The Best Guide to Make an Online Personal Trainer Marketing Plan
Being an online personal trainer, you can perform many marketing activities targeted to people all over the world. But, to execute all those marketing activities smoothly while carrying out your training sessions and running your business, you need to work in discipline and stay on the right track consistently.
A marketing plan can help you plan out your marketing activities and invest resources to each activity thoughtfully. A marketing plan is a roadmap that lays out all the marketing activities and strategies that are to be executed for a specific period say, a quarter or a year.
A marketing plan gives you various benefits such as:
Helps You to Invest Resources Strategically
A marketing plan lays out all the details about each activity that you have to carry out during the year. This helps to understand how many resources should be invested in each activity to execute it successfully and not suffer losses.
Helps You Stay Focussed
A marketing plan has each activity listed along with the information regarding when it has to be executed. It also contains information about who has to do what. This helps you and your team have clarity and stay focussed throughout the year.
Acts As a Standard of Measure
A marketing plan acts as a standard of measure that can be compared with the actual performance to assess the performance and find out the gaps in terms of amount spent and success of the activities executed.
You need to work on these 4 aspects to build a effective marketing plan:
- Find and Stick to Your Niche
- Decide Your Marketing Activities
- Schedule Your Marketing Activities
- Measure Your Performance Regularly
Find and Stick to Your Niche
When you start your online personal trainer business, it might seem lucrative to sign up any kind of client who wants your service but in the long run, this will act as a barrier to your business growth. Try to find your area of expertise and put all your efforts towards the people who come under that area.
A unique segment which comes under your area of expertise and to whom you can provide your services to is called a niche.
A niche is important for your online personal trainer business for the following reasons:
- It helps you stand out from all the other online personal trainer
- It helps you to work in your area of expertise and thus, provide exceptional services
- It helps you to keep clients for longer and get more clients through word-of-mouth of your existing clients
- It increases the credibility of your online personal trainer business and sets up a brand value for your business.
For example, if you provide your online personal trainer services to any kind of a person, you will make it difficult for yourself to beat the competition and you won't have anything unique to offer that people already can't find on the internet.
But, when you choose a niche such as, young males from the age of 21-25 years who want to lose weight and build muscle, it will help you to showcase your expertise. You can offer specialised services and increase the credibility of your business. People will trust you more as they'll feel that you know what you're doing and will opt for your service. It will also help you stand out from your competition.
Decide Your Personal Trainer Marketing Activities
Once you know the types of people to whom you want to provide your online personal training services, it's time to find out and decide on the marketing activities you want to perform throughout the year to get clients and engage with them.
Here are a few activities that you can select:
Create Educational Content
As an online personal trainer, the best way to earn trust of your audience is by creating and providing educational content. Creating different types of content helps to connect with different types of people in your niche. It helps to educate them and show them your credibility. As people go on learning new things and trying them out, they also start trusting you and start taking interest in your services.
You can create and distribute content in many ways:
- Blogs
When it comes to content creation, having a blog should be the first and foremost thing on your list. Create a blog on topics around home workout and workouts without equipment. Educate them about the impact of different workouts on different muscles and body parts. - Videos
Videos are one of the most popular ways of content creation. People find it easier to learn through videos and engage more with videos than any other content medium. Create videos to show different workouts that people can easily do at their home or simple food recipes that people can easily cook at home instead of eating processed food. - Podcasts
Podcasts have been gaining a lot of popularity recently. People can listen to podcasts while doing their routine tasks such as driving to and from work, doing house chores, working out, etc. Create a podcast where you host fitness experts and interview them. You can even ask your social media followers to send in their questions that they want to ask and use those in a Q&A session at the end of each podcast episode. - Ebooks
Ebooks are a great way to share long-form content with your audience. You can create guides in the form of Ebooks and share them with your email subscribers. You can even use Ebooks as lead magnets to get more people in your email list. You can create Ebooks on topics such as, "A guide to gain muscle mass with strength training and a protein rich diet"
Build a Website
The biggest importance of building a website as an online personal trainer is that your website will be the biggest proof of your existence and help your business get the credibility it needs to survive and grow.
There are certain things you should add to your website:
- Showcase the services you provide
- Put testimonials of clients to increase credibility of your business
- Provide basic contact details such as email id and phone number
- Set up a call-to-action so people can book their first session with you from just a click
- Link your blog and other content pages with your website
- Mention an About section and add information about yourself along with your professional certificates. This will help people to have an idea about who you are and whether you're qualified enough or not.
Also, go through your competitors' websites to understand what's missing from your website and what would help you to make your website more high converting.
Offer Free Trials
Whether starting out as an online personal trainer or looking to grow your business, a good way to get more clients is by offering a free trial. Offer free trials for upto a week or 2 weeks. This will allow your potential clients to try out your services and understand whether it's appropriate for them.
It will leave a good impression about your business and will increase its credibility. It will also build trust in the people's eyes towards your online personal training business. Even if someone doesn't join your services, they will be impressed enough to recommend it to someone who they feel will be more interested.
Influencer Marketing
Fitness industry has seen a massive rise of influencers in the last few years. Influencers can be one of the fastest ways to get a large number of clients easily for your online personal training business.
Reach out to the influencers who are in the same niche. Find out if you can collaborate in a way that is beneficial to both or you can pay them to promote your services. Gain their trust and show how your services can benefit their followers.
You can also invite these influencers to your podcast for an interview. This will help them in getting more followers and also help you engage with their followers and promote your services to them.
Organize Webinars
Organizing webinars is another way to attract people to your online personal training business and get more clients. You can organize webinars at specific intervals such a once a fortnight or once a month. Promote your webinars through your social media channels and emails.
Keep your webinars on educational and practical topics such as, "Impacts of HIIT and How to do an HIIT workout an home". You can keep a Q&A session at the end of the webinar. Once your webinar is done, you can give a small reward such as, "3 day split HIIT home workout plan" and in return, you can take basic details about the people who attended the webinar.
Also, provide basic details about your services along with your website URL and your contact details. This will help the interested people to reach out and book their first session.
You can also provide a discount coupon for people who attend your webinars.
Find and Connect With More Online Personal Trainers
There must be hundreds of more online personal trainers whom you can reach out. This will help you to get more clients. All the other online personal trainers won't have the same niche as you. Connecting with these online personal trainers and having a good relationship with them can have benefits for both of you.
They can refer their clients to you incase they're overbooked or in case those people don't come under their personal training niche and you can do the same in return for them.
Once you have developed a good relationship with them, you can even ask them for recommendations and referrals.
Send Newsletters to Engage With Your Clients
Send newsletters weekly or monthly to your email list to engage with them regularly. You can provide various guides, ebooks, insights and tips to your email list. Share various discounts and offers with them. Share personalised emails with your clients who are in your email list. You can send them special offers. Also, send them personalised birthday wishes to make them feel valued and happy with your services.
Guest Blog on Other Personal Trainers' Blogs
Another way to attract more people towards your business is by guest blogging on other personal trainers' blogs. If you have good connection with other personal trainer and more people in the fitness industry, you can reach out to them and ask them if you can write for their blog as a guest.
This will help you reach more people and increase traffic to your website as well. This will further help in getting more leads and eventually, more clients.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media is the best way to engage with your audience at any time of the day. It helps you build your brand value and get a wider reach which further helps you get more followers and connect with more people.
Here are some of the social media platforms that you should use as an online personal trainer:
- Facebook
Facebook pretty much explains itself these days. It has the highest number of users among all the social media platforms. Create a Facebook group to build an engaging community where everyone can share their pain points and problems freely and you can explain more about your services and offer them to your group members. You can also use Facebook Ads to reach out to more people and promote your services even to the people who live far away from your city. - Instagram
Instagram has become one of the most popular social media platforms and is loved by millennials and Gen Z. Use Instagram to post pictures and videos. Instagram also has features such as Stories, which you can to engage more with your audience by adding polls, and Reels, which you can use to share short videos around simple exercises that people can do. Also, you can go live and do a Q&A with your followers and get to know more about their pain points. - Twitter
Twitter is a short-form social media platform where you can share your posts in the form of tweets. You can create threads by linking your tweets together. This helps you to distribute your content in a different way and engage with more people. You can use hashtags in your tweets to get a wider reach.
Schedule Your Marketing Activities
Once you have decided the marketing activities you want to execute during the year, it's time to schedule these activities and assigning the required roles for each activity. To schedule the marketing activities for your online personal trainer business, you should create a marketing calendar.
A marketing calendar will help you schedule your marketing activities for the duration of your marketing plan, say, a quarter or a year.
You should create a marketing plan because of the following reasons:
Helps Maintain Discipline
A marketing calendar can help you stay disciplined. When you have always activities pinned down with all the details narrowed down to each day, you will stay on track and execute your activities as planned.
Keeps Everyone in Loop
A marketing plan schedules all the activities and also shows the required people. It shows who is assigned to do each task in the activity that is to be executed. This gives clarity to people and helps avoid unnecessary conflicts.
Helps Track the Progress of Your Marketing Activities
A marketing calendar will help you track how your marketing activities are progressing as you can compare the actual timeline with the scheduled timelines. This will help in finding out the money and resources being invested in all the activities and will help you to manage your resources effectively and efficiently.
It will also help you understand what led to the delays, if there are any and will help bridge the gap while making the subsequent marketing plans.
Measure Your Performance Regularly
Your marketing plan is more or less complete with all the above aspects but to actually find its effectiveness, you need to measure your performance and compare it with your plan regularly. This will help you to find the gaps and will help you understand what changes to make to increase the effectiveness.
You should follow some of the below metrics to measure your performance:
Review Your Sales Numbers
One of the metrics you must track is your sales number. If you revenue is higher than what it was before having a marketing plan, your business might be moving a positive direction. Also, find out the sales number of each activity instead of finding the total number. This will also help you understand which activity helped in getting the most clients.
Calculate Your Return-on-Investment
While your sales number is a good indication of your performance, it may not always show a true image. To find out how much return you got on your investment in all the activities, compare the amount you invested with the revenue you earned. If your return after implementing the marketing plan is more than what it was before, then consider your marketing plan a success.
Evaluate Clients' Feedback
Take surveys and feedback regularly from your clients. It will help you understand which of your activities worked and which didn't. It will help you to have a different perspective and find new gaps that you can work on to execute those activities better the next time.
Review Lead Generation
Review the leads that you generated with the help of your marketing plan. Getting more and more leads may help in increasing your conversion rates as well since most people don't suddenly become your clients but are in the decision making process.
Compare the number of leads you generated. If you generated a lot more leads than before, then you are in going in the right direction with your marketing plan.
Find Out Competitors' Reactions
Your competitors' reactions are a huge indicator of your performance. If your competitors try to adopt your activities or try out new activities to beat you, it shows they're facing the heat and are trying to up their game to stay in the market.
Conclusion
Work on each element equally to get the best out of your marketing plan. Make sure to evaluate your marketing plan consistently and work on the gaps in the subsequent marketing plan to survive and grow your business in the long run.