7 Effective Ways to Get Clients as a Personal Trainer

Today’s new generation has a holistic approach towards fitness. Personal training is not only about physical workout, but also about providing a healthy lifestyle. A great trainer should just focus on the physical movements of their clients as well as be a great motivator.

As a personal trainer, you already have all the skills and qualities to provide an exceptional service for your clients but you may lack some skills when it comes to attracting clients consistently.

Here are 7 effective ways for you to understand how to get clients as a personal trainer:

Define Your Personal Training Niche

Identify the service you want to offer. A personal trainer can be an expert in many specializations such as bodybuilding, marathon training, weight loss, powerlifting, etc. You should define your niche and target your audience accordingly

If you are a trainer for older adults your target audience will be people above 50 years of age and so, if you are a bodybuilding trainer, you can't go with the same audience i.e., 50 years or above. So, you must define what you are specialized in and choose your audience accordingly. Hey this will help you attract the clients who need your service and will be beneficial for business hey as you work on a specific target audience.

Ask yourself these questions before defining your niche are:

• What am I exceptionally good at?
• What pain points can you resolve using your skills and knowledge?
• Who are the people that will need my training and expertise for their benefit?

For example:

You can set your target audience as adults in their 30s who are training for marathons.

Induce Word of Mouth Among Your Existing Personal Training Clients

Word of mouth is a powerful marketing method and can benefit you in getting new clients. In addition to your professional expertise, being friendly and enthusiastic about your work can help you gather customers in the long run and make them loyal towards you.

Tips to induce word of mouth among your existing clients:

• Communicate with them frequently. Set up a database and send them friendly reminders or monthly newsletters.
• Provide extra perks to your most dependable customers. Set up a reward system for the most loyal and do not forget to give incentives.
• Provide great service. This will not only gain their trust, but also help bring new customers through word of mouth.

Ask for Referrals

Referrals means recommendations. When your existing clients share information about you or recommend you to their peer group, family or friends it is called a referral. After setting up a loyal client base you can use it to your advantage and ask them for referrals. You can provide your clients discounts and other incentives in return for providing you new customers. A steady group of happy clients will boost your business and help maintain constant revenue.

As a personal trainer you can text them, engage with them individually and create a strong bond. You need to ensure their happiness by providing them exactly what they are looking for.

Provide an incentive for both the referrer and the referee like a free personal training session. This will make both happy and will spread word of mouth.

Send Weekly Emails

For a strong newsletter base, you need to keep 3 things in mind. Getting subscribers, keeping them engaged and providing value through your content.

Step one: Getting Subscribers
If you have a blog or an ebook, you may reach out to the visitors of the blog and ask them to sign up for your newsletter by stating you can help them solve the problem. Make sure you clearly mention the content or the service that the subscribers will get while signing up.

Step two: Keeping Subscribers Engaged
One thing you can do to make sure that your subscribers stay engaged is manage expectations. If your CTA promises something, make sure everything falls in line and fulfils everything that is promised. Ensure that you state your purpose clearly. For example, instead of saying, "Sign up for this eBook", you can say "Sign up for this free eBook and get weekly updates"

Step three: Providing value
Ensure that you stay consistent with the value that you provide to your subscribers. No matter what, do not forget to send out weekly updates and make sure you have something to talk about every week.

Offer Free Personal Training Session

You can offer free personal training sessions to new clients depending on how vast your business is. You can offer consultation for anything between 30 mins to 8 complete sessions. Offering free consultation can help you attract those clients who are not sure about whether to invest in personal training because the idea of paying a lot of money can be daunting.

With free consultations you can help them clear their doubts while marketing yourself as why they should join you and why you are the best. This way your clients feel connected to you and it will benefit you in the long run.

Here are some tips for providing free personal training sessions:

• Ask Questions about your clients. The likes and dislikes with exercise of your clients and everything in between.
• Be friendly. More than looking for a trainer who is rude or harsh clients will be more attracted or inspired who is friendly with them.
• Position yourself as a problem solver and show them examples of your previous clients.

Host Workshops

Just like offering consultation can help you build good customer relationships, hosting workshops can help attract new clients and retail old ones.  Conducting training workshops can help you promote yourself and help networking with people.

You can collaborate with other trainers and offer combined training sessions with two-in-one offers and multifaceted benefits. Workshops help you make good impressions on your clients and helps you focus on each client individually.

Tips for hosting workshops:

• Choose the right audience. You can choose your clients from the consultation sessions and offer those clients workshop discounts who seem the most interested.
• Outline the idea. How you start and end and what you do during the workshop, everything will matter a lot, so plan wisely.
• Choose a name. Choose a name for your workshop and advertise on social media platforms for maximum audience reach.

Engage Using Social Media

Social Media is a powerful tool for digital marketing. Facebook Groups can help you build a community of your own where you can share more personalized experience and create a stronger bond. Having a more personal approach with clients helps you to understand how they think and what they really want.

With an online presence, it is much easier to reach a larger audience with little or no cost.  You can ask your clients to post feedback and reviews of your work. What you need to do is share positive comments and learn from constructive criticism.

You can post pictures or videos of your clients working out (with their permission, of course) to show off how well each client is doing and how good you are at what you do.

You can even post your own fitness journey, what inspires you and what you do routinely and be an inspiring mentor.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now have a good idea about how to get yourself new clients and retain old ones as a personal trainer. It's now time to implement these and get going!

Credits - Nikita Gupta