How To Get Clients to Promote Your Personal Training Business

Promote your personal training business using your current client base for an efficient way to generate new client leads. Clients hold the most knowledge about the ins and outs of your personal training business. They can be living, breathing, walking, talking advertisements for you. They hold the key information about the training experience you provide and most likely are wealthy in friends or family who want the same services. Think about the web of people connected to your clients and how much potential there is for growing your business. All you need to provide them is a brand to share about.

First, let’s discuss loyal clients

We need to establish ground rules for client loyalty before we can go willy nilly asking them to advertise for you. Here are three essential points for building client loyalty:

1. Frequent Communication – Personal training should be… personal. In and out of the gym, it is imperative to focus on maintaining connections with your clients. Creating a newsletter is a great way to keep them informed about your business and just tips as fitness trainees. Check-in with them consistently to make sure they are meeting their day to day personal goals in nutrition and fitness.
2. Listen! – As important as it is to communicate with your clients, listening to them is an important way of knowing that you are providing the fitness service they need and want from you. Encourage clients to give feedback as much as possible, so you can make sure the workouts and plans you provide are tailored to them.
3. Training Value – As a personal trainer, the value of your training is essential in making you stand out in such an oversaturated market. Listening and communication is key in increasing the value of your personal training business to your clients. Be able to cater to their fitness and nutritional needs in every way possible. Know your customer and help them get to know you.

Branding, Branding… Branding and more Branding

Whether you have two clients or 200, it is important to first create a brand for your business. Brand awareness is so extremely valuable to getting your business some recognition and remembrance. FitSW actually provides trainers with the option of creating a custom app with their own logo. This gives trainers the ability to tailor the software around their branding needs. Making a brand ubiquitous with a consistent presentation is proven to increase revenue by 33%.

Once a brand is established, it then becomes shareable and can be used for advertising. There are many free tools, like Canva, that help in developing a brand and logo to place on different materials like flyers, brochures, stickers, t-shirts, etc. Canva has hundreds of free templates to help design anything from logos to social media posts. The company even updated its template range to include Zoom virtual backgrounds in light of quarantine restrictions. Another such tool is Wepik, which lets you create flyers and brochures from scratch or use their templates. You can edit your work by adding images, text, shapes and more to make it look professional. Creating these materials can be as cheap or as expensive as you would like. Generally, the internet provides an abundance of different websites where you can design and produce custom gear for your business.

Make sure to include social media handles or website addresses on gear, so people can easily find more information on your business. With that being said, make sure all social media handles are all relatively similar and easy to remember.

Clients can be your brand ambassadors

Create branding packages either for virtual sharing like templates for newsletters and shareable social media posts. Also, create physical branding packages to give to clients. T-shirts and stickers are extremely useful for clients to promote personal training businesses. It’s a safe guess that clients carry the same water bottles to the gym as they do for the rest of their daily lives. These days, it’s a fad to load up a favorite Hydroflask or Nalgene with stickers from favorite restaurants, bars, travel destinations, and… a favorite personal trainer of course.

Here is a great overview of 50 of the best brand ambassador campaigns. See what these organizations do to successfully use their clients to be at the forefront of their advertising. Not all of these campaigns fall directly in line with selling personal training services, but their business models can be helpful for mimicking.

An example of a campaign could be offering referral benefits for clients promoting your business. These are a great way to encourage clients to be your brand ambassadors. For example, you can run a special where any client that gets someone to sign up for a class can receive free access to a class of their choice. This allows for the current client to grow interested and maybe even start consistently paying for and attending a new class. All the while, the newly-referred client is growth to your training business. This is otherwise known as killing two birds with one stone.

Get clients on social media to promote your personal training business

Social connections are like spiders endlessly weaving webs between different people and places. Each client has to have at least one friend. That friend has to have at least one other friend and that friend has to have one other friend. The connections are boundless and so is the personal trainer’s ability to capitalize on that. Social media campaigns can provide a really efficient means of spreading your brand. Current clients can boost the efficiency of campaigns through shareable social media posts. If they click to share, then they can receive a small discount on their next session or class or a free piece of merchandise.

Also, do not be afraid to take pictures with your clients and ask them to share them on their social media after a good workout. No doubt, their friends have been asking them about how in the world they have been getting in such good shape. To get your clients to share more about your business, incentivize sharing and caring about the workouts you provide. Obviously, training should speak for itself and be worthy of sharing about on its own, but everyone loves a good incentive here and there. There are so many ways to incentivize shares – this somewhat goes back to clients being a brand ambassador.

The discounts offered obviously have to be calculated within the realms of what the business can handle.

Discount strategies for clients to promote your personal training business

First and foremost, it is imperative to know your profit margin, markup, and break-even point. Calculate your gross profit to see how much money you have left after your expenses for the business are paid. Now, look at your markup and see how much profit you are earning for every training session and class. Finally, what is your break-even point and how much room do you have to spare between all these data points. In very basic terms, this is how to calculate the ability for your personal training business to have sales and discounts on services.

Here are some strategies and ideas for running your client promoted campaigns:

1. Look at what your competitors are offering clients for referrals and spreading their brand. How do you compare to that now and how can you compare to that in the future? If your campaigns can have more creative offers (within your profit margin) than your competitors, then you will be more likely to attract clients.
2. Get clients involved in sharing seasonal discounts. For example, around New Year this could be a promotion: “Don’t let your friends fall off the wagon with their New Year fitness goals! Bring your friend for FREE to your first session of the year!”
3. Ask what more your current clients want out of the training they are receiving and try to offer them that. If they want longer sessions, then run a promotion for extra time on their future sessions if they refer their friends.
4. Connect with other businesses that supplement your personal training business. For example, offer coupons to a local massage therapist for sharing your brand on social media and growing likes and shares.
5. Conduct a giveaway for clients who refer their friends. Each person they get signed up for a session or class is an entry into a raffle for the big prize. This can be a great social media campaign tactic for your clients to share.

The opportunities are truly endless if you can budget wisely and get creative!

Leave us a comment if you have any thoughts on how to get clients to promote your personal training business!