You could set a “minimum bid” by stipulatating up-front that you obviously can’t provide this service for free, so only bids above the minimum will be accepted. If you do this, you’ll probably find that almost everyone bids just above the minimum. It’s safer to you, but you may not get as many takers, and the ultimate dollar figure could be lower than if you do this…

4. Or you could just leave it up to the individual to bid whatever they think is fair (be sure you give them a complete description of what they’re bidding for, and associate a value with it, so they have a sense of what it’s worth – and be sure to include language that includes the word “fair” in it – most people are fair and don’t try to game the system). I like this method better. You have greater risk, but you also have potential for greater reward. Serious people will bid very close to the real value.

5. You could “plus” this by making a contest out of it with a big prize. And you should definitely include a condition to this offer that requires everyone to complete a progress report at the end of the 30 days (or whatever duration you plan on building into this offer). The progress report would include…a testimonial.

6. If you structure this as I’ve described in item #4 above, the reality is that you could get 100 people who each bid $5, or something like that. If that happens, what do you do?

You really have to noodle this through in advance, making sure you have considered worst case scenarios. But…is it really a bad thing if 100 folks bid $5 each?

My opinion is no, it’s not. Here’s why…PUBLICITY is the goal!

I would structure this program so it’s 4-weeks long with four group training sessions out doors, in a park or something. I would set up a $10 forum online to use as a community-building resource, and a way to provide “coaching” online in a group format. Not only will this be a stimulating way for the participants to interact and support one another, it also gives you…wait for it….yes…leverage! We’re always looking for leverage in everything we do. This way you can answer questions and provide coaching to the entire group via the forum, rather than doing one-off emails.

They still get the benefit of your coaching, and you can still promote the service as 4 weeks of coaching, plus 4 group training sessions, plus whatever else you want to throw in (like a nutrition seminar on a Sunday afternoon at the park) to increase the value of the offer, and therefore demand for it.

And if you do this right, you could get a tremendous amount of publicity because you’re giving back to the community, helping people through a tough economic time, and allowing people to name their own price for a highly valuable service.

You should be able to get the media to come out and cover one of the workouts, and you’ll certainly have human interest stories about some of your participants you can use to feed the publicity fire.

You may find that the people you attract with an offer like this are not good candidates for up-selling into higher priced services on the back-end of this service. But many will probably be good candidates for lower cost services like small group or boot camp.

But that’s okay. Additional sales made to these folks should be looked at as gravy. The meat is the publicity…the media exposure.

If you’re looking to make a big-time splash in your community and garner lots of media attention fast, this just might be the ticket for you.

As Picard would say…”Make it so number one!”

Eric Ruth

P.S. DEEP-CORE live coaching and training begins Monday, March 30th. To get into this class, go here.

Here’s another personal trainer marketing post you may enjoy.