How to Advertise Your Fitness Business

Whether you are a gym owner or a personal trainer working from home, you need clients! To get clients – people have to know you exist. This means advertising. Marketing your fitness business and personal training services requires you have a good strong grasp on who your ideal client is.

Get Paying Clients to Your Fitness Business
in Just 3 Simple Steps

Step 1: Choose your client. Who do you want to cater to? By focusing on one particular sector you will be in a better position to get more bang for your advertising buck.

As a personal trainer myself I learned how to market my business as a trainer and then how to take that business online as an online trainer and affiliate marketer. From there I developed my own products and then built an eCommerce store selling physical fitness products. My marketing methods work, and they work well.

Choosing Your Personal Training Client

No doubt you have something to offer most people. Personal Trainers are a passionate bunch and want to spread their knowledge to benefit others. But the pool of potential clients is HUGE! This can be a drawback so its a good idea to choose a sub-niche. For example – do you prefer to train men? Or women?

Are you more comfortable training a particular gender? Do you find one gender seems to gravitate toward your message more than the other? Start with that.

The next sub-group to niche down to would be based on their goal or focus.

Some examples of clients goals are: Weight loss, muscle development, improved cardio etc. Or, maybe short term goals are a better focus for your business. Special projects like “Wedding Weight Loss” for people who have a wedding to attend. This can be directed towards the bride-to-be, bridesmaids (as one person told me “I don’t want to be the fattest bridesmaid there!”), or mother-of-the-bride.

Other special project ideas are body building competitions, weight loss challenges, and marathon race training.

Next, break this sub-group into age groups. Who do you identify with? Over 40, 50? Under 25? They all have their special needs and want to know they are being catered to differently than other age groups.

Bottom line – by choosing a specific category or niche of client, you can more quickly position yourself as an expert in that field AND they all have friends in their peer group. Do a good job and you have great fodder for word of mouth referrals.

Step 2: Marketing to your ideal client. To get your message and service offering in front of your potential clients, you need to know where they are hanging out. There are lots of free places you can use to get your name out there.

Direct Marketing to a Personal Training Client

For this post let’s assume you are marketing for paying clients who are interested in training for an upcoming marathon in your area and assuming as well that you are, or were, an accomplished marathon runner. Collect a portfolio of your accomplishments so you can support your claim as the authority. Post this to your website, facebook, Tweet it out. Just this one thing will set the stage so you can position yourself as the “Go to Guru” for marathon runners.

For example:

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If you can’t say you won, you can say you improved your time every year or whatever the selling point your audience is looking for. If you don’t want to be that specific you can try focusing on first time and beginner marathon runners.

A quick Google search using the keywords “running a marathon” the first suggestion for additional keywords that Google suggests is “how to train for a marathon for beginners”. Add the word +forum to this and look at the GOLD! Here is a list of places to find the pain points of your audience. Now you can put together solutions they will pay for.

These forums are great places to get ideas for blog posts too (yes, you should have a website with a blog). If you have a website and start blogging about what you are selling, people in your town will find you organically. Don’t forget to list your business with Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Economical Ways to Advertise

Step 3: Advertise your expertise. The first stop should be to the existing marathon community. Post on their forums with helpful ideas. You could say things like “My client who was your age found they improved when we…” If you are helpful and active, likely people will check out your profile page to find out more about you. Maybe you can write a guest post on their site or even in your local community newspaper. Often times local newspaper editors are looking for writers. Come up with a 4 – 7 part series directed towards your audience and pitch it to the local editor.

Check with your local gym and see if they will let you promote your service. Maybe they have a newsletter they send to all their customers you can piggyback on. They might be more open to this idea if you bring your clients in to train once in a while.

Advertise in other places like Craigslist and Kijiji. Just be sure you keyword your headline to match your message. Go back to the forums for ideas on what to put there and it will come up in the search engines. For example “Running Your First Marathon? – I can help!” then put in a short blurb on you and your contact info.

Yelp is a spot you can list your business but you might want to think twice about that.

Another favourite place to promote your expertise and collect active clients is by hosting training sessions on meetup.com You can contact groups already active that are related like diet or yoga groups and ask if they will send out an email to their group for you.

Send out your information and new promotion on your Facebook page, make a video for YouTube, and Tweet to your followers. Do this with all the other social media places to tell folks what you are doing. Importantly too, these are great social platforms to post the successes of your clients as well. If you have a client that succeeds in something you helped with – post it and tag them. Most people will enjoy the accolades AND they will “share” your post with their friends.