Marketing is an essential step in ensuring you are successful within the personal training advertising industry. Therefore we have put together this guide to provide you with guidance and knowledge on how best to market yourself in order to make the most of your Personal Training Qualification. This guide will cover everything you need to know by teaching you how to organise your marketing activities, marketing in local areas, building a brand along with online marketing including SEO, social media and Google ads to ensure you have a successful personal training advertising plan.
Personal Training Advertising – Marketing Strategies
Time
As a Personal Trainer, it is likely that you are tight for time when trying to get new clients through the door whilst still juggling your existing clients. Following from this time is one of the most important factors to ensure as a Personal Trainer you are getting the most out of a day as you know an hour wasted is time you could have spent running a PT session.
For this reason, it is important that you map out a schedule and stick to it, by planning your sessions around your other main goals. Personal training advertising and marketing can be a timely task when starting out, therefore make sure you invest at least 25% of your working time into marketing yourself, the results will then pay off with increased client numbers.
Brand & USP
The personal training industry has been ever-growing since 2012 with more and more people investing money in qualifying themselves for a high level of training meaning on paper many people can offer what you can! In order for you to be successful, you need to build on your brand and make the most from highlighting your unique selling point (USP).
Firstly you need to refine your core values and what is it that you can provide your clients that other personal trainers may not be able to. A good way to utilise this would be investing some time in personal training CPD courses which provide a specialist area in things such as kettlebell training, Nutrition for building muscle or advanced resistance training. This shows to a potential client that you invest in yourself and build on your personal training knowledge which is a unique selling point when advertising your own personal training services.
Some other key tips when building your brand would be to consider a recognisable logo and give out promotional discounts to start building your client base quicker. If you want more detail on how to build a personal training brand we’ve got you covered. Find 4 ways to build your brand and market yourself by reading out top tips.
Finding your audience
Finding clients can be difficult when just starting out in the Personal Training industry, this is a great opportunity to really focus on personal trainer advertising to capture the attention of your desired audience. You should take the opportunity to start doing some research from clients you might already have or even people you see around the gym floor.
Discussing what clients needs and wants are will help you identify how you can effectively target this audience. After all, if you know what their weak points, main focuses, end goals or major concerns are you can use this to leverage how you approach your personal training personal brand. Personal feedback would also be helpful from current clients for the reasoning behind why they chose to train with you and what made your personal training
An example may be that from the research you saw that 60% of your clients wanted to ‘tone up’, now with this information you could go and create a basic beginners tone up a program to offer new clients if they sign up. Within this programme, you can use social media to showcase the current results clients of yours have had to demonstrate strength in your training.
Programmes & Taster sessions
Everybody has to start somewhere, unfortunately, the clients won’t always come themselves, for this reason when you are starting to put some time aside to write some quick-fire workout programs as PDF documents. Once you have created this build awareness on your social media channels to encourage people to follow or sign up for a taster session and they can receive this free mini workout programme.
Offering your clients taster sessions or providing programmes, shows that you have confidence in what you offer whilst also giving you the opportunity to show the high-quality training you can provide a potential client. Doing this at the start of your personal training career can be difficult as everybody wants to start earning, but using taster sessions or mini workout programs as a personal training advertisement for yourself is a great way to build brand awareness.
Referral process
Just like anything else in life people often engage more in wanting to do something if they are incentivised by something. This is a great strategic way to start building on your client base and utilising the clients you already have. In the personal training industry, it is often about understanding how to market yourself and advertise your personal training brand, but a big part of this involves referral and word of mouth.
Start by creating an over to you current clients which encourages them to go and speak to their family and friends about your services and push for them to book a personal training session. One of the best ways to do this would be to offer a benefit for both sides, your current client and the referee for example a free personal training session for both!
In health and fitness, industry referrals are a major role in client generation, friends are inspired by each other so demonstrate as a personal trainer to be helping your client reach their goal and naturally their friends are going to hear about it. This can be quite a timely task to maintain at first but it should be a priority list because this is a big opportunity to build on your current clients and increase brand awareness without having to use paid advertising.
Local marketing strategy
A local marketing strategy goes hand in hand with any online marketing you have in place, it’s a great opportunity to make the most out of your local community and ensure your services are made aware to them. A key step in making this happen is ensuring you have your brand and services advertised in all community spaces where new potential clients are likely to spend their time.
In order for you to be successful in this strategy, you need to carry out research on what other personal trainers are doing in the area. Without having this knowledge, you won’t have a competitive advantage on understanding how to compete with them.
A good way to get started is registering yourself as a personal training service provider on the Google My Business page. This is a great marketing resource for personal trainers wanting to increase their online visibility in a particular area. This platform is used to bring up the best local results for the user’s search term for a particular service in the area. To ensure you get the most from your profile on Google my business you will need to populate it with as much detail you have about your service, the more detailed provider the greater audience you are likely to reach.
Another way to advertise your personal training services in the local area is to go back to print basics, although everybody does so much online advertising nowadays it’s still important to focus on print options as well. Print can be a more cost-effective way to market yourself, spend some time putting together posters and leaflets that offer an incentivised promotion to sign up today. If you can get print advertising out on your services around all key locations in your local community your name is going to be the first thing they see!
Budgeting: how much to invest into personal training advertising?
Marketing yourself and your personal training brand through advertising does involve cost when it comes to wanting to put yourself out there. Marketing is a costly thing in all business and sometimes people invest so much into this but don’t always reap the benefits in profits.
It is difficult to set a budget for each of our readers however you should consider the below factors to work out how much you are willing to spend on personal training advertising.
- What location are you training in?
- Who is your competition?
- Do you offer specialist training?
- Where are you in your personal training career?
- Are you online based?
- How much are you wanting to invest in yourself?
Spend some time answering the above questions and this should highlight the basis for you to start figuring out how much you can afford to invest into marketing and the strategies you want to put in place to do this.
Create blog content using your knowledge
Whilst you can expect to pay for most marketing techniques, you can benefit from organic SEO marketing through content creation and keyword targeting, which involves fewer to very little cost. You should use your knowledge to start creating insightful and valuable content on personal training, within this content you should focus on getting your knowledge across whilst targeting key terms which could be converted into a client.
An AI-powered blog writer can be a valuable asset in this process, helping you craft content that targets specific keywords effectively.
For example, you could write blog content on ‘How to tone up’ this keyword is has a search volume of 480 a month, this is potential traffic that could be driven to your content as people who are looking for ways to tone up.
You should focus on what you can offer clients then develop content around that based on your knowledge, doing this provides potential clients with an understanding of what you know whilst also being able to answer their search intent.
Social media advertising
It is important that you market yourself in a way where potential clients will understand your USP and the benefits of training with you. The most cost-effective and easy way to do this is on social media platforms and Facebook groups, raise awareness of your online business and the interest will naturally increase.
A good online advertising strategy bases everything on the benefits of the service or product they have to offer and what it can do for the person. Consider how it will enhance life or solve the problems of the people you are prospecting.
Leveraging the expertise of social media marketing companies in the UK can significantly contribute to achieving your goals.
Take a look at some online fitness professionals on Instagram and see what their grids look like. You will find the style is less direct marketing and more subtle. They sell a story and build on client success stories. Perhaps 9-19 posts down you’ll find what they’re selling. In fact, this is one way to stand out from your competitors. Don’t advertise – let your clients do it for you.
Use your social media platforms to build on a fitness community based on your clients, this includes success stories, new client introductions and really try to make this personable to you. Success stories are a quick win in prooving the results of your training and in turn advertising the success of your services as a personal trainer.
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Google ads
Google Ads is a great way to get your Personal Training business in front of people that are searching for your services. Using the Google ads platform you can select ‘keywords’ that you want to show up for when they are searched on Google and create ads that match these keywords to drive traffic to your website.
Using Google Ads targeting you can even show ads in the exact location where you want to gain clients. With a well set up and maintained campaign, you will be able to show ads for keywords such as ‘Personal trainers near me’ to someone that is searching in your service area.
To get started with Google ads all you need is an account, a website and a defined daily budget. Simply, decide what keywords you want to target, write your ad copy and tailor a page on your website to send the traffic to. The budget you set will depend on how much traffic you want to gain but you are able to adjust budgets whenever you want after you launch your campaign.
Google Ads is a great way to get your business online and it usually produces quick results. It is easily measurable and will allow you to build an online presence quickly in a very competitive market.
Final Thoughts
Overall figuring out the best way to approach marketing your personal training brand can seem daunting at first. However, if you follow this guide we have made sure to cover all the bases for you to get started in the personal training advertising industry. Alternatively, you can choose to study a continuous professional development course on Building Your Fitness Business. Within this course, you will learn invaluable skills in marketing and building a brand alongside selling your services and planning your fitness business plan.