Unlocking Success: How to Market Yourself as a Personal Trainer

Imagine stepping into a fully packed gym, your name echoing in the room as clients eagerly await your next life-transforming workout session. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Yet, even the most captivating dreams crumble if they’re not built on a rock-solid foundation—in this case, a robust marketing strategy. The world may be teeming with people yearning for a healthier life, but they won’t know you’re the key to unlocking it unless you tell them. 

Marketing isn’t just a buzzword; it’s your gateway to a fulfilling and lucrative career in personal training. If you’re passionate about transforming lives through fitness but puzzled about how to market yourself, you’re in the right place. This comprehensive guide unfolds a roadmap, rich with actionable tips, to help you brand yourself, attract clients, and dominate your niche in the fitness industry.

Why Marketing is Crucial for Personal Trainers

Marketing is the cornerstone of sales and growing business. Without marketing, no one knows you or your business. Without marketing, you wouldn’t have clients. However, marketing is a complicated animal to capture and an even more brutal animal to tame.

So what should you do? And how do you do it?

There are a number of ways that you can do marketing for your business. However, in order to see positive results, you need to do a little background work. 82% of marketers use content marketing, but without proper initial research, there’s no guarantee that they all see success.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Prior to jumping in the deep end, it’s best to test the waters first. Your research should start with your target audience. There are a number of things you’ll want to find out about your target audience. Let’s review.

Demographic Data

Demographics include things like age, gender (identity), marital status, housing type, income, geographic area, whether they have kids or not, and so forth.

Target Audience Pain Points

What are the pain points of your target ideal clients? What is the problem that you propose to solve for them? What sort of solutions would they look for? What will resonate with them?

By understanding the demographics and pain points of your ideal audience, you’ll find that as you learn more about them, you will also learn how to communicate with them in a way that resonates with their ideals.

Leveraging Social Media Channels

One of the points I like to consider is where my ideal audience spends their time. If they spend a lot of time on one or a few social media platforms, then those are likely where I want to start.

A significant aspect of personal training is leadership. People don’t hire personal trainers because they are highly disciplined and can do the work on their own. People hire personal trainers to train them and (politely) tell them what to do with their own bodies to achieve the desired outcome. Because of this fact, those who can build a following on social media (and lead others within the community) are well-suited to market themselves.

Tips For Leveraging Social Media

• Start as soon as possible. Building a social media following takes time, so don’t postpone getting started. Remember, everyone starts at some point, so why delay?
• Post often. Posting on the regular is a necessity when trying to grow your online presence. No one is going to pay attention if you wait weeks or months between posts. With an estimated 4.9 billion users, social media isn’t going away anytime soon, so get started building your social channels.
• Engage With Your Audience. Don’t just post and ghost. If someone comments on your post or asks a question, reply promptly. Building a community around your brand should be one of your top priorities.
• Collaborate With Influencers: Partnering with influencers in the fitness sector can bring credibility and a broader reach to your brand.
• Run Social Media Ad Campaigns: With a moderate budget, you can run targeted ad campaigns to boost your visibility. Platforms like Facebook offer incredibly detailed targeting options.

Creating Valuable Content

You may have heard the saying, ‘Content is King.’ It’s true, so pay attention. Posting for the sake of posting is transparent and will lose followers fast. You’ll flush your credibility with every poorly thought-out post. However, it isn’t just social media where you will want to provide your audience with valuable content.

One of the best ways to market yourself is through a robust presence online with a professional website. However, a website is only as good as its components, like its posts and pages.

Website Blogs

Writing valuable articles to post on your website will drive what is known in marketing circles as organic traffic. That is, people search using a search engine, and if your article is relevant to the search, then the search engines suggest your content to the searcher. The better the content, the more attention you’ll get.

The beauty of well-thought-out content is that it lasts for a long time and continues to drive traffic to your website. Include an intelligent conversion funnel or two, and now you’ve got the makings of an automated lead engine to fuel your sales and growth.

If you’re not sure what to write about, consider what would resonate with your target audience. Ask questions like ‘What would my clients like to read?’. Doing so will help you to create helpful content that will help you build your audience of followers.

Videos

Anyone who tells you video isn’t one of the biggest drivers of traffic has been living under a rock. There’s a reason why YouTube is so popular – people love video. YouTube has over 2.7 billion users as of 2023. That’s more than 25% of the entire human race (8.07 billion total population). If this doesn’t convince you to make some videos that your clients or potential clients would find helpful, I don’t know what will. Do yourself a favor and film a few videos to get started.

Networking and Partnerships

Networking is one of the best ways (if not the single best) to start your business off on the right foot. You could pitch your personal training services to local gyms and clubs. Give them a cut, or a ‘finders fee,’ or work part-time using or renting their facilities. There are several opportunities, depending on your value proposition, that might be highly beneficial to gym owners – especially the ones who have more clients than they have trainers to manage them.

Partnerships work wonders for boosting your social media presence. You could partner with smaller influencers and work together to a mutually beneficial end.

Email Marketing

Since its inception, email marketing has been a preferred method by many marketers, sales, and business professionals. Why? Because email marketing has one of, if not the biggest, returns on investment. It’s estimated that email marketing campaigns typically have about a 36:1 return-to-spend ratio, making it one of the best investments businesses can make in their marketing space.

Here’s how to do it (basically):

1. Set up an email account with one of the many popular email marketing software like Mailchimp or Brevo.
2. Write a series of valuable and engaging emails that you think your clients or potential clients would benefit from reading.
3. Schedule your emails on a weekly basis to ensure you reach your target audience.
4. Monitor open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics so you can perfect your approach with data-driven decision-making.

How to Grow an Email List

Here’s where your website content can really shine. Good articles lead to people signing up (subscribing) to your email list. Good content should result in a steady stream of new emails signing up to receive more of your helpful content (do you see why content is king yet?).

Utilizing Technology to Enhance Client Management

You’ve heard the expression, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” That expression is more accurate than we like to admit, right? So what happens when you sign up a client? What impression do you make?

The last thing you should want is to look like an amateur to your potential clients. That’s why it’s such a smart idea to use a professional platform like EliteTrainr – to ensure you give your clients a professional and valuable experience and to make your first impressions on new clients radiate professionalism, reinforcing that their choice of selecting you as their personal trainer was a good one. That’s how you keep clients for years to come – by being helpful and showing them that your knowledge, expertise, and professionalism are all positive virtues of the experiences you provide your clients.

Using robust personal trainer management solutions like those provided by EliteTrainr, you are assured a lack of a professional platform won’t harm your future growth.

Managing and communicating with clients needs to be easy, as does workout creation. With the over 3000 exercise GIFs built into EliteTrainr, you are enabled to easily create workout programs for your clients that are easy, even fun, to learn and follow along. That, my personal training friends, is a win-win for anyone who uses our platform, from client to trainer, even for gym owners.

White Label Branding: Make The App Yours

I mentioned earlier how you need to know your target audience, and you need to promote your business and services. Again, I’m going to mention that a professional platform provides an excellent first impression. However, a custom-branded platform does that much more to solidify the belief in you and your brand’s professionalism.

White-label branding comes standard with the EliteTrainr platform, so not only can you brand the dashboard that your clients will use and see, but you also promote your authority through the extended professionalism that a custom-branded dashboard can offer.

Tips For Branding Your Personal Training Business

1. Go Authentic, or Go Home. According to studies, 88% of consumers favor authenticity when choosing which brands to support and purchase from.
2. Building Trust Means Building Value. 46% of those surveyed stated that they would pay a higher price for brands they trust. Trust means you could charge more money, and that’s just good for business, so strive to promote confidence in all your marketing efforts.
3. Don’t Skip The Value Proposition Deep-Dive. Seriously, the value proposition can make or break your efforts. In fact, only about 14% of value propositions result in consumer buy-in. That’s because the companies weren’t considering their target audience appropriately. Remember, find a problem and show that you have the means to solve it.
4. Furthermore, it would be best if you found the benefit that the potential client will get from choosing you over the competition. In other words, how is your service better than everyone else, and how much benefit would your potential clients get? Answer this correctly in your value proposition, and you’ll see how well it can work for you.

Monitoring Progress: Data-Driven Decision Making

If there’s one single piece of advice I can give you for growing your new personal trainer business, it’s not to ignore the data. According to research by Gallup, about 70% of decisions are based on emotion and 30% on rationality. If you are making decisions about growing your business based on your feelings, you could be metaphorically shooting your efforts in the foot.

You don’t need to be a statistician to monitor a few basic KPIs for your business marketing efforts. Here are a few things to watch for that can help you make data-backed decisions to leave emotion out of the path of your business’ growth.

Data To Watch

Website

Use a free service like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track things like how many visitors your website has, what pages they go to, and what pages they spend time on. These sorts of numbers can reveal what’s resonating with your target audience.

Email Marketing

Email open rates and how many people click on your email call to action can again reveal what’s working for you so you can repeat it. Similarly, if you write an email that no one opens, you’ll know not to repeat what you did to get such poor results. Remember, there’s no bad data – only data to teach you how to succeed better.

Advertising

If you’re at the point where you can afford to run some ads, then you’ll want to pay attention to ad spend versus return. You’ll want to see what ads work and which ones don’t. Monitor things like click-through rate versus impressions. If your ads get a lot of impressions but no clicks, then you might need to adjust your ad to increase engagement. 

Pro Tip: Always strive to understand intent. Suppose you can understand the meaning behind a person’s search online and the purpose behind clicking on your ad. In that case, you can also understand what works to bring in your new potential clients, so always strive to understand why a client might choose your ad over someone else’s.

A Few Final Words

To wrap it up, growing a personal training business involves a multi-faceted approach. Don’t underestimate the power of networking and building partnerships, particularly with gyms and influencers. Email marketing is not just practical—it’s essential. Get to know popular platforms like Mailchimp, craft engaging content, and monitor your metrics rigorously.

Your website is your silent salesman; make sure it’s selling you effectively by consistently publishing valuable content. You don’t want to miss out on the benefits of professional client management solutions like EliteTrainr that can help you maintain a stellar reputation. Remember, your first impression can make or break you, so be sure to utilize a platform that screams professionalism.

Branding is more than a logo; it’s the trust and authority you build in your space. Dive deep into your value proposition to understand what sets you apart and why clients should choose you over competitors. Lastly, base your decisions on data, not gut feelings. Utilize tools like Google Analytics and always, always measure your return on investment.

Your Action Plan

So, what are you waiting for? If you want to succeed in your personal training business, take action now:

1. Network with local gyms and influencers.
2. Set up your email marketing strategy and start growing your list.
3. Optimize your website and churn out valuable content.
4. Invest in a professional-client management solution.
5. Deep dive into your branding strategy, focusing on trust and authenticity.
6. Be data-driven in all your decisions, from website metrics to email open rates.

Implement these strategies today and pave the way for a successful, thriving personal training business. There’s no better time than now to get started.