How to Get More Personal Trainer Clients

Choosing a career path as a personal trainer can be an incredibly rewarding decision. After all, fitness careers offer the opportunity to transform lives, inspire confidence, and cultivate health.

But becoming a personal trainer is more than just training clients.

It requires a complex behind-the-scenes job - ensuring your personal training business thrives in a growing market. One of the biggest and most important aspects of this job is getting more clients .

Personal trainer marketing is a bigger strategy that aims to build your business profile and attract more new clients in the long run. Before you start trying any new marketing strategies though, make sure you're set up to do business effectively.

Launching Your Personal Training Business

Before you start advertising your services or trying to win new clients, take a few simple steps to help you on your business development journey.

Make Sure Your Papers are in Order

Of course as a certified personal trainer, you have the training and you're ready to start helping your clients on their way to their fitness best. But there are other elements which you might need to organize before you start charging people money.

These can include:

• Business insurance
• Personal liability insurance
• Being registered to pay tax in your area
• Any necessary industry affiliations such as unions or associations
• Business premises agreements
• Certifications for additional services (such as nutrition etc)

Of course these will vary depending on the service you offer, where you're based, or even if you're operating from your own gym studio or from third party premises.

Get Your Online Presence Ready

Every business profile needs a good online presence, even if it is relatively simple. For personal trainers, this will usually mean having at least one good social media account and ideally a website too, even if this is a simple landing page.

The best social media channels for fitness professionals are:

• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Facebook

While you don't need all of these, it helps to have at least a simple presence on all of them.

We recommend using at least two social media platforms and updating them as often as possible. We're going to look more at these in detail later in this article.

When offering personal training services, you should also have a unique domain or website. This means that you're not at the mercy of the social media algorithms and you can add content, sign up forms or any other useful information to your website.

Have the Right Software

Every business needs tools to help manage schedules, finances and even elements such as marketing. While many personal trainers start out with different free tools to get them started, it can quickly get complicated if you need to manage your schedule in one tool, invoices and payments in another and then pay for a marketing tool too.

Arbox offers an all-in-one business management solution for personal trainers and fitness professionals. Easily add sign up forms for one off classes or memberships, take payments online, track your business performance and even manage various marketing strategy processes.

Best of all you can get started with Arbox for free to see for yourself why so many fitness business owners love us.

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How To Get More Personal Training Clients

So now that you're all set up and ready to start offering your personal training services, how can you start attracting those clients?

There are various ways both digital and real world that you can use to start marketing personal training services in your area. It's a good idea to mix the two, but steer your clients towards your online platform.

The reason for this is that when clients engage with your website or social media, you'll be able to save their details and send them marketing materials as necessary.

These are the steps you can take to start getting lots of new personal training clients even if you're totally new to the scene.

How to Define Your Ideal Client

Defining your ideal client is the foundation of effective personal trainer marketing. While you might think you can help anyone achieve their health and fitness goals, it's a better idea to define your audience so you can speak directly to them with your messaging.

Some examples of a good ideal client might be:

• Young professionals who don't have time to plan a fitness strategy but want someone to help them achieve their goals.
• People who struggle with their weight and fitness and have decided now is the time to hire a personal trainer to finally get them in shape.
• Athletes of fitness professionals who need someone to coach them to get their best performance.

These are just examples, but by understanding exactly who you are hoping to work with this can help with everything from personal trainer marketing ideas to targeting for paid ads.

Read our guide: Types of people at the gym, which could offer some inspiration...!

It can be a good idea to ask people in your target audience about what they want from a personal trainer.

This can help you build customer personas and to understand who your clients are, their age, gender, income, location, workout preferences, and exercise goals. This in-depth understanding helps you create a more focused, effective, and successful personal training marketing strategy.

Define Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

In the social media age, it's all about your presence on these platforms.

Social media is not just a crucial element to marketing. They serve as a channel to engage with potential clients, share your testimonials, and reflect your training style authentically. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok let you share pictures, videos, fitness tips, nutritional advice, and success stories for a wider reach.

Some tips to help you define a strong social media presence:

• Understand the pain points of your target audience.
• Define and understand the types of content that your audience enjoys.
• Research competitors or other personal trainers and see what works for them on social media.
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses both with regards to your personal trainer skills and your capacity for social media marketing.

Not everyone is a social media natural, and that's fine. But to help your personal training business grow and attract clients, you should have at the very least a strategy to:

• Have a well optimized social media page with your business details visible.
• Create new social media posts at least weekly, ideally daily.
• Make time to engage with people who engage or others in your industry.

Make sure to research fitness hashtags and take plenty of pictures and videos of your daily business operations.

Creating Useful Content

Creating valuable content demonstrates your expertise and distinguishes you as a trusted voice in the fitness industry. However there are many ways to do this, and it can be overwhelming when starting out to define what you can do to help potential clients and build your personal brand.

While social media and the internet is full of personal trainers marketing their skills and business with some sometimes outrageous content, you don't need to compete with them. In fact, you can make it simple for yourself.

• What are your fitness passions?
• What type of content do you enjoy creating?
• How can you help your target audience with simple easy to digest content?

You might love to plan and manage HIIT classes, or you might be great at helping clients lose weight.

Create content around the niches that you are passionate about and understand well.

This can include:

• Writing blog posts or downloadable guides.
• Creating how-to videos.
• Designing nutrition guides.
• Creating short form video on social media.

This type of content can position you as an expert and it can be an incredible way of nurturing relationships with clients too.

To get your content found, you will need to master the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) or hire a content marketing professional to do it all for you. You can find bloggers and SEO agencies easily online, with many of them even specializing in the fitness industry.

Generating Leads from Content

When it comes to getting more clients from your personal trainer marketing, you will need to factor in ways to collect emails or other contact details.

Hooking in more potential paying clients with your content takes a few additional steps.

First of all, you need to give your clients a reason to give you their contact details. The easiest way of doing this is giving something away for free in exchange for their contact details.

This could be:

• A free downloadable fitness plan.
• A discount voucher or taster session.
• Access to a webinar or online class.

All of these need to be gated - which means that the client needs to hand over their email to get access. This can be done with a landing page using Arbox, where you can also store their contact details.

This is a well known effective marketing strategy and one that can be used to build an email marketing list. Talking of which...

Email Marketing is Key to Success

One of the best ways of converting potential clients into paying clients is by using email marketing. This is another step in your personal trainer marketing strategy, but a very important one.

If you've been collecting your lead in a CRM tool such as Arbox, you'll be able to easily send regular updates and newsletters to develop relationships and get more personal training clients.

Email allows you to speak directly to your prospective clients. It's an excellent platform to deliver personalized content, exclusive discounts, the latest blog posts, and more.

Arbox can be used to send and manage your email marketing, or it can also integrate with popular email scheduling tools such as Zapier to automate your process, segment your list, monitor open and click-through rates, and test different strategies for more successful campaigns.

Some tips for a successful email marketing strategy.

• Send useful and actionable information, such as 5 tricks to lose belly fat or how to get fit on your lunch break.
• Be consistent, but never spammy. This means schedule your email marketing once or twice a week, and avoid sending pestering emails asking people if they'd like to sign up for your personal training classes.
• Send offers when relevant. We're going to look at this in more detail shortly, but there is no harm in sending out unique offers to attract that potential client.
• Experiment with subject lines. Analyze what works and what type of content is most likely to get opened and not marked as spam or unsubscribed.

Give Offers – But Time Them Wisely

Promotional offers attract the attention of potential clients and can amp up your sales. A well-timed offer around New Year or a local event might boost your sign-ups with people inspired to make healthy changes in their lives.

Mindless discounting, however, can tarnish your brand and business. If you're always offering 50% off, or a free trial session every month, why would anyone pay full price?

Be strategic about when and how often you give promotions. Offers should be a tool to enhance loyalty and attract the right clientele, not a random, desperate call for attention.

Encourage Referrals and Feedback

One of the best marketing strategies is to ask your current clients, or even past clients, to either leave feedback or refer you to new clients.

In fact, prospective clients often rely on the recommendations of others when choosing a personal trainer. So, encourage your existing clients to refer your services to their friends, family, or colleagues through a referral program. You can provide exclusive discounts or complementary sessions as a thank you gesture.

This can also be done using Arbox. Send your past or current client list an email asking for feedback or reviews in exchange for loyalty points.

As a bonus, you can also win more reviews on your chosen site, whether that's Google, your Facebook business page or other review platforms.

This not only improves your reputation but also helps you understand where you excel and where you need improvements.

Partner With Local Businesses

Partnering with local businesses like health food stores, sports clinics and wellness centers can give you access to new clients who may already be interested in fitness or wellness.

A simple cross-promotion strategy, like sharing each other's flyers or offering special discounts, enhances your local presence and boosts your reputation.

You could also approach local businesses to offer corporate wellness packages. This can be a very effective marketing strategy as many professionals are open to hiring a personal trainer to help them maintain those fitness goals outside of sedentary or stressful jobs.

Work With a Local Gym

A local gym partnership can be a win-win option for you. It not only brings in more personal training clients through the gym's existing members but also aids in networking with fitness fans and other fitness professionals.

It also eliminates the need for your own training facility and equipment, cutting down overhead costs.

While some gyms might not welcome an independent personal trainer, many are also happy to host freelance or independent trainers on site.

Run Social Media Ads

Running ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram allows you to target a specific demographic group. Internet advertising enables micro-targeting, ensuring efficient use of advertising capital.

Your ads should use strong visuals, compelling headlines, and a hook to inspire people to learn more.

We've looked in detail at running PPC ads for fitness businesses. But in summary:

• Define your budget and stick to it. PPC ads can get expensive.
• Create strong visual content designed to attract your target clientele.
• Make sure to include a clear and strong CTA (call to action).
• Track and monitor ad performance and make sure to update your content regularly.

Using Arbox CRM to Manage Data

Every personal trainer knows the importance of client data. By using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like Arbox, you can collect, organize, and analyze client data efficiently. This tool allows you to track membership renewals, monitor client progress, and automate communication. It also assists in managing your calendar, billing, and much more.

Leveraging a CRM tool saves you countless hours on administrative tasks. It helps you better understand your clients on a personal level, improving relationships and increasing client retention.

Arbox offers a comprehensive suite of tools for fitness business owners including payment processing, class booking and scheduling and even client communication tools.

Winning Trust a Marketing Strategy

Consistency is key in the world of fitness. Clients need to know they can rely on you to be organized and punctual. Using scheduling tools such as Arbox will ensure you avoid double-booking or forgetting appointments.

With Arbox, you can also send a text message or email reminders to clients, minimizing missed appointments. Better still this can be automated so your client gets a reminder without you needing to remember to press a button or set it up.

And of course, incorporating scheduling tools into your personal training business allows you to manage your time efficiently, keep track of client training schedules, and streamline your administration.

Increasing clientele in your personal training business can be a challenge. However, a clear and effective personal trainer marketing strategy can attract potential clients. Remember, success rarely comes overnight. Keep measuring your marketing efforts, refining your tactics, and persistently working toward your goals to thrive in the personal training profession.

Get started with Arbox for free and find out how many clients you could sign up!

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