Episode 313: What to know if you are hiring a digital marketing agency

Thinking about hiring a marketing agency for your boutique fitness or wellness business? In this episode, Christa Gurka shares exactly what you need to know before you spend a single dollar on paid ads.

Christa breaks down the essential marketing metrics and strategies every studio owner should understand — from CPC, CPA, and CAC to lifetime value (LTV) and conversion rates — so you can make informed decisions and avoid wasting money.

Whether you run a Pilates studio, yoga studio, or private-pay PT clinic, this episode will help you become confident in your marketing conversations, know what red flags to watch for, and understand how to measure real results from your ad spend.

👉 Listen in to learn:

• What marketing agencies can and can’t fix for your business
• The biggest red flags when hiring an agency
• The difference between CPC, CPA, CAC, and LTV (and why they matter)
• How to calculate your ideal marketing budget based on annual revenue
• How to know when you’re ready to run paid ads
• Why strong backend systems and offers matter more than ad creative
• How to track conversions and optimize your ad funnel
• The importance of owning your data and understanding key metrics

If you’ve ever felt confused about marketing terms or unsure if your ads are actually working, this episode will give you the clarity and confidence you need to take control of your marketing strategy.

🔗 Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Free Marketing Metrics Cheat Sheet: www.christagurka.com/marketingmetrics
  
  Get Christa’s simple guide to understanding marketing terms, calculating key numbers, and evaluating your ad performance.
• Join the Fit Biz Community: Learn the business, leadership, and financial skills that help boutique fitness owners scale profitably — for just $99/month.
• Visit www.christagurka.com
  for upcoming programs launching in 2026 designed to help you build smarter, more profitable businesses.

💡 Key Takeaway:

A marketing agency can amplify what’s already working — but it can’t fix unclear messaging, broken systems, or a weak offer. When you understand your own data and metrics, you stay in control of your ROI and your growth.

🔍 SEO Keywords:

marketing agency for fitness studios, boutique fitness marketing, how to hire a marketing agency, marketing metrics for Pilates studios, paid ads for wellness businesses, CAC and LTV explained, Christa Gurka podcast, Fit Biz Strategies, Female emPOWERED podcast

Transcript

Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies: 0:51

Hey there everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Female Empowered Podcast, and I am your host Christa Gurka. And we have a pretty, I think it's a pretty cool episode today because we are gonna be talking about what to know if you are going to hire a marketing agency. And one of the reasons we're gonna talk about this is because we have been doing a ton of. Paid ads. I've been doing paid ad strategy for, the Fit Biz Christa Gurka brand. You might have seen some of my ads. If you have, that means they're working. Woohoo. I've had a lot of people hire agencies. I myself hired an agency and probably spent$30,000. And I didn't know enough to recognize they weren't doing a great job. what I wanna talk about today is if you are gonna hire an agency or a person or somebody to run your paid ads or do some sort of marketing, here are the must, must haves. must. You must know these things in order to make sure that your agency is doing. Job and doing the right job and the right questions to ask. it's really, really, really important that you have all of these things in place before you hire. I advise learning how to do ads and strategy, and then that way you can outsource it. I have a great person that I work with. Who does the backend, I set the strategy with her and then she's the one that actually goes in and sets it up'cause I don't have time to be in there and nor do I wanna do it. I know what to look for, I know the metrics I'm, I want, I know what's working, what's not working. And the most important thing to note is that a marketing agency cannot fix what you don't understand. And if you don't understand, you won't be able to have clear conversations with them about what's working and what's not working. if you don't know who your ideal customer is or what makes them buy a marketing agency is gonna cost you a ton of money to figure that out. And they don't know the answers necessarily either. before you hire anyone, make sure that you understand your own business. What is your brand voice? Who is your ideal buyer? Who is they? What, how do they think? How do they act? How do they feel? What is your average, what is a lifetime value of a customer? Which will tell you how much you, you can afford to spend on acquiring a new customer. agency's need direction. You can't clearly explain your target audience and goals. If. You won't get results. if you can't clearly explain your target audience, your goals, your, and I'm gonna go through all of these things today, you won't get the results that you expect. Marketing amplifies what's already working. if you don't have great organic growth, marketing paid ads isn't necessarily gonna help that. It's got a little bit of water. if you don't have good systems to. Have an onboarding or a follow up email or all that stuff to people that do opt in for an ad or do, do, do, do, excuse me. Hopefully we can edit out these coughs. if, what was I saying? I got distracted with? Do, do. if you don't have systems on how to nurture these people, how to follow up with them, how to retarget them, then you won't get the same results in your ads. If you don't have, space, if you don't have the utilization, if you don't have your new specials down, if you don't have all of the rest of that stuff, then once again, you will not get the right. Metrics. Don't hire an agency or someone to do your ads until you have an offer that works, that sells and sells consistently to an organic market. And what you need is just more eyes on it. what are the different types of marketing agencies out there? there are agencies that specialize just on paid traffic. Google ads, meta ads. there's YouTube ads, there's Pinterest ads chat. GBT ads are gonna come out soon. there's paid ad agencies, there's content or social media agencies that focus on organic awareness, engagement and things that. Then there are strategy. Agencies that focus on funnels and messaging and campaign building. Ideally, you have someone that's doing everything together so that your brand, your, ads, social website, all is cohesive and works well together. and on average. When you're growing well, first of all, when you're growing, when you're a growing business and you want more. People coming in your door and you're, you're willing to pay money to get more people in your profit may be a little lower than 15%. maybe your profit is 8, 7, 8, 10%, 12%, and you're spending an average of 10 to 20%. On marketing. that means if you're generating$500,000 a year, you should be spending$50,000 on marketing. Now that doesn't mean$50,000 on paid ads. That's your website, maybe SEOO, social. that you probably should be spending a solid.$20,000 on, on some sort of advertising, local ads, community building stuff, paid ads. you need, if you're gonna be spending your money in a healthy way, you want to be having these types of metrics down so that you can understand and speak appropriately to the agencies you hire. here are some things that you want to know. Red flags, big red flags big no-nos are guaranteed results overnight. Guaranteed results do not happen overnight. it takes a little while. It takes testing, it takes being this headline work better than this headline, I'm not, I'm not loving the analytics on that. Can we go back to the drawing board? Or is it the ad that's not working, or is it the landing page that's not working? there are things that you must understand about your offer, about your pricing, about your capacity before you start running paid ads. we're gonna talk a little bit about that right now. let's talk about some marketing language that you should understand so you can have. Appropriate conversations with a marketing agency. C-P-C-C-P-C. What that stands for is cost per click. This is how much you're paying every time someone clicks on your ad. low CPC or low cost per clicks might sound good, but sometimes that's not necessarily great because now you're getting cheap clicks, low quality leads, but they're not actually your client. a lot of times when marketing agencies are oh, I can get you 50 cent cost per click, Or I can get you a dollar cost per click, but it comes from someone in. Barbados, that's not valuable, not all clicks are created equal. You could be willing to pay$5 a click for someone that is two miles from your studio or your clinic. it's really important to know where are these clicks coming from? And that's what's also important is how these people are setting up the ads. they are getting people, especially for brick and mortar locations within a local search area. that's cost per click. Some people call it like Google ads are usually what, what they call PPC, pay per click. you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Here's another one. CPA cost per acquisition. This is what it actually costs you to acquire a lead or sale. acquiring a lead is different than acquiring a sale, Acquiring a lead, if you consider that someone clicked on your ad, a lead, that's one thing. If you consider someone who submitted a lead for, they clicked on your ad, maybe that's a click, and then they're considered a lead. If they submit a lead form and then they're. Considered a conversion once they become a client. there's a, a kind of a pipeline here. cost per acquisition, CPA is different than cost per click.'cause acquiring a lead is different than someone clicking on. the more meaningful. The more qualified the lead is, the higher, it's the higher you should be willing to go for cost per acquisition. if you spent$500 on an ad and you got 10 people to fill out a lead form each, that cost per acquisition was$50 per acquisition. But what if all of those. Discovery calls did not turn into a conversion. And now then, the next level in the tier or the funnel is what they call cac, customer acquisition cost. This is the cost associated with acquiring a paying client. here's the way the funnel works. Someone clicks on your ad, that's cost per click. Cost per acquisition means they scheduled a discovery call or they filled out a lead form or a, I wanna schedule some kind of this. That's cost per acquisition. That usually costs more. And then customer acquisition cost CAC is what it actually costs for them to become a client. say you have 500 people that click on your ad. 50 of them. 10% of them fill out leads, and then five of them become clients. that's really a 1% conversion rate from the, from the clicks. More people are gonna click on it than actually convert. if you spend$500 on ads and one person converted to a paying client, it cost you$500. Maybe that's good. Maybe that's not what you want to know then of whether that's good or not is the lifetime value of your customer. LTV, lifetime value. if you know that the average client stays at your studio for nine months, and they pay$200 a month, that's$1,800. And if your customer acquisition cost your CAC is$500, then I would be willing to make that investment all day.$500 to get$1,800. I'd be willing to do that. Would you be willing to do that? But if your lifetime value of a customer is$600, I wouldn't be willing to spend 500 for 600. Because the work and everything involved, this is why it's really important to know all of these values when you start working with an agency so that you can give them direction and you can say to them, my customer acquisition cost is now at a thousand dollars and the lifetime value of my customer is 500. We are underwater. You are losing. You are not doing what you were paid to do. now. Conversions. The way that you measure conversions, what you tell Google or meta what you want to measure as a conversion. sometimes it's a page load. for example, for me, I currently have an ad running that's a freebie, a lead magnet, a free download that talks all about. What are healthy percentages to spend in your business, brick and your boutique fitness business? we talk about what's a healthy marketing spend, what's a healthy advertising spend, what's a healthy spend for rent? And the way that I know that I have a conversion is if these people put their name and email in. And they land on a thank you page. I know that they downloaded the cheat sheet because I don't want them to click on the ad because they might click on the ad and never enter their email. And the whole idea is that I want their email I can start nurturing them on my email list. that's how, that's a conversion. You can have a conversion that's a sale. They purchased, they added something to their cart. You can have a conversion that they registered for a webinar or a workshop. You could have a conversion in, in Google, you can have a conversion that someone called your clinic or studio. There's lots of different conversion metrics that you can use, and that's how you measure the success of an ad. A paid ad. It's not. Leads, it's not clicks. when people are I can get you a thousand clicks a day. Clicks are easy to get, but not all clicks are created equal. What you ultimately want is you want people converting into paid customers. When you're paying for advertising, you want those people, you wanna leverage it they're converting into paid customers. you could have. An AD strategy, that's getting people to get your email list and then eventually you're gonna convert them from no and trust, there's a window, all this stuff. it is important that you have a strategy. for me, for my strategy in the online business, I'm I want people on my email list because then I can promote my podcast. This, which gives free tips. People get to know, like, and trust me, and they'll eventually want feel confident in trying to work with me as a business mentor. When I was in Pilates in the Grove, one of the strategies we used was we used Google Ads as our local search ads. people searching for Best Pilates near me, and then we would retarget them on Facebook and Instagram, they would see our ad in on Google and they were searching, but maybe they got distracted. Maybe they did schedule their appointment or not. And then what they did afterwards was see us all over on Meta and Instagram, and they're I have to keep remembering to go to Pilates in the Grove. And because we knew what the lifetime value of our customer was, we were also, we also really knew how much we could pay for a click. We knew that full funnel, How much we were willing to pay for a customer acquisition cost, and we were really able to hone into, optimize the outcome of our ad spend. What are, what's really important when you do look into hiring an agency is that you have to learn the language that they speak so that you don't get bamboozled with them telling you, I can get you a thousand leads a day. Getting free leads is not that difficult. Getting people to pay to come is what's difficult. some people are you have to use a lead magnet. I can get you a hundred. But now you're spending time either on discovery calls or doing free evals for people that are not gonna convert. The other thing I see a lot, Google ads, What's really important in Google Ads is the intent of the. Browser, You want people that are gonna buy, not people that are browsing. when people are doing ads and they're using what we would call, Broad match that is not really qualified lead. it's really important that the search terms match your keywords, and if you don't understand that and you don't know how to optimize it or you don't know how to at least ask the right questions to your agency, they may take advantage of you and you don't know enough to push back. I'm not saying all agencies do this. There's plenty of great agencies out there, but you have to know enough to say, I don't like these metrics. I don't like the way that they're optimized and we have to pivot. It's the same way we as physical therapists might tell a patient I'm not really loving, what I'm seeing on the MRI ask your doctor this because I want some more clarity if you. And power yourself with enough knowledge that you can be dangerous. you can have an apples to apples conversation. Ask for clarity. Ask, what does this metric mean? How does this help my bottom line? I have and, and I, and for sure, you need to let things run. You need to let things work. You need to test different things, you have to be willing to spend some money. But if you're at the point where you've spent. A thousand, 1500,$2,000 and you have not got one single conversion, something is off. Then you have to be very on the backend. What's important is that you have your offer tight and honed in. You have your sales process tight and honed in.'cause what good is marketing and paying for leads that are coming in and getting a shitty service? Nothing. Nothing is worth that. what is your client onboarding process? How many reminder emails are they getting? How many follow up emails are they getting? What kind of. Experience are they getting, when they come into your business, what kind of sales process do you have that when they come in for the evaluation, you already have a pipeline for them to schedule the rest of their plan of care? Or when they come in and they're in their intro pack, what kind of process do you have to get them to convert to that next pack? This is why it's important not to throw money at ads, but to have. The entire strategy built out and honed in well. you can figure out where if something isn't working, you can figure out where the kink in the chain is. another thing. Hopefully you are not running any paid ad without your pixel embedded on your website. if you're running meta ads, you need to have your Facebook pixel, your megapixel up on your website. If you're running Google Ads, you have to have your Google tag up on your website and all of the, what those things are, they're a piece of code that lives on your website that tells Google or Meta this person landed on the site. now that's how they track. Did this person click on your ad and now did they get to the thank you page? Did they make a sale? That's also how you gather data so that you can retarget these people, people that have landed on your website, people have, that have opted in for the freebie. How can you retarget them with additional ads and promotions? And it's like a reminder of, Hey, we have something you were looking for. We're here for you when you're ready to make that decision. here's another one that is really important to kind of push back on is impressions. there is a metric that are impressions, which is basically how many people are shown the ad, 20,000 impressions. That seems super exciting. but it means nothing if we can't eventually tie those impressions to booked and paying clients. And also recognize that for cold audience, which is people we're running ads to, People that don't know us'cause we're trying to get new leads. Cold audience, an average conversion rate is one to 3%, maybe 5% is high. if it. Costs you$500, Which would be, five people is one conversion, Five people is 1%, if it costs you$500 to get five people to pay, then if you spend a thousand dollars, it'll get you 10 people, If you spend$2,000, it'll get you 20 people. that's how, you know, I can throw more money at this.'cause my funnel, my process is working. If it costs you a thousand dollars and you're only getting one person something is, is wrong? Is it the ad? Is it the keywords you're using? Is it the creative that's not working or is it something on your landing page or the backend system of they came and they got a shitty service? it's really important that you arm yourself with understanding the language. Owning your own data, being able to be dangerous enough that you can go in and look at things, having your backend processes, your mark, your your offer, your sales process, your retention process, your product itself really honed in. it's really important that you have all of this information. You don't have to be a pro at it. But you should know it so that you can track if the agencies are leveraging people into customers. oftentimes I'll look at thereports that marketing agencies and digital marketing ads agencies are sending my clients and I'm they said you got a bunch of impressions. But impressions doesn't mean anything. You're not tracking the right conversions. You're not even tracking conversions. that is no bueno. Google ads. Meta ads is something we've been talking about a lot, and chat GPT ads are coming out probably within the next year, which is going to open. I believe it's going to open the market a little more because if people start leaving Meta and Google to go to chat BT and run ads over there and then take their money, Google and Meta are gonna be we need some of, we can't lose all this money. What are we gonna do to make it better? it's possible, it's agood thing to come and learn some of this stuff so you can be at the forefront of when this ads race maybe takes over. If you're interested. In being in a program that teaches this kind of stuff, I would invite you to come visit my website. I have some exciting offers that I'm rolling out in 2026. at the time of this recording or at this, when this airs, there will either be a brand new Krista GKE website, which I'm excited about, or it will be almost ready to be launched. stick around and then visit. Krista gca.com. There'll be all sorts of new, I have two new programs that I'm introducing, both of which have this kind of ads training in them that I'm excited to. I'm not gonna be running ads for people, but I'm gonna be helping them either work with agencies, learn how to do it themselves, and then also be able to look and analyze their metrics for them and make sure that they're getting the ROI that they deserve. The other thing is I created because I want to be of help to everybody, as many people as possible. I don't believe in hoarding information at Behooves. No one. I did create a simple. Marketing metrics cheat sheet to help you break down all of these terms, what they mean, how to calculate them, and what good numbers actually look like for boutique fitness and wellness businesses. And you can grab it for free at www.kristagca.com/marketing metrics. Okay, Krista gke.com/marketing metrics. If you're on my email list, you already got the download in in today's email, but if you're not on my email list, go grab it. Krista gke.com/marketing metrics, and it's a little cheat sheet that basically gives you the rundown of everything we talked about today. What I want you to come away with is. I want you to come away with not being overwhelmed about the things that we discussed today, and not intimidated by marketing jargon, but knowing that knowledge is power. Understanding these basics gives you control over your marketing and the money you're spending with an agency. Whether you run your ad yourself or hire help, I don't want you to think that agencies are evil, they're not. There are great, great, great ones, great people out there, but you should come to the table as informed as possible because no one, no one will care about your ROI more than you do. Or maybe more than I do, but pro probably more than you do. I hope you got a little value out of this. Remember, go grab the cheat sheet christagurks.com/marketingmetrics, and if you want more tips and tricks, and you wanna get smarter with your marketing without wasting money, join us inside the Fit Biz Community. It's only$99 a month.$99 a month. Or check out one of my new offers that's dropping in 2026. And until next time, my friends, bye for now, everyone.