7 Core Steps to Market Your Personal Training Services and Attract More Clients
As a personal trainer, your primary goal to help your clients achieve their fitness goals. Except you’ve run into one problem: You’re having a hard time promoting your business and attracting new members.
Don’t stress.
All you have to do to overcome this obstacle is to spend time focusing on the right marketing techniques that work specifically for fitness services like yours.
In this ultimate personal trainer marketing guide, you will discover exactly what marketing techniques you need to implement to attract and retain new clients. You will also learn how specialized personal trainer software can help you manage your business and schedule new and existing members with ease.
First up, let’s talk about your personal brand.
1. Create a personal brand
Whether you are the sole trainer at your studio or you operate an entire gym of trainers, your brand image is hugely important if you want to positively position yourself at the forefront of your clients’ minds.
Here’s why.
Your brand image is your client’s perspective of your business based on how you present yourself to them and how they interact with your services. This little marketing technique can really make or break your business, so it’s important to set yourself up for success in the very beginning.
How To Set Up Your Personal Brand
When it comes to creating your personal fitness brand, ask yourself these questions:
What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), i.e. what makes your fitness business different from the rest?
Why should a client choose your personal training services over your competitors?
How can you set yourself apart from all of the other personal trainers in the industry?
Do you have any core values that will positively serve your clients?
Armed with the answers to these questions, you can develop a strong mission statement that puts your customers first and helps position you the best way in their minds.
Speaking of putting the customer first…
Define Your Target Audience
While you are creating your personal brand, this is also a great time to define your target audience, or in other words, your ideal clientele.
For starters, you will want to ask yourself, “Who is an ideal candidate for my fitness services, and how can I attract them to my business?”
Once you have the answer to this question, you should conduct research on the behavior and demographics of your target audience. This is an essential step for any successful personal trainer marketing strategy because it helps you better understand the ins and outs of the people that would be most interested in your business model.
Plus, this can save you a lot of time and money because you can focus your energy on targeting only the RIGHT leads instead of casting a wide net in hopes of capturing a single client.
2. Build a strong online presence
Now that you have a defined personal brand, it’s time to talk about your digital presence. Do you have a website and/or active social media pages? If not, you should definitely consider uploading your business online.
In today’s digital world, an online presence is absolutely essential to the prosperity of your business because it allows the clients to come to YOU. That sounds like the dream, right?
More likely than not, your customers will try to look you up online before they schedule a session or buy into a membership. Therefore, if you have an established online presence, not only can you put your brand in front of clients with just a click of a button, but you can also potentially draw leads away from your competitors.
How To Level Up Your Online Presence
Whether your business is already online or not, here are some tips that you should follow to build up your digital presence.
First, consider optimizing your website for search engines like Google or Bing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is increasingly more important as you migrate your business online.
If you want to draw in your ideal clients, you need to be able to effectively target them through the use of keywords, blog posts, event listings, and enticing call-to-actions (CTAs). You can also optimize your website by making it both user-friendly and mobile-responsive.
Next, create a Google Business profile that helps your brand stand out during Google searches. When you have a profile, clients can simply type in your business’s name in Google, and your business profile will pop up with your location, hours, reviews, photos, offers, and more.
Finally, an online presence is never complete without social media pages, which leads us to our next must-have personal trainer marketing technique.
3. Inspire clients through social media
Are you on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.? Do you have influencers who help promote your mission? Have you ever uploaded fitness videos, tutorials, or simple guides to your story?
When it comes to the fitness world, a strong social media presence is almost always necessary!
Why Social Media Is an Important Marketing Tool
Social media creates a community for you and your clients. It helps you interact with your members, even when they are not in your gym or studio.
Plus, it gives you the opportunity to promote your training method, events, real-life client experiences, promotions (like giveaways and discounts on training sessions), and end results that can inspire new and existing clients to want to hop into their car and make their way to your gym ASAP.
For these reasons, you should consider pouring some heartfelt time and effort into your social media pages.
Pro-Tip: Top social media platforms for fitness instructors and personal trainers include YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook because they allow you to highlight videos and images of your workouts, results, and overall customer satisfaction.
4. Send personalized email marketing campaigns
Over the decades, email marketing has become a huge revenue generator for many businesses, including personal trainers. The secret to successful email marketing lies in the way you construct your email.
You have to make sure every email you send fits your personal brand and meets the specific needs of your target market. Be sure to include enticing subject lines, easy-to-read messaging, and exciting graphics that promote your brand in your emails. This will gain the interest of clients and improve your overall ROI.
Furthermore, it might be a good idea to onboard a marketing platform that simplifies the emailing process, so that you can compose, send, and automate emails to your entire email list.
Pro-Tip: Along with emails, consider adding SMS marketing, or text message marketing, to your toolbox. SMS campaigns are a great way to send promos, scheduling notifications, and other transactional messages straight to the client’s phone.
5. Collect referrals and reviews from clients
This next personal trainer marketing tip is extremely important.
Since you are part of the service industry, you need to receive and capitalize on reviews. Not only will positive reviews boost your brand credibility, but they will also increase your SEO score online and put your business profile in front of more people.
Reviews and referrals can literally transform your business and attract many new members to your gym.
How To Get More Reviews
If you are having a hard time gaining reviews online, then follow this trick:
Offer a type of promo, discount, or giveaway for anyone who leaves a review on your Google Business profile, website, or social media account(s). This is a great way to rack up your review count and boost your brand image at the same time.
And of course, word-of-mouth is still the gold standard of marketing tactics. Use a gym management software to track referrals and offer incentives to those clients who refer a friend to your business.
6. Use testimonials to promote your brand
Along with reviews, testimonials are another marketing must-have for the fitness industry. Why? Because potential clients want to see if your business model actually works.
Since you are not selling a tangible product that a customer can pick up, hold, and feel, you need to show your target audience that your service will help them reach their fitness goals. The best way to do this is to collect testimonials from existing clients.
You can do this in two ways:
Testimonial Videos: Film an interview with your client that features their fitness journey. You can even film them working out with you to demonstrate what a typical session with a client looks like.
Case Studies: Interview a client and write a case study that highlights their experience, using quotes and photos to display their transformation over time as they have committed to your process.
Whichever method you choose, you will need to reach out to your current clients that have had a transformational experience with your regimen and ask if you can interview them. Before you do so, create a list of questions to ask that will help them easily tell their story.
Pro-Tip: Make sure you receive written consent that allows you to publish their testimonials! This will keep you safe from any legal issues and build trust with your clients.
7. Run your business with personal trainer software
Last but not least, the final tool to add to your personal trainer marketing toolbox is a business management software system that is especially suited for personal trainers like you.
How can personal trainer software help you? Simply put, the right management system will not only save you a ton of time through automated processes, but it will also help you:
Schedule classes and appointments
Build compelling marketing campaigns
Keep extensive client records
Track employee timecards and records
Monitor real-time business reports
Create and track rewards programs
Accept a variety of payment methods
Grow your business
And the best part? You can manage everything all in one place.
Use Inspire by STX® To Level Up Your Business Management
At STX Software, we offer a business management platform that allows you to effortlessly manage, market, and scale your personal trainer services. It’s a fitness software that was built with you in mind.
From the moment you decide to migrate your business to our platform, you will have the ability to manage your entire company through your own, personalized dashboard. Scheduling clients, promoting fitness events, and offering new memberships have never been easier!
Book a free demo to see how Inspire by STX® can transform your fitness business and make big gains.