Personal training has been a mainstay of the fitness industry for some time. Personal training is the second-largest source of revenue for most health clubs today, and in some cases, it’s their primary source of revenue. Marketing your personal training business is vitally important to the growth and success of your business. It is easier to grow revenue by increasing services to current members rather than spending money on bringing in new members. IHRSA’s Profiles of Success states that leading club operators generate a median of 10% of total revenues from personal training. Incremental membership growth over the past several years has motivated club operators to seek new revenue sources and, consequently, the emphasis on monetizing the member experience through individual and small group fitness training has grown. This leads to great opportunities for those in the Personal Training Business and people interested in fitness in general.
New competitors who focus almost exclusively on small group or one on one personal training have also emerged to offer more personalized fitness training experiences and services. Alloy Personal Training is one example of this type of business model which has been licensed around the world and is now offering a personal training franchise. A franchise offering like Alloy’s is based on many years of experience and systems which help professionals open and operate successful fitness businesses. A vital aspect of the franchise and business systems is marketing your personal training business. .
Operators in the fitness industry need to take the right steps marketing your personal training business and services in order to set themselves apart from the rest.
4 Keys to Marketing Your Personal Training Business
1. Marketing your Personal Training on Social Media
Social media has become the foundation of any brand’s image and voice. This applies to any fitness brand, whether large or small. It is essential to recognize the value and opportunities social media can offer you as a functioning personal training business.
The first thing to avoid is solely focusing on one social media platform. Most people make this mistake because they get familiar and competent at operating one specific social media platform. This approach isn’t in your best interest. It is best to set yourself up on all platforms to reach every aspect of your market. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, and Youtube, are reaching different demographics of your target market and may all be viable channels to be engaged on.
When creating your profiles, be sure to complete all available information. For example, Facebook offers a lot of room for data input about your business such as the “about” section, mission, phone number, address, hours, your story, category, company overview and much more. Completing as much of the information as you can. Doing this helps SEO on google when someone may be searching for you, your brand, or your type of services specifically.
Make sure to add a link in your bios and other given spaces on your profile where the platform allows. For example, you can use resources like LinkTree in your Instagram bio, being that Instagram only allows for a certain number of characters. Using resources such as LinkTree will give you the opportunity to link more than one asset to your bio. Assets you may want to consider adding are your website, any written content you may offer, your schedule, video content, or links to other social platforms you are utilizing.
During the set up of your social platforms, be sure to create business profiles on the platforms that offer this option like Facebook and Instagram. Many don’t realize that Instagram isn’t just an excellent platform for visual content, but it has also become a unique platform for businesses. Realizing this, Instagram launched its business profile option that offers additional tools. These tools include detailed profile analytics, which demes helpful when creating and planning content. Analytics help you get to know your audience on a more intimate level, showing you where they are from along with other demographic information. You can also utilize your business profile and the data insights it provides to take advantage of your audience engagement. You can do this by checking post insights to analyze which content is working best for your audience. You can also use this tool to line up your post schedule with daily and hourly activity patterns of your visitors. Also, you will want to connect your profiles to one another to enable your followers on different platforms the ability to find and follow you.
2. Create Great Content for Marketing Your Personal Training Business
The number one rule in content planning and creation is to provide value to your followers. There is a misconception that you have to post every day to get high engagement. That simply isn’t so. If you provide your followers and community with high quality and valuable content, you will build an authentic following.
Offer free tips and information that your followers can find useful or share other articles that are relevant to your audience. Posting before and after photos may be a little cliche, but they do the job when providing evidence that your personal training programs work for your clients. Before and after photos as well as testimonials in the form of video or text are incredibly useful when showing potential clients the benefits your personal training services can provide. Reviews and testimonials are social media’s form of “word of mouth” marketing.
Post-high-quality photos and include some type of consistency in your feed. Invest time into checking out apps that will help with short video form and image editings like PicTapGo, Lightroom, and Video Crop. These tools will help make your profile easy to navigate and create a professional look. Also, check out resources list Sprout Social that will allow you to schedule content out in advance. Tools like Sprout help save time and offer functions that let you respond to all engagements on all of your platforms in one place. Best practice for most social platforms is to post at least three times a week. When scheduling, set a cadence and reschedule so that if your audience doesn’t catch a piece of content the first time you post it – they find it the next time. For example, schedule a particular video once every other month for four months. Using this method also gives new followers to acquire a chance to see this content fresh in their feed.
3. Use Paid Ads To Market Your Personal Training Business
Boosts and ads have come a long way. Facebook now offers templates that allow you to plug in your image and text to create animated boost and ads. Facebook business manager will enable you to set up and manage your ads, breaking down your target market by age, region, interest, and much more. In business manager, you can also create “lookalike” audiences to attract people who could benefit from your services that might not yet know about your personal training fitness business.
Ads will help to raise brand awareness, drive likes to your social page, collect potential client’s information, drive people to your website, and/or have people engage in a post. Facebook has worked to make it easier to help choose an objective for your ad spend.
- Brand awareness with likes and does just what the title states “raise your brand’s awareness.”
- Engagement ads are useful if you want to boost a particular post or event that has already been created on your social page.
When you are looking to bring people to your website to obtain information about your services, a Website Clicks Ad would be used. This option gives you the function to embed a URL in the ad, so when someone clicks on the ad, it takes them to the URL that was set up. In most cases, this ad is used to direct people to a landing page or online signup page.
Lead Form Ads allow potential clients to see a form that is filled with info they have already shared with Facebook, like their name, number, and email. This is an effective ad to use to capture lead information and be able to follow up with them.
These ads can be displayed on Facebook and Instagram, which allows people to see ads multiple times on both platforms.
Because of its affordability, Facebook is still the most-used social media site and has recently passed over 2 BILLION users. Over Sixty-four percent of people in the U.S. that are twelve and up are active daily users. On a high level, targeting isn’t too complicated. Many options can be utilized to deliver very relevant ads to improve your leads for your personal training services.
When you are selecting an audience to target, it is important not to be too broad or specific. Facebook has many filters; the best place to start is the age and radius. After that, there are many other factors to choose from, such as household income, interests, gender, net worth, etc.
If you use these filters correctly, it can increase targeting. Keeping your targeting well balanced comes from starting off slowly with just a few filters. Take time letting your ads run to learn about your audience. Analyzing your ads performance and then make adjustments accordingly.
4. Connect With Your Community To Market Your Personal Training Business
The most important part of marketing your personal training business is connecting with your community. This piece of the puzzle is most often overlooked. Set yourself apart by committing yourself to be proactive and reactive engagement. Reactively answer every comment, direct message, and respond to every tag. Make this a daily task. Let your community know you hear them, and you are reachable. Proactively, go through your feed and congratulate others on their wins for the week even if they didn’t use your services to get them. Showing people you care will set you apart. Study and get familiar with keywords and popular hashtags that are relevant to your audience and comment on the top ones with the most engagement.
Another way to create a connection with people who will benefit from your services is to use relevant hashtags. Hashtags with help people discover your content. If you’re not sure which hashtags to use, investigate what your competitors are doing, or what other brands in the fitness space are using that you feel are relevant to your brand. Generic hashtags like #workout and #fitnesstrainer are helpful, but more specific hashtags are essential to identify. An example might be #plyometricworkout #hitttraining. You can claim a unique hashtag specific to your brand and encourage your clients to share and utilize it.
In addition to hashtags, tagging people can prove to be helpful when you want to expand your impressions, whether it be a written content or a photo of a client tag whomever that post might include.
Another great way to connect and bring your community together as well as expand your reach is to host a contest or giveaway. You can do this by creating a hashtag campaign. For example, whoever has the most likes on any post that includes your branded hashtag and tag your brand will win XYZ or partner up with a local business and offer your followers a prize for commenting, liking, sharing, or tagging friends on your posts. You can also utilize this opportunity to make the prize a free trial of your personal training. You’d be surprised at how many new followers you will get out of this, and you’ll also plenty of new leads that are interested in your training services.
There are many things to learn and apply to your strategy for marketing your personal training business, but the important thing is to start with a plan that relies on these four keys. Where are you at in your marketing journey with your personal training business? The team at Alloy Personal Training would love to hear from you.
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Matt Helland is the Vice President of Programming for Alloy Personal Training. A former college baseball player, Matt has been a personal trainer since 2006. His favorite aspect of being a trainer is teaching people how to use their training to create a healthier, happier version of themselves every day.
Since 2010 Matt has been creating all of the programming that Alloy has to offer. Matt credits Rick Mayo and the Alloy team for showing him how to be a great trainer and what it takes to run a successful personal training business. Matt is looking forward to taking all that he has learned throughout his career to help others realize their dream of running a successful personal training franchise business of their own.
Alloy’s fitness program was created in 1992 around a very simple concept: people who get personalized coaching get better results. Today, Alloy programs are among the most effective programs in the world for helping people who want to look and feel their absolute best. Teamed with credentialed exercise physiologists, an onsite Doctor of Physical Therapy, a registered dietician and other advisory board behavioral specialists, and with ample experience bringing fitness education and training systems to markets around the world, and with speaking engagements at countless industry events, Alloy has created a program where cutting-edge science meets real, in-the-trenches experience. Therein lies the Alloy magic formula for world-class fitness programming. Alloy Personal Training has evolved its programming into a premier personal training franchise solution that provides gym owners and their members with real results. If you are interested in joining our mailing list to stay up to date with the latest regarding Alloy Personal Training Franchise sign up HERE.