There’s so much information out there, free and paid, that it’s hard to be sure what works and what doesn’t. One fitness marketing guru says one thing while another says something different. It’s impossible to know which way to turn!
So instead of working your way through 30 emails, 50 blog posts and countless case studies, you can sit back, grab a coffee, absorb 50 of the best marketing tactics for fitness professional.
Table of Contents
Carl was sending an offer to everyone on the list asking if they were interested in personal training (“Buy My Stuff”) in email 1. This worked great and got a few more sign ups to his online programmes, but he found that when he got to the clients that were around 12 months gone (had no contract for 12 months or more), the emails weren’t opened or offers taken.
How to do it:
If I hadn’t spoken to you in 12 months and then I asked you to buy my stuff you’d probably be a little put off, right?
So the tactic here is to RE-ESTABLISH rapport using an email series and THEN send an offer. Try saying hi and asking how they are first.
When was the last time you contacted an old client? In fact… Don’t answer that. Just go do it.
This does make real-time, inter-personal interaction a rarity and thus extremely powerful. Jumping on the phone for an actual conversation with a prospect has never been so powerful, because people are used to everything being automated. The chance to interact with a human being is ‘going the extra mile’ and delivering a high level of service.
How to do it:
If you’re an online personal trainer, don’t be afraid to get on the phone or meet with people to help them and find out how you can serve their needs. Other trainers are trying to make a sale with zero interaction so your extra effort will really stand out.
If you’ve collected phone numbers from potential clients in the past then these are more than likely your best assets.
Have a chat and make the focus about how you can help them. Even if they don’t turn in to a client they’ll be recommending you to others.
How to do it:
Go through your old blog content and see if you can promote your blog posts using the advice above. Then promote them on social media using the rules above.
Example:
How to Burn Fat at Christmas
Instead:
3 Ways to Torch Fat at Christmas (And Make it Last!)
So look for Facebook groups, Meetup groups and forums for local, interest based communities that are a fit for what you do. Then join them and interact. Don’t just give a sales pitch, that is going to be a huge turn off. Rather, participate, give value and show that you are an expert without ever having to say it.
People will naturally connect with you and start to approach you for more information about what you do.
Facebook:
- Use the search bar to find local fitness groups
- Join as many groups as possible
- Use the search bar in the group to find your topic
- Answer questions and be useful
Rather than trying to make new content all of the time, let your audience indicate what they’re interested in and then expand upon that in different mediums.
How to do it:
Use your website builders statistics, Google Analytics or an app like Buzzsumo to find your most popular blog posts.
Once you have them, you can either turn them in to an email sign up incentive (PDF), a short email course or a video series.
Little pieces of customer service like this go a long way to having a great fitness business that people love to associate with.
How to do it:
Record yourself or get someone to help you record a very short intro. Nothing fancy. Just you against a blank wall or in your training space and looking professional.
Quickly say hi, thanks for joining, you appreciate their service and you’re excited to be working together on their goals. That’s it. Fitness marketing at it’s finest.
“Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, destroying the natural state of the Petrified Forest.”
Their findings were shocking. It tripled the amount of THEFT!
Because it was evidence that many other people were already stealing from the forest. It made the perpetrators more confident that stealing was “okay.”
How to do it:
So many personal trainers use fear and scarcity to try and get friends, fans and followers to take action.
“Most people don’t do this then this terrible thing happens”
But what if you’re just making it OK for people to not do something because everyone else isn’t doing it? Make sure your content is positive in nature and doesn’t promote the negative norms.
How to do it:
You can access your group insights from both desktop and smartphone. Once you’ve found it you can discover all kinds of cool stats that will help you to understand what your group members like and interact with.
These are your highlight reel blogs and you can use them to make a whole new blog.
Pick some of your best blogs and write a brief intro about them, explain why they’re so popular and how the website visitor will benefit from reading them and turn that content in to it’s own blog post.
You can also create a menu item on your website navigation or on your blog sidebar called “Popular Posts”.
Get things moving as soon as possible. Then tweak, test and improve. Perfectionism kills progress and I see so many PT’s waiting to launch a product or service until they have their PT website fully built, or until they have moved to a new gym, etc.
Just start putting stuff out online as soon as you can. Always be testing and improving. You will get much further by throwing out something that is ‘good-enough’ and going from there.
How to do it:
Choose a starting point, build the bare-bones of it and go! Once you’re live and getting real time feedback, test changing one thing at a time and see if it improves your conversion rates. Websites, opt-ins, sales pages, adverts etc should all be tested constantly.
Instead, give something away that people will use, and not only a physical reminder of your business for them – but also everyone around them too!
A T-shirt is great for this, as people always need clothes to wear to workout in.
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Use an online t-shirt printing service. Have some graphics made with your brand on, print and give them away. You get bonus points for making the t-shirts funny or inspirational.
You could even offer an extra incentive by giving a free training session to anyone who wears the shirt and posts a selfie to Facebook or Instagram.
If you want to talk to BodyBuilders you are in competition with every huge supplement company, IFBB pro and ‘Arnie wannabe’ in the world. Your chances of standing out are slim.
One way to stand out online is to speak to very specific group of people. You could successfully carve out a spot for BodyBuilders in their 50’s or Female-Vegan BodyBuilders, because not many other people are creating content for such a specific group of people.
How to do it:
Finding your niche can often prove difficult. It’s tempting to think that by narrowing down your target market to a smaller group of people, you’re losing out on all those people you could sell to.
A niche should be selected based on it’s size, your knowledge of it, how much fun you’d have in it and how much the people within that niche are attracted to you.
For example, the Protein World ‘Beach Body Ready’ advertising scandal last summer was worldwide news and there was great opportunity to have your voice heard, no matter which side of the opinion you land on.
But it can often be awkward asking for a referral so make sure to manage your clients’ expectations early on. In other words, include the fact that you’ll be asking for a testimonial in your consultations and your sessions, plus why that referral is important.
How to do it:
Let your clients know on the first session that you’ll be asking for a referral if they like your services.
“Not only do referrals help you move your business forward but they also help us keep our prices down.”
Done, the client expects it so asking for it isn’t awkward later on.
Your website visitors will feel like they’ve already done their homework, so they’re more likely to stick with your solution if it fits the bill.
BUT DO IT TASTEFULLY
Don’t just create a pricing table that shows why your personal training business is awesome and the other business should be burned to the ground.
To do this without looking like an overly competitive ass, be sure to include your drawbacks. For example, online training is ideal for people who are more self motivated. Face to face is ideal for people who need the accountability of an appointment with their personal trainer.
You’ll find that you can even give the cons a positive spin. Explain that your offering doesn’t include a particular feature because you focused more attention in another area — an area that’s more important to your target market.
By focusing on YOUR drawbacks and not your competitors, you portray confidence in your product instead of pettiness toward the other business.
For example, hairdressers, wedding photographers and supplement companies. Plus, commenting on other sites and linking back to your own site is great for your position in Google search results.
It must be tastefully done though or you risk being flagged as spam due to poor marketing.
How to do it:
Leave thoughtful and engaging comments and the author is more likely to send traffic to you, or be open to a joint-venture. Plus some of their readers will click through to your site, right from the comment.
Choose one or two people at random from everyone who enters and you will build your following, raise awareness and you can follow up with everyone who entered – they’re clearly interested in what you do!
Just be sure that whatever monetary value the prize has is made up for by the amount of new leads and clients you will obtain from running the contest.
There are loads of apps out there but it’s actually very easy to do this on your own. Simply create a share-worthy piece of content on your blog, share it on Facebook and include your terms in the post!
Examples include most shares, most comments or most replies to someones comment. It’s easy to see who the winner is and contestants can have a bit of fun trying to compete with one another.
The key is to make the educational series incredibly valuable for the reader. To teach them something that they genuinely want to know. If you help someone solve their problems, they know you are the expert and will more likely come to you for further help.
How to do it:
Set up a series of Emails as auto-responders in your Email provider. Create an opt-in page or box on your website that shows the benefits to signing up for your mini-course.
Either send people to this page via adverts, blogs, social media and other outreach, and/or simply add the box to your web pages in the side bar or pop-up.
If you’re paying for ads to get traffic to a particular page on your site (squeeze page), you can identify those who are almost ready to buy and who’s not.
People often download stuff when they’re looking for more reasons to support the decision they’ve already made in their heads. The free giveaway might not be the tipping point, but the ads about how awesome your service is, what the benefits are and how you’ve helped people just like them certainly will be.
- Add a free giveaway to your services page with a title like “5 reasons you should hire us” or “5 stories from existing clients”. The giveaway is for those who are interested but looking for more reasons to sign up.
- Add a Facebook tracking pixel to the thank you page where users are directed to download after sign up. E.g /thanks-for-downloading
- Sit tight while Facebook creates a highly qualified audience of people to advertise to for you.
- You can now send ads to people who are hot leads. They’ve shown interest in your service by visiting the services page and they’ve downloaded your content. Next step: become a client.
These types of businesses might include hairdressers, beauty salons, health food restaurants and even other personal trainers!
How to do it:
Approach complimentary businesses and ask if you can promote their content for them. Then promote it. When you have something that their audience might like, ask them if they will promote it for you.
By reaching out first and doing them a favour, they’ll more than likely help you out. If they don’t then you can sleep tight knowing you’re a super nice person.
For example, if someone buys a training program online, would they like a nutrition plan to go along with it? You don’t know until you ask!
How to do it:
Set up an auto-responder email to present an ‘upsell offer’ after someone makes a purchase. Don’t be pushy and only offer something that makes sense for the person to buy.
The two purchases should work synergistically. Even better if it is a no-brainer for them to get both and exponentially improve their outcomes.
What makes for a good keyword? It needs to have sufficient search volume that people are going to find it, but small enough competition that you can rank highly for it. Depending on your location and how competitive the keywords are will determine the cost and time it is going to take to rank.
Using Google’s keyword tool you can find out what people are searching for, and then start to slip the keywords on to your personal trainer website and in to your content.
Use the Google Keyword planner to find out what search terms people in your area are typing in to Google.
You can then add those keywords to your page title, 1st header, 1st paragraph, second header, last paragraph and written once in bold.
This will boost SEO almost instantly.
Listen and watch what people do. The things they complain about, discuss or struggle with and you will have an endless supply of things that people are interested in finding answers to.
In the gym, in coffee shops, in restaurants, on social media. Listen and observe what people say and do and you will never be stuck for ideas.
How to do it:
- Ask your clients what they would like to read
- Search Facebook groups for questions that get asked
- Search Twitter for questions that get asked
- Use Google autocomplete to find popular search terms
It’s important to remain in the minds of these bounced visitors so that when they ARE ready to commit to your services, they can not only find you easily again but trust your services even more due to brand awareness.
How to do it:
First, you’ll need a Facebook pixel installed on your website. You can get yours by clicking on the Adverts tab on your Facebook page.
Once your pixel is installed you can create a custom audience. For this fitness marketing hack, you’ll need to create a custom audience for anyone who landing on your website. You can then serve these people ads later. Blog posts and valuable content work best.
You could create a group for like-minded individuals to connect with each other and consume your content. It’s kind of like an email subscriber list on steroids.
This will offer great value to the members, while positioning you as the expert.
Go to any Facebook group and you’ll see a Create Facebook Group button at the top of the page. Fill in the details, invite people who might be interested and post content regularly.
It takes some time to build and become something substantial but it’s very worth it when you do.
Tell a story and people understand. Humanity has used stories to influence people since time began. You can write, audio or video record your stories. Whatever you feel comfortable with.
How to Do It
If you don’t have a blog already, now is the time to get one. Whether your medium is video, sound or writing, a blog page is the best place to organise your work and thoughts.
Plus, it gives users who do subscribe to your info an easy way to find out more about you!
You can build it as you go, and have people you already know testing your product out in real time. This allows you to make sure it is something people want (they buy before you spend weeks building it) and you can take the feedback you get and incorporate it in to the program as you go. This is both efficient and cost effective.
How to do it:
Decide what product/service you want to offer and put some feelers out for people who are interested in joining it for a discounted rate. These will be your guinea pigs as you build the program.
In exchange for the discount, ask them for feedback and testimonials/case studies to use in the marketing. By having people using the program, you will learn what they perceive the biggest benefits of it are – which are then your main selling points when you market it to a wider audience. As you come to the end of the building phase, roll out the marketing for a new audience.
Make your site mobile-responsive to ensure it looks great across all devices.
How to Do It
Got to the Google Mobile Page Test and enter your website address.
Google will analyse your website and give you a score and recommendations on how to fix any mobile issues if there are any.
Of course this isn’t possible when you’re just starting out so consider putting your revolutionary product or idea in front of as many people as possible.
How to Do It
Use Buzzsumo to find influential bloggers and media personalities in your area, offer to work with them for free in return for an honest review.
If you struggle to find any influencers, try writing a professional press release and submitting it to 100’s of media outlets.
Two reasons: people value what they pay for (even if it is only a small amount) and it gets your clients over the “payment barrier” making it much easier for them to upgrade when they see the amazing value you offer.
Would you rather have 1,000 members who don’t value the work you’ve put in to your service or 100 people who are happy to part with a small fee.
How To Do It
People who are happy to give you their hard earned money in exchange for advice are your perfect clients.
Consider adding a small fee to your membership if you plan on upselling to your PT service. These people will more than likely be your ideal clients and now that they’ve payed and you’ve delivered, they trust you.
They’re easy to consume and read, visually appealing, easy to share and ‘info-taining’ (informative and entertaining).
A really nice way to introduce people to your content is to create a infographic highlighting a couple of key facts/points, which is shared on social media. The graphic can then link to a post of video exploring this in more detail. Works especially well on Pinterest!
How To Do It
Highlight a couple of key points/facts from your content and then visualize it in to an infographic which you share on social media. Here’s on we created to help personal trainers create awesome website.
You can test different subject lines using your email service to see what your readers respond best to. The key is to make it interesting, compelling, exciting or deliver a clear benefit that the reader desires.
How to do it:
A/B Test different styles of subject lines and figure out a formula for success. Then use this in the future to guide the decisions you make regarding headlines.
You can play a slideshow of teaching tools, show them around your website or write something and live voice-over as you type it on the screen.
How to do it:
Set up a Google Hangouts account and connect it with your Youtube account. Create a hangout and record the screen. It will upload to Youtube in real time. Giving you a video done and already online, almost as soon as you finish talking.
Niel Patel from Quick Sprout tested this. By replacing all of the money back guarantee badges with free trial badges and by placing “30-day free trial” offer on every page. He was able to boost signups by 116%.
Why? probably because the client has nothing to lose right from the get go making the barrier to entry very low.
How to do it:
Ensuring your potential clients have “nothing to lose” by signing up with you can prove tricky. Especially when you do have something to lose. Your time.
Try have a low barrier to entry service like group training, where they can come for free to try it out and if they like it, they commit.
For example, you might write a post about running performance, featuring a running technique coach, podiatrist, exercise physiologist and county level runner.
This will be immensely valuable for your audience, and the individual contributors will usually share it with their audience, expanding your reach.
Do your research and create a great in depth list based post about a topic that your niche will be interested in.
For example: The Top 5 Running Blogs This Month
Write comments about how informative it was and the writing style. Then share it on social media and share, tag or Tweet those featured!
Use this on your website and posts by incorporating case-studies in to your writing, using testimonials and before/after images. You can also slip it in to your copy, such as “we have trained 164 people this year, helping them to…”
As well as adding how many people you’ve helped, video testimonials and other social proofing, don’t forget the basics like having share buttons on your website.
Seeing a post or page has been shared already encourages others to share and will massively expand your social reach.
One of their tricks is discounted sales button. They don’t actually list the price. All they show is the OLD price crossed out with a 40% off notice ($497 save 40%).
What’s 40% off of $497?
It’s easier to click to find out.
How to do it:
Got a low barrier to entry eBook or service that you’d like to sell more of. Try the hack above.
Instead of listing the price and the discounted price. List the old price, cross it out and add next to it how much the discount is.
As a pro, you have lots of incredibly valuable content to share. Just keep in mind where the prospect is at right now and what they will value the most. Then make it in to an e-book and give it away.
You can even re-purpose all of your blog posts and other content in to a book with very little additional effort.
How to do it:
Writing an eBook that is going to generate more leads needs to be short enough to give value to the reader immediately but long enough to show your expertise.
Give some of the answers away, but not enough that they can just go off and do it on their own.
And have some kind of monetary value. Always put a price tag on it so you can say “get 50 Fitness Marketing Hacks for Personal Trainers worth [amount] absolutely free when you sign up”
The easiest way to find out more about your clients is to simply ask them.
How to do it:
People love to answer questions about themselves. Create a survey or poll on Facebook with questions about what they need from a trainer, what they expect and even quiz them on some fat loss knowledge to generate more engagement.
You’ll have some fun, get more eyes on your business and get loads of feedback about how your ideal clients really feel about your service.
Plus, you can create lookalike audiences to create a lager audience of people who are just like the people that signed up to your list!
How to do it:
- Click Ads tab -> “Tools” -> “Audiences”
- Create Audience” -> “Custom Audience” ->”Customer List” -> “Copy and paste your customer list”
- Paste the email addresses from your list.
- You need to add at least 30 entries.
Now you can create new ads to this custom audience,.
Adding a value to the eBook, eve if you’re giving it away, makes it significantly more valuable in the users mind and makes it more desirable.
How to do it:
Simple, add a monetary value to your eBook.
If you’re not sure how much to add, try going with the standard £6 per 100 words. This is what most writers use and will provide a rough estimate for you to work from.
Sometimes, simple is better and you should get right to the point. If you’re testing your conversions, try a sales heavy page with lots going on, versus a very simple and clean page that highlights just the bare bones of what it is.
Check out this one we created for the Institute of Personal Trainers:
How to do it:
Create an A/B test of your web page, using only the key selling points. Perhaps a short form sales page with a headline, intro and 5 bullets is all you need.
Creating your own graphics means you can say it how you want to say it and you can brand the graphic to your business with your logo and colours!
How to do it:
Create a graphic (original photography is best), add a quote and brand it, then share it across social media.
Your post doesn’t need to be quite that long, but it should deliver loads of value and be more than your average blog.
How to do it:
Look at what you can offer your audience that delivers so much value, they will absolutely love you for it.
Find similar blog posts as inspiration, then write it, promote it and encourage your readers to share it.
A Twitter chat is where a group of Twitter users meet at a pre-determined time to discuss a certain topic, using a designated hashtag (#) for each tweet contributed.
You can organise or jump on an existing ‘twitter chat’ where you discuss a pre-determined topic, usually contained within a hashtag.
You can both lead your existing audience to the chat to learn from you, and engage other twitter users along the way. Gaining exposure participants and interested readers alike.
How to do it:
Start by searching for some twitter chats and joining in, to see how it works, then build up to hosting your own.
The best way to do it, is find non-competitive complimentary businesses and build relationships with them. People such as Nutritionists, Yoga Teachers, Massage Therapists, are great for Personal Trainers to partner with.
Be prepared to offer them something first though.
How to do it:
Always approach someone with an answer to the question, “what’s in it for them?”. You can cross promote each other by exchanging guest posts on each others sites. The back links to your site will also help your SEO ranking – win win!
A great way to re-engage, have people consume your content and potentially move them towards becoming a buyer is by sending a ‘re-engagement’ email.
The key to this email is that it needs to have a headline that grabs their attention, piques their curiosity and demands that they open it.
How to do it:
Find an angle that is going to get your email opened and read. If you can remember why the person signed up for your service in the first place you might want to try:
Hey [NAME],
Are you still interested in [GOAL]?
[YOUR NAME]
Official partnerships are also one of the best ways to make sure your partner doesn’t just promote anybody.
How to do it:
Partner up with say, a massage company and offer a free training session to anyone who buys a course of massages, and they could offer a free massage to your clients who buy a training package. This will lead to you both picking up new long-term clients.
They have so much data about people and you can be so specific in who you target, it makes what was once a case of casting a large net and hoping for a 1-2% return now a complete science where you can get incredible response rates when you get your targeting right.
How to do it:
Using your Facebook page insights of the people who like your page, you can see which other pages they like, along with their demographic information and then target advertising based on this information to find the people that are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
- Go to the Facebook Audience insights tool
- Type in an interest related to your page in the interests tab
- Click on the Page Likes Tab
- See the other pages that the audience (your audience) are fans of
A welcome email when someone joins your list or buys a product/service from you is your first ‘personalised’ impression. Of course they’ve seen your website, etc. but the welcome Email is uniquely for them. Use it wisely.
How to do it:
Decide what you want to achieve with your welcome Email. Our suggestion is to make your new subscriber/customer feel welcome, comfortable and among friends.
Send a conversational email that offers to help them, telling them how to get in touch and setting expectations for what they should expect. Automate this process from your Email service provider.
