If you work hard as a personal trainer, it’s only natural to want to start up your own personal training business. Lots of successful fitness professionals started out on this path… working in a big box gym, slowly picking up clients here and there, then building up a big enough client base to venture out on their own.

But when it comes to growing a personal training business, and making it a huge success, a lot of personal trainers end up struggling because they lack the marketing experience they need to get people interested in their services. Marketing is vital for growing any business, whether it’s brand new or has been established for a while, but most new fitness business owners seem to gloss over this important step.

Marketing a personal training business doesn’t have to be that complicated or even that expensive if you have a few tricks up your sleeve. If you’re new to the biz, then don’t worry… there are plenty of resources out there to help you become a marketing master and business owner, a lot of which are right here on this blog.

So, here are a couple of simple ways you can market a personal training business without spending an arm and a leg.

Social Media Marketing - Facebook

If you don’t have an official Facebook page for your business, then now is the time to start one. And don’t just use your personal Facebook profile to get the word out, start a new page for your business only. You want your business page to be as professional as possible, so mixing your personal account with your business one is definitely a bad idea. The goal of your marketing plan should be to get as many people in your community talking about your personal training business as you can, so you’re allowed to be a bit controversial, but aim to engage people so that you can build up a little buzz around your services. Make it a point to answer any questions that come your way and to interact with your fans on a regular basis to get a feel for what people in your area want.

Once you build up a little following, you can use Facebook as a source for topics to use in your email marketing campaign. Always get permission if you’re using someone’s name or what have you, but you can use an interesting topic that comes up and incorporate them into your website or email blasts. Most people love to see that they sparked a conversation and will probably share your email/promotion/or story, which will help to increase your number of fans.

Social Media Marketing – YouTube

Youtube is a powerful marketing tool that a lot of personal trainers seem to shy away from. Whether you’re comfortable on camera or not, you should try to make videos about your personal training business and put them up on Youtube. Marketing this way is very effective and super easy, not to mention cheaper than buying radio or air time.

Get your videos to work for you by using Google’s free Keyword Tool to research what people are searching for in your area in terms of personal training or weight loss. Marketing a personal training business through sites like Youtube is a great way to get yourself in front of your local audience. There are over a million searches every month for things like “personal fitness training” and a lot of these are localized searches that you could be taking advantage of.

Take some of those keywords and use it to name your videos and for writing up your video description as well as in the headlines and content of articles that you’re writing (start a blog for your business if you haven’t already). You can then share this video all your friends and family, your current clients, you can post it on your website, and start using it as a tool to describe what you do.

Pick the keywords you are going to use wisely and pair them with the name of your town (for example, Los Angeles personal fitness training or wherever you live) to get the most out of your keywords. Try to make videos that are full of great content like a short at home workout or a quick nutrition lesson so that you can start to build a channel of helpful fitness videos that can be Tweeted and shared on Facebook. Focus on making these videos high quality with good audio, find a friend that can help if you don’t think you have the skills to do that on your own (maybe even enlist the help of a local college kid or someone on craigslist for cheap). You want your videos to look as professional as they can.

Your goal with these videos is to get them on the first page of the search engine results pages. Just by taking a little time to research, you’ll quickly discover under-utilized keywords to use and you will cash in big time.

Using some of the tactics above, you’ll see that marketing a personal training business through social media is completely worth the time and effort. By giving your business a face and a little web presence, more and more potential clients will start knocking on your door. You’d be surprised what a little Facebooking and Youtubing can do!

This entry was posted on January 14, 2014 at 9:56 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Fitness Marketing, Personal Training Business by Steve Hochman | No Comments Yet