5 Piggyback Ride Marketing Tactics That You’re Gonna Love
Imagine for a moment that pilates marketing is a game.
It’s fun! It’s invigorating! It’s exciting!
That’s the feeling you need when putting on your ‘pilates marketing hat’.
Each time you do a bit of marketing, you are one step closer to attracting a student to your pilates classes, workshops and retreats. And that’s one more life you can make a difference to. However, without the vital step of marketing, that person won’t ever know about you and he or she will miss out on a possible life-changing experience.
Overview
The main idea of the Piggyback Ride Pilates Marketing Tactic is to partner with businesses that have customers that are ideal prospects for your pilates classes, workshops or retreats. You’ll be able to promote your pilates business to thousands of prospects without forking out a single penny of your hard-earned money.
Impossible?
Nope!
Not when you use the ‘piggyback pilates marketing tactic‘.
Here Are 5 Piggyback Marketing Tactics To Get You Started…
Piggyback Pilates Marketing Tactic 1
Local Organic Shop
Let’s say you’re hosting a pilates retreat in the UK. You know your prospects shop at the local organic shop once a week. So you call up the manager and offer to handout their flyers in your pilates classes if they’ll put your flyers by their cash registers.
Piggyback Pilates Marketing Tactic 2
Local Hotel
Let’s say your hosting a luxury pilates retreat. You could team up with a local hotel that has a spa and offer to host your pilates retreat with them if they help “promote it”. You could ask them to send an email to their customers. You could ask them to hand out your pilates brochures or A5 pilates flyers to customers who visit the spa. Ask them to put up your flyers in the spa.
Piggyback Pilates Marketing Tactic 3
Football Clubs
Let’s say you have organised a pilates retreat for football players and called it: Bend it like Beckham Pilates Retreat (you’ll get a lot of free PR in the press with a name like that). All you’d need to do is contact football clubs to ask if you could host your ‘Bend it like Beckham Pilates Retreat’ at their club. Within no time you’ll come across a football club that thinks your retreat sounds perfect for their players. You won’t have to do any marketing at all because the paying students will be the football players at the club.
Piggyback Pilates Marketing Tactic 4
Accountant
Let’s say you’ve organised a pilates retreat that focuses on reducing stress. You could team up with an accountant and ask them to include your ‘pilates retreat brochure or flyer’ when they send their billing statements. And maybe you could give their customers a special 5% discount?
Piggyback Pilates Marketing Tactic 5
Competition
You could partner up with a bunch of local businesses (hair dressers, organic cafes, accountants, etc) to offer their customers a chance to enter a competition to win a spot at your pilates class.
The 6 steps on how to come up with piggyback marketing tactics by yourself…
Step #1
Identify A Business
Focus your energies on finding piggyback partners who have customers that would be interested in your pilates class (or workshop or retreat). Think of one local business that you could call right now.
Step #2
Brainstorm Promotional Ideas
If you read the examples above, you’ll probably already have a few ideas (e.g. pilates retreat brochure included in billing statements for a large company you used to work for).
Step #3
Send A FAB Email
It’s time to approach the business. Sit down and craft an email that is Friendly, Appealing and Brilliant.
Here’s the FAB formula:
F for Friendly
Make sure your email isn’t too corporate and stiff. Remember, you are a pilates teacher with blood coursing through your veins. So, be real. Add a bit of humour.
A for Appealing
Make sure your email is appealing to the business. What’s in it for the business? Why should the business be your piggyback partner?
B for Brilliant
Make sure your email is radiant by making it ‘shine above’ the other boring, dark and depressing emails the business owner/manager gets on a daily basis. A simple way of doing this is by offering the owner/manager something for free. For example, you could invite them to one of your pilates classes for free. You could offer them a free one to one session. It doesn’t matter if they don’t accept the offer. They’ll be delighted that your email came bearing something of value.
Step #4
Set Up A Meeting
When you meet the business owner be fully aware that you’re offering them something of value. Don’t go in with a begging bowl. Instead go into the meeting with head held high and secure in the knowledge that you can help the business with your piggyback marketing idea.
Step #5
The Meeting
Before you go into the meeting, make sure you have thought through what you are asking them to do. If you’re dealing with a large business, I recommend putting together a simple one page proposal that details the idea. Make sure you focus on what they can expect to get out of it. Don’t harp on about how wonderful you are. Focus on what you can do for them!
Step 6
Repeat Steps 1 to 5
It this marketing tactic works, do it again with another business…and again with another business…and again with another business…and again with another business.
George Watts
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