Instagram Marketing for Personal Trainers: A Mega Guide

Marketing has changed drastically and it is continuing to change. Since the rise of the internet, new marketing methods have come and gone. However, one aspect of marketing that is more likely going to stay awhile is marketing on Instagram. With this guide we intend to cover everything in terms of Instagram marketing for personal trainers.

First, Why Use Instagram for Marketing?

Instagram is a powerhouse when it comes to social media. Instead rambling a bunch on how awesome Instagram is for marketing, lets give some numbers a chance to do the talking. Below are some general statistics on Instagram usage:

Those are some pretty astounding statistics. To put it onto perspective, roughly 15% of the global population is on Instagram every month. To make it more impressive, only 53% of the world has access to the internet.

That means, 25% of everyone on the internet visits Instagram every month. That’s a pretty massive audience to have access to, for free.

Not only that, but a substantial amount of those people visiting Instagram every month are visiting business profiles daily.

This means, in terms of reach, Instagram has more then enough audience to go around.

Now lets dive into return on investment.

Based on the stats in figure 1 and 2, not only are there a lot of people on Instagram but a majority of them are active and engaged users.

If there’s anything you should pull away from figure 2, it’s this:

1. Money spent on Marketing on Instagram is well spent.
2. Instagram is an engaged platform, creating a diverse marketplace for both people who are selling services/products and for those who are looking to purchase services/products.

In other words, Instagram is a fantastic tool to use to tap into target audiences and generate income for your personal training business.

On top of this, the growth and popularity of fitness related content on Instagram is growing and will only continue to grow into the near future. Instagram marketing for personal trainers is looking bright!

Instagram Marketing For Personal Trainers Best Practices

Now, a lot of those statistics we just went over are definitely exciting. But, in order to enjoy the fruits of Instagram, you have to learn your way around the garden. That’s to say, if you just create an account and slap some content up there, it’s probably not going to be performing like you want it to.

Lets go over, from the ground up, what setting yourself up for success looks like.

1. Make sure your profile is a business profile.

The reason for this is simple. It’s free and with Instagram business profiles, you unlock a number of great features such as insights into how your content is performing, you can promote posts to reach more people, and you bio will display a contact button.

Just like that, your profile has turned into a small landing page for people to view your content and get in contact with you.

If you want to switch your account over to a business profile, head to your account settings in the app and select “switch to business profile”. Boom, it’s as easy as a couple taps.

2. Optimize your profile.

Make sure your username and name in your bio are the same. This way when people search for you and land on your profile, they know they are in the right place.

With so many fake accounts out there, people are naturally more skeptical when landing on a profile that doesn’t display some form of consistency.

3. Make your bio relevant, short, and sweet.

Your bio will be among one the first things people read. Keeping it relevant is a small yet valuable aspect of a successful business account.

There’s already a character limit to how much you write in your bio, but nonetheless, this is still an important factor.

As a personal trainer, a good example of a specific bio could be:

“I help women lose weight and hit their health/fitness goals. And I have a damn good time doing it”

The example bio above is good because it tells people what you do and it captures their attention.

4. Make it easy for users to discover more about you.

Please, do yourself and your followers a favor and avoid putting URLs in the captions of your posts. The links are not clickable and you cannot copy them. This is a major pain in the butt for those who do want to visit the link.

Use a site like Linktree or use one of the Linktree Alternatives. Linktree allows you to put all of your links in one place.

Notice the link? That’s where we store all of our links for people to easily click. Here’s what happens when you click the link:

Once you click, you are given a smorgasbord of options to explore. In our Linktree profile, users have the option to check out what we do or explore blogs we have posted.

From a business perspective, this is invaluable. We can include call-to-actions to drive people to sign up and provide immediate access to content.

The free plan of Linktree allows you to upload an unlimited amount of links and personalize your profile.

If you want insights into how many people are clicking and what their clicking, you have to fork over some cash. But, it’s only $6/month and with it you get many more features.

5. Post original, relevant, and valuable content.

By now, you have probably heard us say this time and time again. But much like gasoline is the fuel to your car, quality content is going to be the fuel behind a successful Instagram profile.

People are looking for new content that’s informative and engaging in new ways. In many ways, this presents new challenges to those of use trying to run a business. But it really depends on your perspective.

With Instagram users demanding more and higher quality content, it could be used as a device to distinguish yourself from your competition.

Lets look at how to make your profile a content gold mine.

Make it informative and relevant

If you’re a personal trainer specializing in women’s weight loss, your content should be geared towards that niche.

Now as a personal trainer, most of your content is going to be gated. By that we mean the most valuable information that you provide comes along side people purchasing sessions with you as that’s where they will do a majority of their learning.

One good method of creating content is to take what you typically teach people during an 8-week or 12-week program, divide it up into small lessons, and post that on your Instagram.

Don’t post it all at once as that can devalue your content and leave your grasping for what to post. Instead post in-between other posts such as client shout outs, updates to your business, and other posts you might be making.

One goal you should shoot for is truly adding value to the daily lives of your followers and those that visit your profile. People should be able to come to your profile and after clicking on a couple posts, learn something new that they can take away.

Make it engaging

If your content is informative and relevant, people will naturally engage with it more then non-informative content.

However, there other ways to make it engaging.

One thing you can do is host challenges and polls regularly. Ask questions on your story using the poll feature of Instagram stories and use the feedback you get to create content or training programs people want.

Hosting a challenge can be a good method of creating engagement because the foundation of the challenge is built on the people who are participating.

Additionally, create content with calls to action. In your post, include things like “Share with someone who needs to see this” or “comment below”. This is a good way to get people to interact with your content which then triggers the Instagram algorithm to prioritize your content ahead of others.

One last good measure you can to get people to interact with your posts is to use emotion. Creating posts that people can relate to will generate engagement.

6. Interact with your followers.

When people comment on your posts or DM you, it’s important that your do your best to respond. Responding shows you care enough to converse with your followers even if you don’t know them.

This sort of thing helps bring the digital relationship down to earth.

7. Take advantage of highlights.

Highlights are stories you’ve pinned to your profile because they have some sort of value. Highlights are among the first things users will see when viewing your profile.

As you post stories, remember to save some of the more valuable ones to your highlights.

As a personal trainer, some stories you may want to highlight could be posts about client progress, client testimonials, client success stories, stories about you, new packages or services you’re selling, and anything else that might seem valuable to know as a new visitor to your profile.

Plus, it generates more content for people view when looking at your page which is ultimately what you want.

8. Use hashtags

When it comes to Instagram marketing for personal trainers hashtags can be a great tool to use to get your content discovered by new people. Naturally, many people gravitate towards some of the more popular hashtags.

However, you might want to stray away from the most popular hashtags because a lot of people are using those so it could be easy for your post to get lost among the thousands of posts under the same hashtag.

A good practice could be to use more specific hashtags mixed in with some of the more popular hashtags.

9. Go interact with other posts.

Garyvee coined this as the “two cents” strategy. It’s rather simple, but if you want to grow your following, this can be a powerful strategy.

Here’s what to do: pick 10 hashtags that are relevant to your profile. Go to each hashtag and find 10 posts and comment something thoughtful on each post or in other words provide your “two cents”. You should be commenting on close 100 posts or close to it.

Doing this as frequently as you can will help your gain more instagram followers. Not only that but you’ll get to see a lot of different types of content getting posted which could give you some good ideas as far as what to post.

10. Diversify your content.

Try not to post the same type of image or video every single day. Try mixing it up. Here are some idea’s on how you can mix up your posts:

1. Motivational posts. Post a quote or inspirational story. Even better if it’s a story related to you, whether it be your own story or a client of yours.
2. Behind the scenes posts. When you sit down to create programs or workouts, take some snapshots of your process. This gives people a window into how you do what you do.
3. Reposts from people you follow or one of your followers. This is great, especially if it’s a client of yours. It gives you the chance to shift the spotlight onto others.
4. Educational posts. Post something that people can learn from. Whether it’s nutrition based, fitness based, or something else, people love to learn new things.

11. Create visually consistent style.

If you are able to master creating intellectually engaging content and make it visually appealing, then you’ve got a pretty good grasp on Instagram marketing for personal trainers.

But this can be hard to do sometimes. But boy do people live consistency. As a personal trainer, you’ll more then likely be posting a lot of picture and videos of you workout or other people working out.

You can really make a difference if you keep a couple things in mind as you post you pictures and videos:

1. Use the same filter. Don’t mix up a bunch of filters, each image should look visually similar in terms of how the colors pop.
2. If you’re using text on your images, use the same fonts for everything.
3. When posting images with color, try creating a color palette that you use for every single image and video. Not sure how to make a color palette? Head over to coolors.co. Coolors.co generates color palettes randomly and lets you choose which colors you like. Once you find a good combo, you can save it as an image on your computer to reference.

Above is an example of all of the color palettes you can choose from. There are literally thousands of color combinations you can pick from.

Once you’ve found one, just export it right to your laptop to keep forever.

Notice how there are many options for saving? There are probably a couple that are unfamiliar but fear not. Simply select “png” and you’ll get the following result:

In the image notice that there’s a six digit number at the bottom of each column? Those are your hex codes that tell computers what color to display. It sounds a lot fancier then it is, but essentially if you are ever creating something in an adobe product or some other design tool, just type in the number on the color you want and you are all good to go.

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