7 Tips on How to Find Personal Training Clients

Marketing Nov 28, 2020

As a personal trainer, finding clients is imperative for the survival of your business. But perhaps this isn't a simple task as you first thought.

Finding and attracting the right clients for your style of personal training can be tricky. You want to develop good relationships and a decent rapport to be successful in the fitness industry.

To help, we have put together 7 tips on how to find clients specifically for personal trainers. Read on!

Define Your Niche

It is important for personal trainers to stand out from the vast competition by differentiating their services.

Without a speciality or niche, you are unlikely to find clients who will be more interested in your services than another personal trainer who has an exciting identity and far more interesting package to offer.

You can define your niche by:

Making a list of reasons you became a personal trainer
From that list, pick your top reason for being a personal trainer (e.g. "to help people")
Then consider your ideal client. Do you prefer training women, men, older clients or maybe semi-professional athletes?

From these lists and ideas, you can construct your speciality.

For instance:

If you recognise you enjoy helping individuals reach their goals and your ideal client is someone who wants to build muscle, you could define yourself as the personal trainer who promotes "Get Shredded at Any Age".

Tracy Anderson: The Personal Trainer With a Defined Niche

A great example of a successful niche comes in the form of Tracy Anderson. Now a celebrity personal trainer, Anderson started out as a ballet dancer who could not lose weight, no matter how hard she tried to follow conventional weight loss methods.

Her story details how she was a "large" ballet dancer, claiming that an unfair "genetic predisposition" caused her to gain and retain 40 pounds.

Anderson then researched and developed her own way of losing weight and getting in shape, which is based on engaging accessory muscles. This creates a dancer physique and stops any women bulking up, even "despite their genetic background".

Anderson now trains millions of clients, including celebrities, thanks to defining her training program - The Tracy Anderson Method.

Set up a regular email newsletter and increase your email list to easily find and gain new clients.

You can implement email newsletters to promote your services as a personal trainer, and to provide extra content to individuals who sign up.

Your email newsletters could contain:

Featured blogs from your website to attract readers to your site
Exclusive offers, such as festive discounts (think Black Friday, Christmas, Easter, etc)
Competitions and contests, held and promoted on your social media channels
Client testimonials to boost your reputation

To get potential clients to sign up to your email list, ensure that your social media channels have a good "About Me" section with a link to your website. Then, the landing pages on your website should have call to action links.

Having easy email sign-up forms finds your clients for you without you having to spend a lot of time manually seeking them out!

Facebook is a brilliant digital tool for finding new clients. The platform hosts over 2.7 billions users, and is the ideal place for personal trainers to share their expertise.

You can use Facebook to draw in new clients by:

Creating quality content which demonstrates your expertise as a personal trainer
For example, you could cover topics such as "The 5 Best Fast-Busting Exercises to do at Home"
Share these articles directly from your blog to relevant Facebook Groups to encourage users to visit your website
Write grabbing headlines such as "Piling on the Pounds at Home? Discover 5 Secrets to Blasting Fat With These Home Workout Moves"

The key is to engage users and create an interest around your personal trainer knowledge. Once you have caught the attention of your target audience with great free content, you are likely to receive enquiries about your paid packages.

Demonstrate your Expertise With Workshop Events

Hosting a workshop is an affordable and highly effective strategy to find new clients.

Not only can you demonstrate your expertise as a personal trainer, a workshop gives you the opportunity to interact with potential clients face-to-face.

Here's how to get the best outcome from a workshop:

Pick your venue wisely. Do you have a popular leisure centre where you can find fresh faces to connect with?
Promote your workshop via social media, email newsletters and at the venue you intend to host at
Incentivise people to sign up to your workshop by emphasising the exclusivity of it with limited places
Hold a Q&A section after the workshop so you can interact with individuals directly

By organising a free workshop event, you can give value to those interested in personal training advice and encourage attendees to become paying clients.

Visual your Ideal Client on Instagram

With over a staggering 1-billion monthly users, Instagram is the place to find new clients.

Here's how:

Create (or update) your profile which presents you as a personal trainer. (Don't forget your niche!)
Share content which reflects your services and that will attract your ideal client
For example: you can post images or videos which demonstrate exercise techniques or nutrition advice
Create polls to find out what kind of content your visitors and followers want to see

If you haven't already got a personal trainer account, it's worth setting up a business Instagram account.

The difference between the two is that a business account allows you to access analytics and insights to help use Instagram as part of your marketing strategy.

You can use insights to find out what kind of users are engaging with your content, helping you to understand what type of content you should share to attract more followers.

Don't forget to include a link to your website in the "About Me" section. You can redirect Instagram users to your website to help conversion to paying clients.

Get Tweeting and Follow Hashtags on Twitter

Join the conversation and sign up to Twitter to see what your potential clients are talking about.

You can use Twitter as a research tool to find clients by:

By searching the right #hashtags relating to personal trainers, you can join in on conversations
For example, if you search #personaltraining, #workouts, #gymlife etc, you can opt to follow the conversations about these topics and find out what questions users are asking
Once you've identified the right topics, you can share your expertise as a personal trainer, redirecting attention to your profile

Make sure you have a concise "About Me" profile with a link to your website and your personal training services.

Answer Burning Questions on Quora

Quora is the ideal platform for finding clients as there are over 300-million monthly users scouring the site for answers to their burning questions.

This information-based platform works by allowing users to ask and answer questions on around 400,000 topics.

Here's how you can get involved:

Search keywords which are related to your personal trainer services to find out what users want to know
Answer any questions where you can share your expertise and industry knowledge
Encourage users to find out more about you as a personal trainer by adding a link to your website or blog posts after your insightful answers

Quora works in a similar way to Reddit in that your answers can gain upvotes from appreciative readers. This increases your overall exposure on the platform

Finding Personal Training Clients is Simple

By following our top tips in this article, you discover that it is easier to find clients than previously thought.

Don't forget to regularly review and adapt any strategies or content, depending on your feedback and engagement. This will help you to continually attract and find new clients as a personal trainer.

Credits - Charlotte Osborn