A Guide on How to Make a Personal Trainer Marketing Plan

As a personal trainer, you must have to carry out loads of marketing activities throughout the year along with taking your personal training sessions and taking care of your business. All of it all together can end up making your work chaotic and making you mentally fatigued.

Having a marketing plan to sort out your marketing strategies and activities can help you avoid burnout and continue to grow your personal training business.

A marketing plan, as it sounds, is a document that outlines all the marketing strategies of your business for a specific time which can be a year, a quarter or 6 months. It lays out all the promotional, advertising and marketing activities that are planned for the period.

But is a marketing plan really necessary?

Let's find out:

A Marketing Plan Helps You to Formulate Strategies

A marketing plan enables you to be forward looking and think ahead. It makes you consider how your marketing and promotional activities can impact your business and brand image. It helps you come up with innovative strategies that you can implement to achieve your marketing objectives.

It Helps You Understand Where to Invest

With so many marketing activities, it can get chaotic to invest and manage resources. A marketing plan lays out information about every activity that you'll perform during the year. This includes budget and resources that each activity will require along with its time frame. This makes it easier to manage resources and have a track for investments which can be used later while evaluating the marketing plan.

It Helps You Evaluate Your Marketing Performance

A marketing plan lays out all the strategies that are to be performed to achieve the goals. It acts as a standard that can be compared with the actual performance to find out the deviances and the level of success the plan achieved.

It Allows You to Have Clarity

A marketing plan helps everyone to have absolute clarity of what they are doing and what is expected of them. Also, all the staff have a clear understanding about business, its growth targets and how they are contributing to help achieve those targets.

Here are the 4 important steps for a successful marketing plan:

Having a defined niche
Outlining your marketing strategies
Creating a marketing calendar
Evaluating your marketing plan

Start with Defining Your Niche

As a personal trainer, it's important to have a niche whose pain points you can solve better than your competition. A niche is a targeted segment of people with some specific features and pain points that you can serve with special skillset and expertise.

For Example:

Instead of providing strength training sessions to people of different random segments, you can provide strength training sessions catered to a specific segment such as young females from the age of 20-25 years who want to build muscle by weight training and nutritional diet.

This will help you to stand out from the competition and build more credibility of your business. Moreover, it will help you get clients who want to stay with you for a longer period.

Some benefits of having a niche for your personal training business:

It makes you an expert
It helps you stand out from the competition
It increases the credibility of your personal training business

You can find your personal training niche by following the below 4 steps:

Identify Your Own Interests
Find the Audience Aligned with Your Interest
Solve the Pain Points of the Target Audience
Assess the Profitability

To understand these steps in detail, check out our guide on how to find your niche as a personal trainer.

Outline Your Marketing Strategies

Once you have defined your niche, it's time to select the marketing strategies that you want to carry out during the year.

Here are some marketing strategies that you should use for your personal training business:

Create and Distribute Engaging Content

As a personal trainer, it is important for you to communicate and engage with your audience regularly. This helps you build a connection with them and earn their trust. It also helps to increase awareness about your personal training business.

The best way to connect and engage with your niche is by creating and distributing amazing educational content.

Content creation is important because:

It helps you build relationships as when the readers read your content they develop trust in you so it becomes important that you create good quality content.
It helps to establish, share, and strengthen your brand.
It provides benefits to your readers by providing them knowledge or entertainment so they don’t return empty-handed.

Here are some ways that can help you come up with content ideas:

Keep up with the trend
Pay attention to feedback
Keep a tab on Google search suggestions
Track competitors and explore their content regularly

You can start by creating a blog as they're one of the oldest yet most popular content formats. Stay disciplined and maintain an active blog. Post informational and engaging content regularly to educate your audience. This will build their trust in you. Gradually you can also start promoting your services through your blog.

Some other formats you can use to create content are:

Videos
Ebooks
Infographics
Podcasts

Click here to understand and use the 4 simple ways to find content ideas for your personal training business.

Conduct Workshops

Conduct workshops regularly as it helps to engage with people and earn their trust. Organize both online and in-person workshops. Invite your clients and people who come under your niche by promoting the workshops on your social media accounts.

You can organize different types of workshops such as:

Workout sessions providing a no equipment home workout
Informative webinars educating people about how different exercises and different types of workouts have different impacts on your body
Q&A and myth-busting sessions where you answers various FAQs and clear doubts of the participants

Remember to engage with your participants and show your expertise. Explain the various services you offer along with the pricing plans. Provide them limited time offers to induce them into taking your personal training services.

Take their basic information so you can contact them. Add them to your email list and provide them more educational content and offers to show credibility and build their trust. Also, give them basic details about your personal training business such as location, contact details, email and website link.

Send Newsletters and Personalized Emails

Send newsletters to your email list to engage with them regularly and increase their trust in your personal training business. Provide educational guides, insights, tips, workout plans and information about various upcoming deals and offers.

You can also use newsletters to keep your subscribers in loop regarding various upcoming workshops and social events that you would be hosting.

Use email to build good relations with your clients. Send them special offers and home workout plans to help them achieve their goals. Also, send personalized emails to them on their birthdays and other milestones.

It is important to understand that sending emails doesn't mean spamming your email list. Schedule your emails and send your email newsletters at a fixed interval such as once a week. This will keep them engaged and subscribed to your email list for a longer period.

Having an active presence on social media has now become a proof of existence for fitness businesses. Use various social media channels to market your personal training business and engage with your target audience.

Here are some channels that you should use:

Facebook
Facebook has the highest number of users among all the social media channels. Use a Facebook group to create communities and engage with your followers. This will help you understand and be better equipped to cover their needs, wants and pain points. Also, Facebook Ads has a plethora of options to promote your personal training business to your target audience as locally and narrow as you want to.

Twitter
Twitter is an amazing platform to engage with people and share short form content. You can connect with people easily and share tips and insights. You can even use multiple tweets together by creating a 'Thread'. Use Hashtags to expand the reach of your tweets to engage with more people.

Instagram
As a personal trainer, having an Instagram page is a must. Use this channel to engage with your audience. Post pictures and videos of your clients training and of your establishment. Use Stories and Reels to share short form content such as simple exercises or educational tips on training. Go live and host an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session where your followers can clear their doubts with a free mind.

Set up a Referral Program

Set up a referral program where you provide incentives to your client whenever a new person starts taking your services when referred by them.

A referral program has 2 benefits. First, it helps you in getting new clients without spending too much. Second, it helps in keeping your existing clients for a longer period as they also feel valued due to the rewards they receive.

Here are some benefits you can provide:

Special offers such as a 30% discount for the next 6 months of membership for your existing clients
First month free on one year membership for the new client
A packaged membership deal for an existing client and his referred new client

Offer Exclusive Merchandise of Your Personal Training Business

One of the best ways to market your services and establish your brand is to offer exclusive merchandise of your personal training business to your clients.

Having an exclusive merchandise has many benefits for your personal training business:

It helps you have a steady stream of revenue which is not dependent on getting new clients all the time
You can use it to incentivize your clients and make them feel valued.
It also leads your clients to promote your business without spending any extra money on promotions as other people will notice your brand when they use your merchandise in public

Build Partnerships with Local Health and Fitness Industry Businesses

Having strong partnerships can be beneficial for the long term growth of your personal training business. Reach out to nearby health and fitness industry businesses and discuss with them the benefits that you can provide one another by having a partnership. Explain how it can help in increasing awareness and getting more clients.

Here are various ways you can work with local businesses:

Collaborate and host events together where you offer a combined session of your services to both of your clients
Promote each other's business by providing a free coupon as a reward to your clients or as an offer with a purchase
Refer people who you think can benefit from the services provided by the partner businesses

Give Your Holiday Greetings

The holiday season is an excellent time to market your personal training business. It helps you attract new clients as people want to stay in shape during all the festivities and get-togethers. Provide mouth watering offers and host holiday campaigns during this period to attract people to your fitness business.

You can provide lucrative offers and campaigns such as:

Heavy discounts during Black Friday on your services and merchandise
Host a Christmas event for your clients where they can bring their friends and families and have a relaxing time

Have a Retention Plan

Continuously striving to get new clients isn't the only way to grow your personal training business. For the long run, it is necessary to retain your clients. When your clients stay for a long term with you, it helps you to increase your revenue. Loyal clients also indicate high credibility of your business and spread a good word about your business even without any incentives.

Here are a some ways to make your clients feel happy and valued:

Interact with them and continuously check up with them on their progress and any problems that they may be facing
Send them personalized gifts on their birthdays
Host social events with various activities and games for your clients

Make a Marketing Calendar

Just deciding your marketing activities and preparing for them isn't enough, you also need to understand when each activity should take place. A marketing calendar helps you schedule all your marketing activities of your marketing plan for specific time such as 6 months or one year.

Let's understand why having a marketing calendar is important:

It Helps You Stay Focussed

A marketing calendar gives you an overview of all the activities to be carried out at a specific time. This helps you and your team to work together easily and perform all the activities with high focus.

It Helps Maintain Discipline

As a personal trainer, it is difficult to carry out your business and look over all the marketing activities. A marketing calendar allows you to be in loop of each and every activity and helps you stay disciplined throughout the course of your marketing plan.

It Helps You to Track Your Costs

A marketing calendar allows you to track the amount of money being invested in all the activities. This helps you to manage your marketing budget more effectively. Having a track of the money spent also helps you to evaluate your marketing plan at the end of the year.

It Helps You to Assign Roles

A marketing calendar allows you to monitor what each person in your team is doing individually and how all those individual efforts work together. It acts as a transparent tool and helps each person in your team get aligned with their roles and responsibility along with their individual target that they have to achieve.

We have selected some marketing calendar tools that you can use for your personal training business:

Asana
Asana is a free tool with a simple interface that allows you to schedule your activities and tasks . You can use it for long term projects and activities to stay on track. You can also export from Asana to other calendar tools like Google Calendar.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a great marketing calendar tool for big teams that work in collaboration. it has integrated functions that enables you to stay in one place instead of switching between different apps all the time.
Trello
Trello is an easy to use, free and flexible tool that you can use as a marketing calendar. It gives you a visual way to manage your projects and allows you to collaborate in real time.

Evaluate Your Marketing Plan

Last but not the least, always measure your performance. Compare your performance with set standards and evaluate your marketing plan to understand how successful it was and what changes you should make to do better and grow your personal training business even more.

Here are some metrics you can use to measure and evaluate your marketing plan:

Sales Numbers

This is probably the most straight forward metric. It is a positive indication if your sales revenue is considerably more after implementing your marketing plan that it was before. If there isn't a clear rising trend in your sales numbers, you will have to analyze where your plan went wrong and cover those deviances in your rectified marketing plan.

Return-on-Investment (ROI)

When you create a marketing plan and spend money on your marketing activities, you want to a good return on your investment. You can measure your return on investment by comparing the amount of money you invested with the revenue you earned from all of those activities.

Customer Feedback

Customer feedback helps you understand how favourable or unfavourable your marketing activities were. Send out surveys to your clients and your email list to get their direct response. This will help you understand which activities you can repeat and which ones you should drop.

Lead Generation

You should also review how many leads your marketing plan helped you generate. A lot people don't instantly become your clients but get added to your email list. Compare the number of leads generated before and after the implementation of your marketing plan. An significant increase in the number of leads indicates chances of getting more clients.

Conclusion

Keep in mind all the steps while creating your marketing plan, from deciding your niche till forming your marketing calendar. Regularly evaluate your marketing plan to ensure that it is on the right track. Note down the deviances and make the required changes to the plan whenever needed.

Maintain a high level of discipline while carrying out your marketing plan to grow your personal training business, get more clients and earn high revenue.