Content Marketing for Personal Trainers: A Comprehensive Guide

Content marketing and creation are growing consistently difficult, let alone as a personal trainer. Content nowadays is gaining more and more value to the average business. Primarily because a lot of people turn to the internet to consume content. Whether it be for educational purposes, entertainment, or to try and solve a problem.

Content comes in many forms, such as blogs, social media posts, or even podcasts. Content oftentimes serves as two things:

• Brand awareness for your personal training business. Especially if you write blogs or post on social media a lot. The more you put out content, the more likely someone is to stumble across your content and thus, your brand or business.
• An added bonus. This is especially true for people who put out good content OR if you have content that people can only access when they are a client of yours.

As content grows in value in our modern, digital era, the quality of content increases in value. Let’s dive into a couple of things that make content “good” and how to keep your momentum going.

First, What Makes Good Content?

There are a couple of nuances in creating content on the internet. First, you have to worry about whether or not people will like your content. Then you have to figure out how to make search engines like your content. It takes effort to make good content.

There isn’t a “secret key to success” when it comes to making content on the internet. The real key to success is taking the time to do the research and create the content.

#NoPlagarizing

And at all costs, DO NOT steal ideas from other sites or people. While there may be topics that you steal, don’t steal the content itself. Not only is this acting in bad faith, but Google will also ding you for it (if you are stealing blog content).

As an individual, you can create your own thoughts and development flows around topics that have already been covered. The best thing about being human is that we all have uniquely different perspectives and that’s what makes life so interesting.

Good content comes from applying your unique perspective to topics that others have covered already and developing new avenues of thought around new topics. Google doesn’t dock you for covering a subject that has already been covered, but it will dock you for being completely and utterly unoriginal.

Not only will Google dock you, but your readers will find themselves completely uninterested in your work as well. These days people are massively overloaded with content and it can be quite overwhelming.

Good content leaves the viewer/listener/reader with little to no questions about the subject you are covering. Good content should cover all of the questions they might have about the subject. Think from the perspective of a person who knows nothing about the subject. Consider getting help from a writer to generate some good content to start.

If for entertainment, then the content should make enough of an impact for the person to remember you and your business. Good entertainment content raises brand awareness. I’m sure you could think of some commercials or ads on your social media feed off the top of your head and their associated brand.

Good content is memorable, thoroughly informative, easy to understand, and unique. The best and easy way to check whether your content is plagiarized or not, try online tools like Copyscape or Check-Plagiarism. This will help you in detecting plagiarism in your content before using it for marketing purposes.

Content Marketing Funnels to Increase Conversions

Strategic content creation through marketing funnels is the most useful reason for creating content. Content marketing funnels can boost your conversions tremendously by leading the customer through the purchasing process. Through the funnel, you will create value and authority as a professional in the fitness business.

Through content marketing funnels, you can convey a sense of your personality and establish a sense of comfort for the potential client. Comfort for clients is a huge determining factor in who they hire as their personal trainer.

Top of the Funnel

First, you begin by informing the customer and grabbing their initial attention when they discover your coaching or training services. This can be in the form of running ads using blogs, videos, social media posts, and so on that, you have available. Otherwise, make your content

You need to include a call to action to sign up, follow, or subscribe for more information. Include this in each stage of the funnel to direct your customers to the point of purchase.

Grab the attention of clients right off the bat by telling them exactly what your mission as a trainer is. This does not have to be laid out in plain words, but you can create value for your services by showing how knowledgable you are.

An example of a trainer who portrays themselves well through content is Karina Inkster, a vegan fitness coach. She puts a great deal of personality into her very informative content. She has a TON of content. From the perspective of a potential client, she seems fun, intelligent, and very encouraging. Sounds like a hard competitor to beat from a trainer’s perspective.

Middle of the funnel

Following the discovery content, serve content that engages your potential clients further like surveys, content downloads (like a free one-week workout routine), and other more interactive content. Prompt them to further consider your services with this level of content.

Content that requires an action from the client draws their attention much more than an article or series of images. In the personal training business, trainers must make sure that their clients feel heard and understood.

Providing ways to receive input from current and potential clients is a great way to establish that two-way communication that is so vital to running a personal training business.

Personalization plays an important role in this content marketing stage and the bottom stage. Consumers are drawn to personalization because it generates a stronger connection with the brand.

In fact, 90% of consumers find personalization appealing (Statista).

The best way to serve personalized content is through email marketing. Email marketing allows you as the seller to deliver personalized, interactive content.

Email marketing is also an important medium for sharing the content you generate on different platforms. Imagine delivering your golden content to potential clients in a way that more immediately grabs their attention. This cultivates relationships with people interested in your personal training right off the bat.

Bottom of the Funnel

After that, you have to lead your potential clients through the most difficult section of the funnel to the purchasing stage. Here is where you need to create content that eliminates the cognitive dissonance that a customer may experience before making a purchase.

Provide testimonials, a free session, discounts on the first month, etc. At this point, most trainers work on a relatively small enough scale that you could personally reach out to the potential clients at this stage.

Exemplify your character and values as a personal trainer through your content. Pair that with guiding potential clients down the marketing funnel, and you will be guaranteed to sell more sessions.

Creating effective content

Content marketing is only effective if you make sure the content you create is specific to your audience’s interests. In the personal training field, your content should generally consist of mental, physical, and nutritional guidance.

That being said, the competition is thick when creating content around those subjects. Therefore, you must take a deep dive into keyword research to understand what people search for and what is already being heavily discussed on those topics.

All the content you create must be based around a keyword and related keywords. This will boost your search engine optimization (SEO) and help you rank higher when people search for those keywords. The keywords you choose to build content around must align with the searcher’s intent.

Here’s an example of creating content around misaligned search intent:

You write an article to attract new clients who are looking for nutritional guidance to lose their belly fat. The demographics for the audience are men and women over the age of 35 who have struggled to keep the weight off of their midsection.

However, you choose “healthier eating” as the keyword to focus on. Although relevant, you probably will not attract a more specific audience of people who want to lose belly fat. Instead, use “diet to lose belly fat” as the key phrase focus.

Now, narrow down the audience of who will read the article and most likely become a lead. Focus the content around the difference between men and women and how age, diet, and exercise will affect their progress.

Through this, you have attracted a specific audience with a specific training goal in mind that you can provide services for. You have established credibility by exemplifying your knowledge in an informative article.

Tools

You’ll find plenty of free tools on the internet to help you with your keyword research. If you are already running Google ads or have a google account, then you can also use the Google Keyword Planner. This tool is completely free to use, unlike most others.

Other free tools or tools with a limit on free access are:

• Wordtracker – This site has limited free access, but for a quick search or two, it will do the job.
• Ubersuggest – Niel Patel, a leader in SEO, and his team created this tool to help people like you conduct effective and well-informed keyword research.
• WordStream – Wordstream narrows a keyword search down to your industry and uses your website to gather information as well. This is a great tool for getting the ball rolling on your research.
• Rank Tracker – You have access to unlimited keyword searches with the free version.
• Moz Keyword Explorer – Upon signing up for a free account, you get 10 free searches per month.

These tools will help you narrow down your content topics and give you plenty of ideas to build content around.

Content Repurposing

You will eventually, without a doubt hit a wall in your content creation.

This is completely okay! There is nothing in life that we do without hitting a wall before continuing on. Your content generation is absolutely no exception to that.

Repurposing your content is a fantastic way of keeping that content stream alive and reimagining it differently. Repurposing content is practically limitless as long as you think outside of the box for ways to make your content shine a little brighter.

Let’s say you created a social media post highlighting the importance of the hip hinge. You take a couple of photos and edit them together to show an example of the movement. You get good feedback on the post and leave it be for a couple of weeks.

Later, your having trouble coming up with content to share with your clients and then you remember that you made a post about the hip hinge and never expanded on it. You can repurpose that content and the idea by creating a video demonstrating the hip hinge and different exercises. In the video, describe its importance and the function it has in daily life.

From there, you can take snippets of the video and post that content to your social media platforms in a series. You can share that series of snippets in an email campaign. To go even further, you can write a whole blog article on the movement and dig deeper into the topic.

And that’s repurposing for you! Repurposing content is unlimited in opportunity. Take a moment and evaluate the content you have produced and where you can display the information in a different way.

This places your content on multiple different platforms, making it accessible to a wider audience.

Overall

Content marketing and creation is an endless, cyclical process that you will need to stay on top of your whole career. As a fitness professional, you will have to really convey your personality in your content and keep it exciting. You have ample competition out there for content in the realm of health and fitness.

Keep your ear to the ground to stay in touch with the latest trends and knowledge that emerges so that you can be the first to share about it. Good content is valuable in itself, but content that you can relate to your business will be the most valuable to you.

Make sure that your content prompts the potential client to take some sort of action that leads them to a conversion. This is the most important aspect of content marketing – funneling people down a path to purchasing your services.

Get out there and get busy creating content! People who are searching for information that you can provide as a personal trainer already have a goal in mind. Convince them that you have what it takes to help them reach that goal!