Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Marketing Tips For Personal Trainers

There are plenty of marketing tips for Personal Trainers to help promote their business, but there are three that can give your Personal Training Business a quick, solid reputation.

Collect client testimonials and let your work speak for itself.

Take before and after photos of your clients. Put into writing their own stories: their fitness goals, their conquest to a great body, and the time it took them to get there with your help. Create a display in your location to feature their accomplishments. When you advertise, use these testimonial stories to get attention and interest. However, do not forget to ask for your clients' permission before putting their success stories up on any public space. Generally clients are flattered when they are featured and best of all, they're often willing to create a great testimonial for you as a trainer. In the process, you're not only building yourself a great business but also giving these people acknowledgement for their hard work!

Write a column

Another excellent way to get recognized by potential clients is to write for the local paper. Instead of being compensated by money, you can suggest a trade of your content for a byline and small picture by your column. When people see your article they'll associate your name and face with excellent fitness advice. The newspaper will benefit by offering a service to its readers and you will be developing yourself as an expert.

If you have a local radio station, ask if you can be a guest on the air to discuss personal training, typical issues clients face, or answer phoned in questions. This is a great free promotion and puts your business out there in the playing field.
Using the same approach to the Internet is smart. Being the information highway, your potential audience opens up worldwide!

Get In The Paper

Last, but not least, write a newsletter. Make it monthly and distribute among your clients, and to potential clients as well. It's not necessary for the newsletter to be elaborate, most especially if you're distributing it via email. Simply type up an email about upcoming events, any specials you are offering, information about supplements or health products you promote, and be sure to include any testimonials. Email it out to your customers and any potential customers. As you accumulate more leads, add them to your newsletter list. Keep in mind that when e-mailing a newsletter to multiple recepients, keep the recepients' names and addresses private. Your best option would be to use an email autoresponder.

One way to do this in most email programs is to put your contacts in a group or simply put all the addresses on the "bcc" line. (BCC means Blind Carbon Copy.)

You can pay someone to design a fancier email for you if you’d like, but a simple one as outlined above will serve its purpose. Almost all autoresponder services have templates you can use to make your newsletter look highly professional.
Put these three fitness marketing tips into action quickly and watch your business reputation grow!

WANT TO INSTANTLY DOUBLE YOUR FITNESS INCOME?
Here are the best Fitness Marketing Tips to take your Personal Training business to the next level.





Stellar Secret For Extraordinary Income As A Personal Trainer

It’s no secret that a major key to success as a Personal Trainer Business Owner is learning how to market yourself. But if you think that you need a bachelor’s degree in business in order to market your personal training business successfully, think again.

Believe it or not, lots of the most respected and prosperous leaders today know that the secret to success isn't a degree in marketing, but a level of authority that comes from confidence and knowledge. Not sure if you’ve got the stuff? These pointers will help you rise up tall and make your business shine:

Stand Up Straight. It might sound familiar, like something you heard a kid. You probably already know how much body language communicates without words, but make sure you notice what your posture is saying. If confidence flows in your body, your clients and business peers will pay attention and hear you out.


Dress Appropriately. Yes, how you look makes a difference, and the clothes you wear have a huge impact. Just because you're a personal trainer doesn't mean you need to live in gym clothes, so when you're not in the gym think about what's appropriate and the image you want to embody.

Pump Yourself Up. If you’re still suffering from low self-confidence, try this exercise: every morning when you wake up, look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror and tell yourself why you’re so amazing. You make people smile and feel good about themselves, or you're a great friend, or you know how to listen. Speak out loud and repeat these reasons why you're so great again and again. Soon, your mind will catch up with your mouth.

You want to be seen as a leader with charisma.

Fake It ‘Till You Make It. Frazzled by a meeting in five minutes? Pause for a second, breathe deeply, and imagine that you are the President of the company or a super-successful businessman. The more you express confidence, the more self-assured you will become.

Any way you look at it, self-confidence will effect your personal trainer business, and the more you can trust yourself the more others will trust you. And that lays a solid foundation to creating some serious green for your fitness business.

WANT TO INSTANTLY DOUBLE YOUR FITNESS INCOME?
Recession Proof Your Personal Trainer Business With One Simple Overlooked Tactic...



Monday, March 8, 2010

Fitness Professional Marketing Strategies: Basic Steps


Not many personal trainers start their own fitness businesses because they’re passionate about marketing. They become personal trainers because their goal is to help people lose weight, increase their strength and live healthy lives. However, it’s just as crucial for personal trainers to develop their marketing skills as it is for them to boost their knowledge when it comes to gaining new clients and dollars. Fitness trainers will never attract a consistent stream of new clients without first mastering some basic fitness promotional strategies.

Without marketing, even the most knowledgeable and skilled personal trainers will be desperate for work. That’s because potential customers won’t sign on with even the most talented trainers if these potential customers are unaware that they exist.

The question, though, is this: Is it possible for personal trainers advertise businesses without wasting tons of money? Sure. Trainers just have to use their imaginations and that calls for some common-sense fitness marketing strategies.

For example, personal trainers can ask the proprietors of area businesses such as hair salons, supermarkets and restaurants if they can post flyers promoting their personal training enterprise. Most local business owners will gladly place these marketing pieces in either their windows or on dedicated message boards. Business owners like to see their fellow entrepreneurs do well. When a community is filled with a host of thriving businesses all retailers can experience the positive results.

Another no-cost way for entrepreneurs to market their fitness business is for them to speak at local Rotary clubs, church organizations and community associations. Owners can inquire about running a session that focuses on healthy weight loss, strength training or flexibility exercises. Trainers should be certain, of course, to bring several business cards along.

Of course, not every promotional effort can be free. But much of it can be inexpensive. Personal trainers can place an ad in their local newspapers for rates that are usually quite affordable. If they want to get in the community paper for free, they can offer to write a guest editorial. Most local papers are constantly searching for free columns to fill their pages.

Trainers should make sure to provide real information – maybe on the most effective strength-building exercises for women – and not just an advertisement for their business. They should also feature their business’ contact information and Web site or blog address at the end of their written editorial.

A host of municipalities boast their own public-access cable TV stations. Fitness experts can produce shows on these channels, and they can often do so free or on the cheap. They will have to show, though, that their program offers real information and useful tips. This shouldn’t be difficult; Personal trainers can say that their show encourages healthy lifestyles, for instance.
Finally, personal trainers shouldn’t discount the value of positive word-of-mouth advertising. Potential customers are far more likely to believe the good things that their circle of acquaintances, relatives and friends say about a personal trainer than they are the rave reviews they read in a paid advertisement.

Personal trainers should always remember to ask their current satisfied clients to spread the word about their training programs. This no-cost marketing is sometimes the most powerful of them all.

Not many personal trainers will ever consider marketing to be fun. But trainers who abide by these tried-and-true fitness marketing strategies will always attract new clients. And that, certainly, truly is fun.

Here are the best Fitness Marketing Strategies to take your Personal Training business to the next level.


Fitness Marketing Research – Ask Your Clients

All entrepreneurs need to aggressively market their enterprises to bring new clients. This is true for personal trainers, too. But marketing alone isn’t enough.

Fitness pros must make certain to only sink their dollars in those marketing efforts that are actually generating additional business. It’s why those fitness coaches who want to thrive are constantly performing fitness marketing research.

Marketing can be costly. Ads in glossy publications or newspapers cost money. Commercials on local TV or radio networks aren’t cheap. Building and running an attractive Web site calls for service of costly design experts. Even running a marketing blog can cost a significant amount of cash depending on how it is hosted.
It makes sense to spend dollars on promotional efforts, if this money will lead new clients to your training business or creates name recognition for a business. But no entrepreneur wants to spend money on promotional efforts that don’t pay off. That’s a potentially serious mistake.

Fortunately, it’s one that personal trainers can avoid with marketing research.

Successful entrepreneurs never stop researching their promotional efforts to see which ones are bringing business to them and which are being ignored. There’s no certain way to figure exactly how well a newspaper ad works versus a radio spot. But there are several strategies that entrepreneurs can use to get at least a basic estimate of which marketing efforts are the most successful.
The most obvious strategy is for business owners to ask their customers. This is why many entrepreneurs frequently ask “How did you learn about us?” when they first encounter new customers.

A new customer might answer that he heard about the small business on the radio. Another might say she saw an advertisement at a nearby bus stop. By asking for this information from customers, personal trainers will be better equipped to put their dollars in those promotional efforts that potential clients respond to and those that they seem to ignore.
Fitness trainers can easily see how much business they’re receiving from the marketing piece they run in the community magazine every week. They can put in a line in one of their ads telling readers to bring in the advertisement for a discount when they agree to a fitness session. If a large number of new clients comes to the trainer holding the advertisement in their hands, the trainer will know that newspaper marketing is a good purchase.

If not a soul shows up with that ad? Then the fitness pro knows to invest his or her dollars on more lucrative marketing efforts.
Other marketing strategies are more difficult to analyze. Personal trainers may pay for an advertisement that is placed along the side of a city bus. It’s often a challenge for trainers to quantify just how many people are signing up for fitness sessions because they saw the bus promotional piece. The one strategy to know for certain is for fitness trainers to ask every new client.

Fitness Marketing is hardly an exact science. And promotional efforts that perform well for one fitness trainer may fail miserably for another. This is the reason why fitness marketing research is so critical to the well-being of a personal-training enterprise. Trainers should never waste their cash on a marketing effort that isn’t bringing in new business for them. They should make the effort each month to study their marketing efforts to determine which ones they should maintain, increase or abandon.

Here are the best Creative Fitness Marketing Strategies to take your Personal Training business to the next level.

Sex sells. Are you using it?



The people behind Axe Cologne know exactly what they’re doing. You’ve probably seen the cologne maker’s ads on television. They always show rather average looking young men who become irresistible to women once they spray on a dab of Axe.

The commercials are silly. You might consider them to be rather obnoxious. But you can’t argue with one thing: The promotional people at Axe know their target consumers. They understand that their potential clients, young men, are almost always thinking about one thing: sex. So Axe fills its commercials with sexy women in tight shorts and barely there shirts.
Sex is the greatest advertising tool for certain customers. And Axe knows it.
But what about you? Are you using it?

A smattering of sex never hurt anyone.

I’m not suggesting that you transform your advertising materials into Axe-level naughtiness. But I do believe that fitness trainers should be using at least a hint of sex appeal to market their fitness services.

This is simply the wise thing to do. You’re a fitness pro, so you have a good body. At least you better have. You should take advantage of this body to convince possible clients that they, too, can feel sexier and fitter by signing up for your exercise classes. You should have a roster dotted with fit students, too. If they are willing, you might also include them in your advertising materials, whether it’s a homemade poster in the local hair salon window or a video on your business’ Web site. Just be sure that each of your students looks as good as possible.

Everyone sells sex. Just watch the commercials that national health club businesses run? They always feature gorgeous men and women in impossibly tight workout clothes running, lifting weights, kick boxing, and of course, toweling off. The chains aren’t subtle about what they’re marketing here: They’re selling sex.

You should be careful when drafting sexy promos. It’s one thing to sell sex. It’s another to create marketing materials that cross the line into pornography. If you cross this line you risk turning off possible customers. As a trainer, you must protect your reputation, too. Sex is fine if it’s done in a classy or humorous way. If it seems even slightly pornographic, possible clients might turn away.
Considering the science of sex.

The Journal of Consumer Research recently released the findings of an interesting study that took a close look at the varying ways in which males and females reacted to sex in advertising. According to the findings, a majority of men had good feelings about casual and recreational sex. They also liked commercials and promotional materials that boasted scantily clad women or relied on sexually suggestive humor.

Female viewers reported different emotions. The authors of the study discovered that they reacted in a more positive manner when the sex in marketing suggested devotion and commitment.
You want to bring in both males and women to your personal training business. If you feel that it’s important to inject some sex in your marketing materials – and you better – then you must use it in a way that doesn’t turn one sex off.

By letting your body and those of your customers do the selling for you. Show off your physique. You’ve worked hard to create it; you might as well let it pay off for you.

Here are the best Fitness Marketing Tips to take your Personal Training business to the next level.

Reaching Your Market As A Fitness Instructor

When it comes to running a successful personal trainer business, it is essential to find opportunities to market yourself that are inexpensive and will maximize your income.

Even if your marketing budget is super thin, here are some ideas that you can use to enrich your business. All it takes is time and some careful planning.

First off, it's the positive personality and attitude that will make you stand out and attract clients. These attributes will surely take you where you want to be. You must create a very positive impression of yourself as honest and approachable.

If a person doesn't like you, they are probably not going to choose you as a trainer. A great way to meet new clients is to put yourself out there.

Spend time in the gym chatting with members; hit the tennis courts or even the golf courses.
Obviously, talk alone can only do so much for you. Be sure to always bring business cards so you can give them out anywhere and anytime. A well designed business card will create a very professional impression towards your potential clients. It's not enough to print all your cards on your home printer. Spend the couple extra dollars for quality cards.

Have you ever wondered why most Real Estate Agents have their picture on their card?
They know that if someone sees their face they're more likely to keep the card. So have you’re mug shot taken and place it on your card.

Promoting yourself as a trainer separates you from the rest of the pack.

What are your specialties?
Saying that you are a personal trainer can be vague in terms of what you really do. Are you an expert in pre/post natal exercise? Do you work exclusively with competitive athletes? Do you like fitness newbies? Identifying your own market will help you understand the suitable fitness marketing methods you should use and separates you from the other trainers.

In the world we live in, people love freebies. If you w ant to attract more people to your business, giving out free personal assessments or sessions to clients who make referrals is a good way to go. Personal assessments will help potential clients clearly see the need for a personal trainer like you. Here is where your personality shines through and you use your greatest assets to close the deal.

Since you now have some new clients, you can allocate more funds for marketing. Lots of weekly local newspapers offer very affordable rates for business card size ads. It can help you to promote yourself to the widest market possible and at the same time, fill up the other time slots.
By using these simple and affordable tools you will be booked to capacity in no time. A little leg work now equals a steady flow of clients and financial independence in the future.

Here are the best Trainer Marketing Tips to take your Personal Training business to the next level.