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:

Instagram marketing for personal trainers - image 1: The image displays three cards with stats about Instagram usage. Card 1: "1 Billion people use Instagram every month". Card 2: "500 million people use Instagram daily". Card 3: "20% of people will go to a business profile once per day".
Figure 1

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.

Instagram marketing for personal trainers - image 1: The image displays three cards with stats about Instagram marketiing. Card 1: "Marketers make $5.20 for $1 spent". Card 2: "66% of people use Instagram to interact with brands". Card 3: "Images in instagram get roughly 20% more engagement then on Facebook".
Figure 2

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 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 of the first things people read. Keeping it relevant is a small yet valuable aspect to 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 specific bio could be:

“I help woman 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 follows a favor and avoid putting url’s 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. Linktree allows for you to put all of your links in one place.

Screenshot of FitSW's instagram profile with a link in the bio generate by linktree.

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:

Screenshot of what it looks like when you click on a linktree link in an instagram bio.

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 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.
Instagram marketing for personal trainers tool: The image is a screenshot of coolors.co, a website that generate color palettes for free.

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.

Options for saving color palettes generated by coolors.co.

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:

Instagram marketing for personal trainers: the image is a screenshot of what it looks like to save a color palette from coolors.co.

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.

Feedback on Instagram Marketing for Personal Trainers?

Was this article helpful? Have any feedback? Let us know by shooting us an email at support@fitsw.com. Or hit us up on social media!

Personal Trainer of the Month: Whitney Caison

Personal Trainer of the Month: Whitney Caison.

Our personal trainer of the month is someone who is the definition of a seasoned professional and not just in personal training. Having been in the Health and Wellness industry since 2002 she literally breaths health and wellness and brings a lot of knowledge to the table.

About Whitney

When I say seasoned, I wasn’t joking. Her first job was at a Golds Gym when she was 15. Since then she has taken the health and wellness industry by storm and I’m starting to think we may have to invent more specializations to suit her hunger. She has specializations in Barre, Pilates, Qualified TRX, Personal Training, and is currently working on a holistic nutrtion certification. Oh ya, and she has a degree in Exercise Science as well.

Working out with Whitney is not only guaranteed to yield fitness results but also for the mind and body. By now you may be wondering how she how she trains her clients. Lucky for you, she offers in person training and online. Sign me up!

Specialties

Whitney Specializes in overall women’s wellness (nutrtion, interval training, and mindset). She incorporates a lot of different modalities such as, barre, Kettlebell, TRX, bodyweight exercise, belly dance, and pilates into her workouts. Did I forget to mention she was a professional belly dancer?

Our Interview With Whitney

How long have you been a Coach and why did you get started with coaching? 

“I’ve been passionate about health and wellness for a long time! I’ve been in the health and wellness industry since 2002…my first job was Gold’s Gym at 15 years old. I worked in alternative medicine for over 8 years. This was probably my biggest inspiration. I learned a lot about how lifestyle can totally make or break our health.

What we feed our mind, body and soul impacts us more than we realize. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed many people who don’t understand how important this is until it’s almost too late. This has inspired me to encourage and motivate others to be the best they can be.

We can’t control life, but we can live to be the best versions of ourselves. Sometimes we just need accountability, motivation, and encouragement and I hope to be this for others.

 I have been training/coaching clients for 5 years now.”

What is your favorite part of coaching? And if you had one tip to give to new trainers what would you say?

“Motivating others and watching their body and mindset transform over time. The pay off is so rewarding! I love when my clients reach milestones. They do something they never thought possible and their face lights up the entire room. Or they talk about how good they feel and that they’re achieving things in their personal life they never thought possible.

When you’re dedicated and you put the hard work in, changes really begin happening from the inside out. They come in to lose weight and strengthen their bodies, but they get so much more…they begin shredding not only weight, but things that no longer serve them in their highest and best. They build not only muscle, but strength from the inside that help them achieve more.

They begin creating a life they dreamed of. They are happy, full of energy, and look great while doing it. I want to bring people together, not divide them. At the end of the day we all want to be heard, understood, and accepted. This is what I live for! This is priceless.”

Whitney’s Tip

“Always put in the work and be YOUrself. I have worked with a lot of trainers. The best ones are the ones who are down to earth, fun, dependable, encouraging, and CONTINUE LEARNING. 

Always learning. You can learn from workshops, books, and even clients. It’s important to give back to other trainers as well as clients. “The day you stop learning is the day you die”.

Instead of competing and comparing, create a community that supports and encourages one another…this includes the trainers down the road from you. We all have unique purposes and gifts. Encourage others, don’t tear them down.”

Wrapping Up

As of right now Whitney is working on putting together her online platform, growing it, and is focusing on continuing her education.

If you want to get in touch with Whitney reach out to her on instagram (@aspirebywhitney) or give a visit to her site (aspirebywhitney.com).

Want to be Nominated for Personal Trainer of the Month or Nominate Someone Else?

Reach out to support@fitsw.com with the details. Or give us a shout on social media!

Tips for New Personal Trainers: 10 Tips To Success

10 Tips for New Personal Trainers featured image of a group of people meditating during a yoga session.

If you were to go trainer to trainer and ask them what their experience was like as a new trainer, many will probably have remotely different experiences. However, there are a couple things trainers quickly learn on the job that remain the same for most trainers. For you new or prospective trainers, here are 10 tips for new personal trainers.

1. Use a Client Management Software

When it comes to tips for new personal trainers, this is our first tip. Client management software can change your business for the better. Even if you work for a commercial gym.

Client management software can save you big time in the time management department. Primarily because it consolidates all of the tools you need into a single platform. Rather then bouncing in and out of google docs, gmail, Excel, Word, or any other software, you can accomplish everything in the same place.

With features like…

  1. Workout builders
  2. Workout planning
  3. Automated Client progress tracking
  4. Automated reminders
  5. Secure payments
  6. Nutrition planning and tracking
  7. Scheduling

…it’s bound to save you time and help you grow your business. Eventually, this type of technology will become the standard so why not get ahead of the curve?

2. Try Training All Different Types of People

There are many reasons this is a good idea. For one, this is a great way for you to learn all sorts of ailments people face. You’ll get good experience all around.

The second reason is this, you’ll get insight into what problems you are best at solving and which ones you aren’t the best at solving. This way, in the future you have a better idea as far as which niche you want to specialize in when building your business.

3. Be Easy to Get in Touch With

According to IBISWorld there are three major factors for success that trainers should follow based on surveying clients of personal training. One of those is “easy to access”.

What they mean is, clients don’t like to feel in the dark about their training. They might have questions outside of training sessions or schedule changes. As such, they’d like to be able to easily get in touch with their trainer.

On the flip side, prospective clients would like prompt responses to their questions while they are considering buying sessions. From their standpoint, how you handle prospective clients is a reflection of how you run your actual business.

4. Keep Your Initial Expectations Realistic

According to the same report referenced in the section above, the personal training has an unreal churn rate for new trainers. 90% of all trainer will quit in their first year and move on to another career.

This can be attributed to a lot of factors. But one glaring factor is most people have unreal expectations.

Many new trainers expect to come in right after their certification and have clients pouring in. While this may be true for some trainers, it’s rare and often times takes a lot of hard work.

The Reality of Becoming a Personal Trainer

Here’s the reality of it:

  1. Personal training is considered a luxury service.
  2. It is often times expensive and a major commitment for people.
  3. Getting clients is not just about being knowledgeable about training, fitness, and health.
  4. You are running and building your own business.

Most new trainers don’t actually consider what goes into being a successful trainer. Successful personal trainers are usually great at what they do as a trainer, are great at sales, and great at translating what people want into results.

As a new trainer, your first month will be cold calling, talking to people on the gym floor, performing assessments, learning the systems your gym uses, and admin work for the most part. Training will more likely be at a minimum and often times, so will your income.

If you hit it hard and do a good job of getting clients, your second month will start to get busy. However, it may not be until mid to late in the second month and into the third in some cases that you start seeing things really start to pick up.

Quick Tip

Try to save up some money before getting started as a personal trainer. This can really make a difference in your performance. Don’t believe me? Well here’s what you have to choose from:

You save up money before becoming a personal trainer.

When you get the job you aren’t stressed about finances for the first month, at least. Since you aren’t stressed, you are able to focus more of your attention on what works for getting clients.

You spend time shadowing trainers who are successful and you might even travel to other gym locations in your town/city to do more shadowing. You’ve got the gas money, so what’s it got to hurt? You are learning quickly and are starting to build more confidence in conversing with people about training.

You don’t save up money.

You’re stressed immediately. You know you need money. Your focus is on getting sales immediately. But you’re now violating a major principle of being a personal trainer.

Don’t sell packages. Sell Results.

This is a proven tactic in the industry. You need to learn how to take what people are saying and translate that in a results driven training plan. That’s what you sell them on. Not the idea of personal training, but the idea of results and that personal training will get them there.

This it what often takes the most time to learn. Being stressed about finances often times shifts your focus into other areas that are not beneficial for getting started as a trainer.

What this tip for new personal trainers isn’t saying…

We aren’t saying you shouldn’t be ambitious. Set some aggressive goals and go after them. This tip shouldn’t interrupt your goals that you are thinking about setting for yourself. It’s more so a “word to the wise”.

5. Prepare to be a Facilitator of Change

This is one of our favorite tips for new personal trainers. Mainly because it speaks to how much of an impact you can make as a personal trainer.

Many people come to a personal trainer after they have tried to train themselves and failed. They could never figure out how to hit their fitness goals. More times then not, this is because they need to change other aspects of their lifestyle that are preventing them from achieving their goals.

It’s not unlikely that personal trainers are involved in change outside of the gym. Often times involving major behavioral change. Familiarizing yourself with the psychology of behavioral change can help you put it into practice when pitching the results you can give someone.

Even when you have a difficult client that doesn’t seem to be motivated. While the personal trainer-client relationship goes two ways, often times a lot of the weight is placed on the trainer. When you’ve got a client that’s not motivated, then knowing a thing or two about behavioral change can help you help them

6. Reserve Any Judgement

A lot of trainers get close to their clients. As a result, their clients open up to them about their lives. Sometimes, clients may open up about something you don’t agree with.

It’s important to handle this as delicately as possible as you don’t know everything about their life. Plus, judging a client is a bad business practice. As hard as it is sometimes, remain as neutral as possible when it comes to clients opening up about intimate details of their life.

If things to get to the point where you become uncomfortable about what they are sharing, you can always try to transfer the client to another trainer.

7. The Best New Business Comes From Old Business

Not sure what I mean? Let me rephrase it:

Referrals, Referrals, Referrals!!

There are many ways to market yourself as a trainer whether is be social media marketing, google ads, or blogging, there are tons of methods you can use. However, time and time again, referrals has demonstrated itself as one of the most effective.

Prospective clients are much more likely to start training with you if they were referred to you by a friend or family member. This is because they trust what their friends and family are saying.

This is why it’s important to make sure you really get to know your clients and don’t be afraid to ask for referrals.

Offering a small reward can provide plenty of incentive for people to refer others to you. It doesn’t have to be big but something like a Starbucks gift card can go a long ways!

8. Don’t be Afraid To Try New Things

There’s so much opportunity out there for personal trainers. The global personal training industry is huge and is only going to continue growing.

Despite the high churn rate mentioned earlier in this article, the industry still continues to grow. This is because the trainers that do stick around are successful and happy with their work. The second thing is, demand for personal trainers is still going up.

Fitness trends are going to continue to grow, new trends will emerge, and people are going to want in on it. Because of the growth of the fitness industry in general, it makes it a little easier for trainers to start up their own business once they’ve gained a little experience.

The personal training industry is an interesting one. You see, it’s an incredibly competitive industry and it’s huge. However, for those on a mission with goals set in mind, it can be very rewarding. There’s still loads of opportunity to take advantage of.

9. Learn, Learn, and Learn More!

Those personal trainers who have been in the industry for 20 years and have their own business are those that don’t stop learning.

Whether it be taking on new specializations or gaining experience while working hands on, they don’t hesitate to take opportunity to learn.

Sometimes it doesn’t even mean learning something directly related to personal training. It could be learning something that’s an accessory skill. An accessory skill is something that can help you better run your business.

Accessory skills can consist of learning:

  1. How to write captivating blogs.
  2. Diving into digital marketing (Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, etc…).
  3. Design skills to build a website for yourself.

This list isn’t all inclusive, it’s just there to give you an idea. Successful personal trainers are often lifetime learners.

10. Practice What Your Preach

If there’s one thing you will discover quickly, it’s that personal training can get busy and quick. There may be a slow start to it. But one day it will dawn on you.

“Holy crap, I’ve worked a lot recently. When did I go to the gym for a personal workout last? When did my gas tank run out so quickly?”

It’s important to factor in personal time. Many trainer will work full time on weekdays and weekends. However, I recommend you take at least one personal day a week. Scratch in some time for yourself among the chaos.

Burnout is very real, even more so in the personal training industry.

Feedback on Tips for New Personal Trainers: 10 Tips To Success?

Let us know by shooting an email over to support@fitsw.com or reaching to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

Why Personal Training Contracts Are Important

Personal Training Contracts Featured Image. Two Men Shaking hands with brief cases while another is signing a life sized contract.

Personal training contracts are among some of the more important aspects getting a personal training business up and running successfully and sustainably. The problem is this; the personal trainer and client relationship is one that typically evolves into a friendship. Which is good, however, it’s important to remember it’s also a business relationship as well.

It’s often difficult to maintain the balance between a business relationship while also maintaining a sprouting friendship.

So, Why Are Personal Training Contracts Important?

As mentioned above, a lot of trainers find it difficult to implement a trainer-client contract. This is primarily due to how intimate personal training services are. As you may have seen us mention in past blog articles, there are always two things that remain true:

  1. Clients often make changes in other areas of their lifestyle beyond just fitness. Often times the changes that are made permeate into daily their mindset and overall wellness.
  2. Personal Trainers rarely are ever just “fitness coaches”. Often times personal trainers facilitate behavioral changes. As a result, they find themselves in the position of a part-time therapist, part-time life coach, and full-time fitness coach.

However, when considering the above, this should provide more incentive to put a contract in place. Contracts are important because they help maintain the business relationship and protect trainers financially.

The Legal Purpose of a Contract

Contracts are legal documents between two or more parties that outline the terms of service of products/services being supplied.

Often times, contracts outline obligations between the parties involved in terms of roles. Primary roles often take the form of the customer and the vendor.

From the Vendors standpoint, the contract outlines obligations to the vendor in regards to the products or services they will be supplying and their required payment terms for the subsequent delivery of services.

From the customers standpoint, the contract outlines their financial obligations for the services/products they will be receiving and their requirements of the vendor.

Breach of Contract

Breach of contract simply means one of the parties involved did something outside of the agreement.

Contracts typically involve a “breach of contract clause”.

This is put in place to protect the needs and interests of all parties involved. The breach of contract clause will more likely have a couple stipulations within it.

Cancellation/Refund Policy from the Clients Point of View

A trainer could be considered in “breach of contract” if a client pays for sessions in advance but the trainer doesn’t deliver the sessions within a given time period. Often times, this doesn’t warrant any legal action yet.

Contracts often include cancellation/refund policies. In the example above, the trainer would be required to refund the sessions paid for in advance to the client. If the trainer neglects this even further, the client has the right to bring the contract to the local court system and file a lawsuit for the lost money.

The Trainers Point of View

Now lets look at another example of a cancellation/refund policy.

If a client books a session or sessions with a trainer, doesn’t show up, and fails to notify the trainer before hand, they are liable to be charged for the session due to the time wasted for the trainer.

Now lets say the trainer goes to charge the client for the missed session and the charge is declined. At that point the trainer has the right to seize all services from that point on until the clients account is restored to an acceptable balance.

If it goes further and the client still neglects to restore the account balance, trainers are faced with a couple choices based on the amount owed.

One consideration is to get a lawyer to send them a letter threatening legal action. Often times this does the trick. However, in some cases the letter ends up in a paper shredder. This leaves us with the next option which is going to court. You should one consider this option if:

  1. You think the client has the money to settle the debt.
  2. The value of what you are owed is greater then what you will pay in legal fees.
  3. There is no other option to try.

Either way, having a client-trainer contract in place is going to be crucial in court. The contract solidifies your case in court.

Without a contract to bring as proof, you are left with the responsibility of proving there was an agreement in place which can draw out how long the case takes and can cost a lot more money.

Avoid Guarantees in Your Contracts

We get it, guaranteeing results sounds better then “individual results may vary”, but placing any verbiage in your contract that suggests a guarantee of results is a disaster waiting to happen.

If you “guarantee” results and those results don’t happen, the client can and might demand a refund for your services. Your refusal could warrant a legal battle that would cost you a lot more then the refund they are asking for.

The other reason why this is important is because personal training is a two way streak. Sure the trainer puts in a lot of work but if the client wants to see results, they have to put in work too. Which we know doesn’t always happen.

Feedback on Why Personal Training Contracts Are Important?

Have any feedback on this article? Shoot us an email at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

Pricing Personal Training Sessions: A Quick How-To Guide

Pricing Personal Training Sessions: Featured Image. Personal Trainer Coaching Client on Dead lift.

If you aren’t working for a major commercial gym, then that means you have to figure out pricing personal training sessions. At first glance it doesn’t seem to be very difficult, but there’s a balance you want to maintain. You want to figure out a price that demonstrates your value but also one you feel is fair for your clients.

In this blog we will go over exactly how to price your sessions and what sort of mentality you should be approaching it with.

Common Considerations for Pricing Personal Training Sessions

There a couple considerations you should make before pricing your personal training sessions. Often times, new trainers will look at other trainer in their market and use their base price or say “well bob set his price at this so I’m just going to set my price there too”.

The problem with this is it’s not unique and often times, this approach doesn’t reflect the true value of your services. This is why it’s important to consider all factors and come up with your own pricing model.

Status of the Economy

Pricing your sessions can vary based on the status of the economy because personal training is considered a luxury service by many. Unfortunately, luxury services are the first to take a hit when the economy looks like its going downhill.

At the point of writing this article (3.23.2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has it’s full fledged grip on society. As of right now many stores are closed, including Gyms for the foreseeable future.


As we speak, thousands of people are out of work and applying for unemployment. Right would be a good example of when you might want to start looking at adjusting your prices. One this to consider is, many people are stuck at home, off of work.

If you adjust your prices accordingly, you may find people who still want to train as it might be the only thing that keeps people sane.

However, on the flip side, while to economy is booming, you can charge more for your services.

Your Location Matters

Your location can be a rather large variable in what you price your sessions at. Do you live in a large city or a small rural town? Even if you live in a large city, what part of the city do you live in?

The FitSW offices are located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In Colorado, there are three main cities people go by. Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Denver. Then there are the surrounding cities such as Fountain, Manitou Springs, and Falcon which are all outside of Colorado Springs, but close enough to be considered part of the Colorado Springs area.

If you were to look at the prices on average with the surrounding towns, trainers in Fountain would more likely charge slightly lower rates. Same with Falcon. However, Manitou is very heavily visited by tourists and has a lot more money. Therefore you might find training to be more expensive in Manitou.

Then you have Denver for example. Personal training in Denver is likely to more expensive then Colorado Springs. However, much like Colorado Springs, Denver also has smaller towns on the outside of Denver that are almost seen as a part of the city. As such, you might find cheaper prices in Aurora or Littleton then Denver even though they are essentially in the same place!

Does the Price of a Session Cover Your Expenditures?

This all depends on what kind of training you are doing. If you are a private trainer who travels to the home of the client, then what would your expenditures be?

If you are training in their home you probably pay for liability insurance. You have the time it takes you to drive there, the gas you use, the equipment you bring, the time it took you to write the program/workout, and probably a couple other factors. Are you an employee of the gym you train at or are you renting space there as an independent trainer? Are you renting space at just one gym or many?

When considering all of those expenditures, you absolutely need to sit down and tally up all of your unique costs and factor those into your pricing. Especially if you have special requests from clients.

This is essentially comparably to calculating “operating costs” for larger companies. Factor in how much it costs to run your PT business.

What is Your Target Market?

This one often times runs parallel with your experience level too. The trainers who are in the more niche areas of personal training often are the most experienced. This is because they have spent the most time in the personal training industry in general and know where their interest lies.

Trainers who work for corporations as the “company trainer” might make more then a trainer in a Golds Gym.

In this case, it’d be good to do research on that specific niche industry to see if there’s any rhyme or reason to other trainers pricing. Not because you want to copy their pricing, but this way you can get a better feel for pricing and the variables involved.

Self Worth & Confidence

Have you heard of Paula Scher? She is one of the most renowned graphic designers and artists in the world. There are a lot of different achievements she is famous for but among them is her 5 min sketch of the Citibank logo.

Citibank was paying her design agency $1.5 million to help them come up with a logo and more likely other branding assets. Paula Scher sat down and drew the Citibank logo in 5 minutes. Dubbed the $1.5 million napkin. Later on she was quoted in saying:

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

Paul Scher

This quote couldn’t be more applicable to pricing personal training sessions. A lot of clients only see the couple minutes it takes you to create a workout for the day. But they don’t see the hundreds of clients you have trained and the thousands of workouts you have written.

Not to mention the hundreds of hours of reading and studying many trainers do on their on off time.

Many trainers spend quite literally thousands of hours honing their craft. Some trainers can look at the way you walk in the gym and tell you what part of your neck is sore and how personal training can help alleviate that. They might even already have an idea for how they would structure your program in their head. Not because they have done it before but because they know how the human body works.

Listing Your Prices and How to Discuss Them With Clients/Prospective Clients

This really depends on your employment situation as a trainer. For example some trainers work at commercial gyms as an employee of the gym. With a lot of commercial gyms, your rate is dependent upon how long you’ve been there and how many specializations you have.

In the example above, more times then not, your rate is set for you. However, you still need to have the confidence to discuss it openly with prospective clients.

In other examples, some trainers rent space in a gym and set their own prices.

In either example, you want to sell results first, not packages or sessions. Regardless of the issues clients are coming to you with, the bottom line is a better quality of life is essentially priceless.

Personal training is so much more then just “selling workouts”. Many trainers are part time therapists, part time life coaches, and full time personal trainers. Many people who start a rigorous personal training program undergo major changes in other areas of their life as a result of the training.

When you approach it from that direction, it suddenly seems pretty easy in discussing exactly what the price will be and the benefits of your services.

Feedback on Pricing Personal Training Sessions?

Have any feedback on this blog, other blogs, or just in general? Let us know by shooting us an email at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Trainers

The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Trainers: Featured Image

The impact of COVID-19 on personal trainers has already begun. Many gyms are being forced to shut down for the next 30 days at the minimum. That’s assuming nothing gets worse.With that being said, the affects of COVID-19 are being felt across all industries. But that’s old news.

Many trainers and their clients are scrambling to figure out how they can continue training for many reasons. Namely, clients who have been working hard for months with their trainers don’t want to lose all of their hard fought progress. On top of that, trainers – especially in-person trainers – are having their very livelihood taken right out from under their feet.

I mean, many people are prone to feeling a little cabin fever during this time of social distancing and working form home. But, trainers especially. Many trainers went from the normal hustle and bustle of their typical work day to essentially being laid off for 30 days; all within 24 hours in some cases.

How to Continue Training

First, a disclaimer. Training won’t be the same as you are used to. You think toilet paper and chicken were the only things people raided at the stores? I implore you to check out the fitness gear sections of your local stores.

Many of them have been raided already for resistance bands, weights, and other common fitness equipment. Not only do you have to find a way to train at home but also with limited gear. We are going to have to get creative.

With that being said, we can still find ways to sweat.

Body weight Workouts

Considering that people are raiding fitness gear, it might be a good idea to prescribe body weight workouts. This way your clients can rest assured that there is a way to maintain all of the progress they have fought for.

We at FitSW are already hard at work in putting together some body weight workouts trainers can use as templates.

However, in the meantime we will be posting body weight workouts you can use on our social media accounts.

Using a Client Management Software

If there’s one thing that’s true, it’s that COVID-19 has created a lot of uncertainty. Not only in our day-to-day lives but also in the way that we will train. You may have clients who are used to exercises within a certain training style. Now, we are being forced to adapt to new training styles with body weight exercise, the use of bands, and anything else we can get our hands on.

Client management software can help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on personal trainers and some of the uncertainty. FitSW for example offers demo videos you can include in exercises for clients to reference. You might be saying “well duh”, but now that clients are training at home, a demo video can go a long way when they are unsure about certain exercises.

Additionally, using a client management software can help give your clients security with constant access to workouts. Not only that, but they can also continue tracking their progress.

Many trainers are creating packages in FitSW and selling them to clients for in home workouts and in home training sessions. Through all of this, there might be some grey area when it comes to payments because a lot of clients are still paying for sessions at their gym that they aren’t able to use.

Luckily, most gyms are putting a pause on payments which makes it easier for trainers to accept payments from clients while everything is shut down.

Keeping Your Spirits High & Using Your Time Wisely

Although there are some negatives coming out of all of this, the impact of COVID-19 on personal trainers can also yield some good.

Through all of this, it’s easy to feel down about the whole thing. Not just because you are no longer working. But because your daily routine has been knocked off it’s tracks.

It’s good to maintain a normal routine throughout the day to keep yourself from feeling down. Maybe that means continuing daily rituals, such as, getting up at a normal time and drinking your coffee/tea. In addition, get up and get active. Schedule walks and home workouts for you to do.

You can even schedule a group training session with clients who feel up to meeting at a park. Just make sure your group doesn’t exceed the maximum gathering size many states and countries have established.

You might be thinking “okayyy, that only gets me so far through my day” and you’re right. However, you can supplement that time that you’re usually training with writing home workouts for clients or learning new things.

Get a Specialization

Maybe you have purchased one already and haven’t finished it or you have a rainy day fund you can use to purchase a course. Whatever it maybe, what better time to gain another specialization? You have more free time then usual and when all is restored to normal you can get right to training with your new specialization.

Explore Business Idea’s You Haven’t Had the Chance to Explore

Have you been thinking about online training? Setting up a website? Why not try it now? At the very least, some site builders like Webflow offer a free subscription model that allows for you to build websites for free. This lets you explore their courses and tutorials and familiarize yourself with the tool. Plus it’s free so why not?

Get ahead on Social Media Posting

Do you automate your social media posts? Many trainers and businesses do with sites like Hootsuite. With some of your spare time, you can sit down and make a bunch of posts to schedule in your social media scheduler.

This way when things go back to normal, you are caught up and ahead of the curve. And trust me, my guess is things are going to be crazy. Clients are going to be clawing their way into training sessions with you and a new crowd of people will be looking for training sessions too.

Make a Guide

Are you a personal trainer trying to grow your business? A guide is a great way to show your expertise and get leads.

The only downside of creating a guide is that it takes time. You have to choose a topic, do research, create an outline, and design the whole thing. But now that you have more free time this might be a good option to consider.

Brush up on Your Marketing and Sales Skills

Although there aren’t specializations with this, there are plenty of free courses and certifications online you can get. You can even start by reading some of the blogs we have written about marketing:

  1. Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: Click Here
  2. Social Media Marketing for Personal Trainers: Click Here

Aside from this, Google offers a boatload of certification courses with Google ads. These can be a great resource that you can use to start learning digital marketing.

Turn part of your home into a safe haven

Have you ever jammed you finger and injured it? And then over the course of your finger healing, you realize how often you bump it into random objects because it hurts every time you do.

By the time it’s done healing, you’re glad, not because you were in aching pain, but because you missed the luxury of not having to care when you bumped your finger into things.

Well, COVID-19 has done something similar to a lot of people.

However, instead of it being a stubbed finger, it’s taken away our daily rituals many of us take pride in. Right about now, some of us are starting to realize how much we miss our day-to-day habits because we have never had to go without them like this before.

If there’s one thing we know to be true, it’s that most of us have mini rituals we follow everyday, sometimes unwittingly. Some are intentional, some are a product of the habitual nature of human beings.

Whatever the reason is, we run on mini rituals. They help us ground ourselves during times of stress and right now is no time to sacrifice your personal time.

At the time of this blog being written, many of us are at home due to mass closures and mandatory social distancing. As a result, our worlds have shrunk drastically from what is a normal day and so have our daily habits. At this point you may be asking, “how am I going to re-create a daily pattern from my living room couch?”.

The answer is this, you don’t have to. Start by freeing up any points of stress in your life. Are the dishes a disaster when you go to cook food? Find out why and fix it. Then, turn your kitchen into a point of joy. Cook meals you’ve wanted to learn and try decorating it how you’d like to.

Haven’t had the time to decorate your desk in your room? Go buy a couple fake plants for a couple bucks and liven it up a little bit.

Your closet full of laundry? Do your laundry!

The point here isn’t to overload yourself with chores and eventually stress out, but quite the contrary. Eliminate the clutter and put things in place that make you happy.

Feedback On The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Trainers?

Have any feedback on this blog post? Have feedback in general? Let us know by shooting us an email at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

FitSW Web Update: Group Scheduling & Autocomplete

Hello Group Scheduling and goodbye to tediously adding clients to the same time slot. The long awaited feature many have asked for has finally come. Accompanying it is another feature just released today we are calling “autocomplete”. We know, so original. Without too much rambling, lets dive right into Group Scheduling & Autocomplete.

Group Scheduling

Before the group scheduling update in FitSW, you could schedule more then one client at a time. It was just a tedious process of adding each client one-by-one. Now it’s a simple click and drag and then selecting the client name for the group session.

Group Scheduling & Autocomplete: Sample image of the new Group Scheduling Feature.

Notice the beautifully drawn red box in the image above? That’s where all of your clients names will appear when you create an appointment or session in the scheduler. Once you have selected all of the clients you need, you can make it a recurring event and set an automated email reminder for either 6, 12, or 24 hours before the scheduled event.

Now that group scheduling exists you can create workouts, assign them to multiple clients, and schedule a group training session in the scheduler. This is especially handy since you can set reminders mentioned above.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete is a little self explanatory. On client workouts, you as the trainer or the client can now select a button the left side of their workout that auto fills their workout data.

Notice the fancy drawing again? Now you can just select the “Fill” button and have all of the data auto fill for you. A simple yet handy feature when it comes to workflow efficiency.

Feedback on FitSW Web Update: Group Scheduling & Autocomplete?

Have any feature requests or feedback on the new update? Feel free to reach out to us at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

How to Run an Online Fitness Challenge

Ever thought about starting up an online fitness challenge? Or have you tried already? Then you may already know it’s not as simple as just creating a “challenge” and selling it. You must consider why you are creating the challenge from different perspectives. More notably, two perspectives, your businesses and your target market.

Just simply creating a challenge doesn’t mean people will buy into it. Nor does it mean it will benefit your business either. Think of it like you do when writing a workout or creating a fitness program. You don’t just slap some stuff in FitSW and expect it to work do you? You more then likely put careful thought and consideration into it. As such, you should do the same when creating fitness challenges.

1. Breaking Down Your Online Fitness Challenge

When it comes to creating online fitness challenges, there are a couple essential variables you want to assess:

  1. What is the goal for your business?
  2. What is your target audience and what is your goal for your target audience?
  3. How will you market the challenge?
  4. What is your plan for after the challenge?

These questions help gain a better understanding of what it takes to run an online fitness challenge from a birds eye view.

Fitness challenges can be a very effective way of taking someone who is a complete stranger to your business and turning them into a long term client. The thing is, a lot of trainers don’t take the necessary steps to ensure the challenge launches successfully and they lose out on a lot of value that could have been generated from the challenge.

In the next section we will outline each step from the list above and look at what it takes to create and launch an online fitness challenge.

2. What is the Business Goal?

When it comes to the business goal you have to ask yourself what you want to come out of this challenge for your business.

  • Are you trying to increase sales?
  • Build your email list?
  • Create awareness of your business and services?

Your business goal is one of the most important aspects. It essentially defines the nature of the challenge and how you approach marketing it. Lets look at example challenges from the list above. Remember, there are loads of different business objectives. These are only examples.

Increase Sales

Lets say, for example, your goal is to convert people who do your challenge into longer term clients. Then that means your challenge might come with an exclusive discount towards some of your larger packages that you sell. But only if they signed up and competed in the challenge.

You could make this a free challenge or a paid one. It’s up to you and what you want to accomplish.

A challenge you can offer is 2 weeks of training geared towards solving a problem of your target market. Let’s say the goal is to lose weight. For those that complete the challenge get the price of the 2 week challenge taken off of a larger package that you offer.

This is a great way to increase sales. People are either purchasing the smaller 2 week challenge from you and that’s it or they are purchasing the 2 week challenge and then going on to purchase something larger.

Build Your Email List

Another business objective example could be trying to build your email list. You could run Facebook or Instagram ads that direct people to a landing page you have set up where they input their email as a way to sign up.

Then you deliver workouts straight to their inbox for the duration of the fitness challenge. Plus you could deliver other content besides the content you are delivering for the challenge. This gives you a great way to showcase your knowledge and provide real value to challenge participants.

This also opens the door to sending them marketing emails in the future when the challenge is over.

Creating Awareness

This is one of the more simple challenges, however, can still be effective. An example could be running a challenge on social media. You can ask participants to sign up on a landing page that way you can track who’s competing.

Then post updates on social media as far as the daily tasks for the challenge goes.

You could do a free 2 week push-up challenge where you post the daily workouts on social media. Then ask people to post their results on social media and tag you or use a specific hashtag you created for the challenge.

3. What is Your Target Audience and What is Your Goal For Them?

Keep in mind, many of the people who are or are considering signing up have something specific in mind they want solved. Maybe they are just looking to squeeze in a quick workout throughout the day, lose weight, or they want to try gaining muscle.

So, the question is, how will your challenge benefit them?

The goal should be to pick a pain point and guide challenge participants to a solution over the course of the online fitness challenge.

Lets look at weight loss as an example. Through the duration of the challenge provide exercises participants can do that will help them lose weight, educate them on diet, educate them on the myths of diet and exercise revolving around weight loss, and talk about how to healthily operate on a caloric deficiency.

It’s important to make sure the challenge target market fits the market you traditionally train in. Someone who’s a strength and conditioning coach isn’t going to launch a challenge about Brazilian jiu jitsu.

This is important because it helps you better ensure results for your clients and for your business.

In setting up a challenge that’s related to other personal training packages that you sell, it gives you the opportunity to up sell challenge participants later on.

4. How Will You Market Your Online Fitness Challenge?

There are different ways you can market your challenge. Without diving to deep into marketing your challenges, we will go into a high level overview of what a marketing plan can look like.

Referrals

The first obvious one is using referrals! Once you have the challenge outlined, then you can send out an email blast to your current and past clients informing them of your challenge details and asking them to refer people to the challenge.

You can even create a rewards system. If a current client refers someone to the challenge they get a gift card, a free supplement, or they get a discounted rate on their next session.

If a past client refers someone, they get a discount on future sessions they purchase or you can even try giving the person they recommended to the challenge a discount on any of your programs they purchase.

Creating a rewards system might even bring some old clients back!

Blogging

This method works if you already have a blog going. Posting a blog updating your blog readers on the challenge you are running can help create awareness of the challenge.

Having an active blog also helps as it this gives people the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter which opens the door to leveraging email marketing.

Email Marketing

This is one of the more powerful marketing methods. Especially if you have an active newsletter you already send out weekly or monthly. Simply just send out a couple newsletters announcing the challenge details, starts dates, how to sign up, and any other details you find are needed.

Another option for email marketing involves leveraging the power of social media marketing. Essentially, use social media ads to drive traffic to a landing page where site visitors are given the opportunity to sign up for the challenges. A part of signing up is they provide you with an email you can send information to.

Social Media Marketing

As mentioned in the previous section, you can use social media marketing to drive traffic to a landing page where people are given the opportunity to sign up for the challenge.

However, this is where social media marketing can get really powerful. Not everyone is going to sign up when they click on your ad and are sent to your landing page. Fear not, you can get them to come back through re-targeting ads.

With social media ads, you can create an audience based on what pages of your site they viewed. For example, if they viewed the “Sign Up” page for the challenge but didn’t view the “Thanks for Signing Up” page for the challenge, this means they didn’t sign up. With this same exact logic, you can tell Facebook to deliver ads to people who viewed and didn’t view certain pages.

Another option for social media marketing is just simply posting about it on your personal Instagram or Facebook page. In your posts, announce the challenge details and don’t forget to include a link in your bio.

Google Ads

Leveraging Google Ads for marketing your online fitness challenge can be intimidating but it’s not too bad when you get the hang of it. The reason why Google Ads is so powerful is because of human nature. Think about it, when you have a need or problem, where do you go? You search for solutions on Google. And so do most people.

Google ads give’s you the ability to bid on words people are searching for.

Google Ads Example Image
Google Ad Example: Notice the highlighted area? That’s what the typical ad looks like on Google.

In the image above, notice how an ad pops up based on my search? That’s because Adobe is bidding on the search term “Photoshop”.

When I say bidding that’s because Google Ads is structured like digital auction. Every time you search something, an auction happens in the split of a second.

Anytime you search something, it’s likely the first 2-4 search results are actually ads. Each of the top 2-4 search results are different companies bidding on the term you searched or one similar enough to the word you searched such that their ad appeared.

This whole process operates on what you’d call a “pay-per-click” model or PPC. This means you don’t pay until someone clicks on your ad. This is where the auction comes from.

In your Google Ads account, you tell Google the max amount you are willing to pay per click and they “enter” you into the auction. You also tell Google what words, or more commonly referred to as keywords, you are bidding on.

Then when a search happens involving your keyword, your business is entered in the auction and Google determines who the top 2-4 bidders are. You might think this is immediately based on what you are willing to pay per click, but that’s not everything. Google also looks at how relevant your bid is.

For example, if a software company was bidding on the search term “Cocoa Puffs” that wouldn’t be super relevant and Google wouldn’t show their ad.

Given this, what’s another reason why Google ads is so powerful? It’s because of what us marketers call…

commercial intention.

Commercial intention is referencing the intention of the user who is doing the searching.

For example, if someone searches for “Personal Training” it might be hard to determine exactly what they are looking for. They could be someone looking for a personal trainer, wondering what personal training is, or they could be someone who wants to become a personal trainer.

That wouldn’t be a good word you’d want to bid on because you can’t tell what the user wants. However, bidding on the word “Software for Personal Trainers” is a good one to bid on. It’s more specific and tells you more about what the user is searching for.

In the example of online fitness challenges, you can do keyword research and find the best words to bid on for your challenge.

Online Fitness Challenge Key Word Research
Ubersuggest: Keyword Research Tool

In this example, I’ve typed in Weight Loss Challenge in Ubsersuggest to give an example. Notice immediately it gives you the Search Volume which is how many searches for this terms occur each month, SEO/Paid difficulty, and the estimated cost per click (CPC).

This is a great place to get started in doing research for keywords for an online fitness challenge.

5. How Will the Fitness Challenge be Delivered?

There are many way’s you can go about delivering a fitness challenge.

Social Media/Blog

You could post the daily challenge details on a blog or social media profile. You’d just have to make sure you let people know where and when you will be posting challenge details. On top of that, if the challenge is based on a social media or internet platform, you might want to give people a place to post their results.

Since it’s on social media, it might be a natural response for people to want to share their progress.

Email

An additional method for delivering challenge details and daily tasks could be over email. You could send out daily workout emails or deliver all of the details at once in an excel or word file. This is probably the most common method and can work pretty well.

The only thing is, if you are collecting feedback or results from this challenge, you will have to ask challenge participants to submit their results all over email. The problem with this is it’s a pretty manual process for your clients and can turnout to be a substantial amount of work for you.

Along these same lines, you could create a Google document you share with everyone. This could be a good central place to update challenge details on a daily basis and collect information from participants.

Client Management Software

The last route you can go is using a client management software for personal trainers. This is a pretty good way of making sure the challenge details are delivered effectively. Not only that, but, using a personal training software can help you track the results challenge participants see over the course of the challenge.

6. What is Your Plan for After the Challenge?

Your plan for after the challenge is completely dependent on your business objective and what you’d like to accomplish. One aspect to consider are re-targeting marketing campaigns to get people to sign up for larger packages.

With re-targeting, you can simply run social media ads and email marketing campaigns to inform challenge participants of the services you offer in larger packages.

Another aspect for consideration is setting up a system for feedback. Whether you simply accept feedback through email or you use a software like Survey Monkey to collect feedback, creating a plan for feedback is a must.

This way you get insight into what parts of the challenge worked and what parts didn’t for future challenges.

Feedback on How to Run an Online Fitness Challenge?

We take our feedback seriously, if you have any, please feel free to reach out to support@fitsw.com or get in touch on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Updates to Our Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers

Shamelessly, we are very excited to announce updates to our web and android apps for personal trainers. The updates come right after a couple big feature releases, subscriptions and packages.

This update includes:

Web
  • Table sorting on sessions and subscriptions.
  • Infinite scrolling.
  • Your services are now more accessible from your trainer page.
  • Macros are now totaled as you you add food items to meals.
  • Custom brand colors are now displayed on the trainer pages of those that purchased a custom web app.
Android
  • Updated super set and workout functionality.
  • Exercise list sorting.
  • General functionality improvements

Okay enough rambling, you’re probably curious about what “infinite scrolling” is! Well, me too so lets dive in. In this blog post, we will be exploring mainly the web updates.

The Android updates were mainly primarily improvements to general functionality and eliminating some small bugs that were reported. While we are at it, we’d like to say thank you to those who have reported bugs or submitted feedback.

We take any bug report or feedback submission pretty seriously as it really helps us provide a better service and platform.

Web Updates

1. Table Sorting on Subscriptions

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Table sorting on subscriptions

You can now filter by client name in your subscriptions list. That’s right no more scrolling down a large list of subscriptions when trying to find a clients subscription.

2. Table Sorting on Sessions

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Table sorting on sessions.

Alright, now we’re talking! Although infinite scrolling is a part of this update, fear not, there will be no infinite scrolling here. Filtering on client name, session date, and session status helps you keep clients accountable.

3. Trainer Page Improvements

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Trainer Page Improvements

Now all of the subscriptions and packages you put together are available on your trainer page. Making it easier then ever for prospective clients to access your services.

4. Infinite Scrolling

Do you have a lot of workouts or meals created? Previously, the page would load the entire list at once which could take awhile. Now it loads the top of the page first and loads the rest of the page as you scroll down.

So now, you’ll just be infinitely scrolling rather then infinitely waiting! Woo!

5. Totaled Macros

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Macros totaled

When creating meals and meal plans, the macros are now displayed as totaled values for individual meal items and entire meals. Making it easier for clients to hit not only their fitness goals but also nutrition goals as well.

Tip: If you would rather just simply prescribe macros instead of entire meals, you can create a custom food called “Macros” where you input macro values. Then assign that to your client as their nutrtion prescription. Example below.

This is a good way to give clients a guide for macros they should be hitting while giving them the flexibility to pick the meals they eat.

6. Trainer Pages with Custom Branded Colors

Trainer page with Custom Colors

Now, if you have purchased a custom web app, your brand colors will display on your trainer page as well as your logo in place of FitSWs logo. Creating a consistently branded experience for you and your clients.

Have Feedback on Updates to our Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers?

Feel free to comment on this blog post, fire off an email to support@fitsw.com, or reach out to use on Instagram or Facebook. We look forward to hearing from you!

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: A Complete Guide

What the heck are marketing funnels for personal trainers?? Well, I can tell ya’ one thing, it’s not something you just throw your money at and hope for the best. That’s a good way to waste all of your money.

Instead, lets do the opposite. Let’s take a calculated approach and make some money, shall we?

Admittedly, there can be a learning curve. Not in learning what a marketing funnel is, but more so learning common methods and tools.

But, lucky for you, here I am writing this blog and simultaneously googling “marketing funnels”.

Just kidding, I’m not doing that. Everyone knows Bing is better.

Okay, enough with the jokes, lets take a deep dive down a funnel of our own. One made of knowledge. What say you?

First, What is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a method of defining a would-be customers journey in discovering your brand and eventually becoming a customer. This includes from the point they first discover your business to purchasing your product or service – or not purchasing anything.

Marketing funnels are commonly broken down into 4 main phases:

  • Awareness: The prospective customer is aware they have a problem/need they want to solve. During this phase your goal is simply to get discovered as a brand that can solve issues/needs for consumers.
  • Interest: Our prospective customer has stumbled upon some content which has tipped his/her attention towards your business and has converted into a lead. Now it’s time for you to develop a relationship with the customer. Converting into a lead simply means they signed up for a newsletter or tool some action that gave you access to their contact info.
  • Desire: The prospective customer is now considering your business as an option. However, they still have not purchased anything and are evaluating all options – including yours. At this point you have introduced a “soft sell”. Meaning you informed them of something you offer in a passive manner (i.e. not “BUY NOW”).
  • Action: They bite and purchase something from you! or not. Yes, sometimes work goes into leading a customer down a marketing funnel just so they can decide not to purchase your product. Fear not, there are other fish in the sea. However, this stage is critical and is where you want to make sure your site is designed perfectly. Your messaging is fine tuned. And everything is optimized towards guiding those strangers who have made the pilgrimage across the internet to your site to make a purchase.

Different Marketing Methods Used in Marketing Funnels

Often times marketing funnels are made up of different types of marketing strategies. The main ones you’ll see are:

  • Content Marketing: This consists of putting out content such as blogs, social media posts, videos, eBooks, guides, white papers, etc… in an attempt to solve problems for people and create awareness for your business. Content marketing is typically in the awareness phase of the marketing funnel.
  • Paid Ads: Paid ads can occupy many different phases of the marketing funnel. You can run ads to people who may not have ever heard of your business or you can run adds to people who have been to your website. Popular tools for running paid ads are Facebook ads and Google Ads.
  • Email Marketing: Email marketing is a great way to keep people up to speed with the products/services you offer, discounts you’re running, announcements, top blog articles, and much more.

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers

In this section, we will outline what actions are typically taken in each phase of a marketing funnel.

Phase 1: Creating Awareness

When it comes to marketing funnels for personal trainers, creating awareness is often times the most underrated aspect. Creating awareness is considered a Top of the Funnel (ToFu) phase.

Without this phase, you don’t really have much of a funnel. This phase is where people identify they have a need they want a solution for and are actively searching for this solution.

The goal is for them to discover your brand while they are searching for a solution. Here, you want to make your business as discoverable as possible.

Social Media

A good place to start is social media. This is an obvious one but there are some nuances that often get ignored.

When it comes to leveraging social media as a branch of your content marketing strategy, it’s important to follow a couple practices:

  1. Do your best to post content that’s valuable. Content that’s valuable is usually informative, visually appealing, triggers emotions, is relevant, and is interactive. Interactive usually means running polls on your stories, creating regular opportunity for shout outs, and even just asking general questions to the community. Making sure you are actively conversing with your followers is a great way to create engagement on your profile. This is great because it shows your followers you care which means they are more likely to interact with your posts. Additionally, the platform you are on will recognize this and promote your posts to more people.
  2. Use hashtags. Hashtags can help your posts get discovered. You can create different combinations of hashtags for different types of content that you post. This helps you test which hashtags yield the best results just makes sure that it’s relevant to those who are discovering it.

Creating engaging content on social media is the most important part. It increases the likely hood of people liking, commenting, and eventually sharing your content.

Which makes it more likely that people who are searching for solutions to their needs will discover your social media profile and brand. This in turn makes it more likely that people visit your blog or site.

Blogging

Another fantastic content marketing strategy is starting a blog. Blogging is easily one of the most powerful marketing strategies out there.

However, much like social media, there are best practices to follow to ensure you get the best results:

  1. Post blogs with value. Do you see a trend here? When it comes to content marketing, providing relevant value to your audience is the most important aspect.
  2. Make sure you go into enough depth in the topic you’re posting about.
  3. A good blog solves problems for readers and search engines. Meaning, you should spend time on making sure your blog is search engine optimized (SEO). A good way to do this is using the Yoast SEO plugin for your blog if it’s a WordPress blog. Yoast helps you optimize your blog while you are writing it.
  4. Posting a blog once a week is always a good place to start. Although, there are loads of studies that show posting more often is better.
  5. Never post the same blog twice. In-fact, this can have a negative impact on your SEO. Instead, regularly update old blogs. This has shown to have positive impacts on your SEO.
  6. In each blog, link to an external website and link to at least 2 other blogs of your own (internal links).

SEO is really important for blogging as many people turn to google when searching for solutions to their needs.

If your blogs aren’t optimized for search engines then that greatly reduces the chance of people finding your blog when doing research.

Inevitably, it’s important to make it easy for people to sign up for a newsletter which gives them access to your content. This also gives you a channel to nurture this lead into a customer in later phases of the funnel.

Sponsored Brand Awareness Ads

Here’s another reason to make sure you are posting content that’s valuable on your social media accounts.

You can run paid ads on Facebook and Instagram that drive traffic to your site, blog, and your social media profiles. When running these ads, you run them towards “audiences” you have created in your ad account.

These audiences are made up of people whom you think have a higher likelihood of taking interest in the services you offer. Through your ad platform you can simply create audiences who have an affinity towards athletic clothes, technology, or pretty much any common interest you can think of.

When running brand awareness ads, the goal in mind isn’t necessarily to drive sales immediately. The goal is to create engagement with people who see your ads.

Engagement can mean they click through to your site or they visit your social media profile from the ad. This is why it’s important to consistently post valuable content to your social media profiles as it increases the likely hood of them following you.

Often times, giving them a little bit of information about your business in the ad is enough to peak their interest and prompt the esteemed click/tap on that “learn more” button of your ad. Effectively driving them to your site and giving you “ammo” for the later stages of your marketing funnel(s).

Summing up phase 1

Phase 1 is all about creating awareness of your brand and showing site visitors that you are serious about helping them out.

When it comes to marketing funnels for personal trainers, phase 1 can really help build a good reputation as a knowledgeable resource.

If visitors to your blog are able to pull actionable information away from the content you publish, they will be more likely to subscribe to a newsletter or even schedule a consultation with you.

Phase 2: Interest

This phase is where customers provide contact information so they can continue to get an endless stream of your lovely content.

Prospective customers haven’t decided on a product yet, but your brand is on their radar of products/services they are comparing.

Call-to-Actions (CTA’s)

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: CTA example image.
Call to Action Examples: Can you identify all of the CTA’s on the FitSW homepage?

Calls to action are just as they sound. They are simple features on your site or app that drive customers to provide contact information in exchange for something that will benefit them.

Examples include signing up for a newsletter, signing up for a free consultation, or providing an email address in exchange for downloading a guide.

When incorporating CTA’s in your site, it’s important to keep the CTA somewhere where it’s relevant.

For example, it doesn’t make sense to call site visitors to sign up for your newsletter on your contact or services page. However, a good call to action for your services page could be a “Get Your Free Consultation Today” CTA. For the contact page you can incorporate a “Have Questions? We are happy help” field people can fill out.

In this phase, the calls to action shouldn’t be too much of a commitment for prospective customers. You don’t want to come off as pushy with “BUY NOW!!!” calls to action everywhere, especially this early on in the funnel.

Re-targeting Social Media Ads

Re-targeting ads are where social media ads really flex their muscles. When you set up your ads account you will more then likely install a tracking code on your site.

A tracking code allows for you to do a variety of things, such as measure page views, how many page viewers click on a CTA, and a lot more.

However, one of the most powerful things it lets you do is create audiences based on what pages site visitors viewed and what pages they didn’t view.

For example, you can tell Facebook to create audiences for people who viewed the “Sign up for our Newsletter” page but didn’t view the “Thanks for signing up for our newsletter!” page.

This means they thought about signing up but didn’t.

Running a re-targeting ad based on the example audience above is a powerful way to draw those users back. Examples include:

  • Running an ad with a blog image and summing up what the blog is about with a “Read More” CTA on the ad. When users click through to the blog, they are eventually prompted to sign up for the newsletter.
  • Or you can run an ad with a creative image suggesting they should sign up for your newsletter and a caption with a message such as “Don’t miss out!” and a details about what’s included in the newsletter. Users who click through are sent directly to the newsletter sign up page.

Effectively running re-targeting ads means you can increase the leads you have, which gives you more leads to nurture later on down the road and provides you with more nurtured leads to convert into paying customers.

Phase 3: Desire

Alright, you have done a lot of work at this point. But, you can’t stop now, no one else is going to nurture those leads for you!

In phase 3, prospective customers have provided contact information. They are interested. It’s time to inform them about your service even more and prepare them for a purchase. This phase is all about developing a relationship with your customer.

Email Marketing

Since you have their email now, you can send marketing emails to them providing helpful information that both benefits them and helps them determine why your services are the option they need.

However, don’t come out to bat swinging with discounts and reasons why they should purchase your service outright.

It’s important to start off slow. Provide information to common problems they might be facing and how they can overcome them. Then include what your services and products do to help over come these issues as well. At this point, don’t make the email all about your services.

Once you have sent a couple of these emails, then you can send an email targeted at getting them to purchase in phase 4 of the funnel.

Here are some email templates that can help you get started. In addition, you can use tools like Mailchimp to help you manage your email marketing campaigns.

Phase 4: Action

Phew! Hang with me here, we are almost there. This is the phase where you go for the purchase. At this point, you customer knows your brand, the services you have to offer, and has been nurtured with some extra content you have sent them.

But “how do you I actually get them to make a purchase?” you ask?

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a fantastic method of converting leads into paying customers.

After you have sent them a couple emails about your business with helpful information, you can send that coveted sales email.

Here, a common practice is to offer a discount code only good for a limited amount of time in the email. Talk about what the discount is good for and how long it is available.

Provide a handy CTA for them to click such as “Claim My Offer Now” or something along those lines where they are guided to your site with discount and a wallet in hand ready to purchase.

However, leads may not always bite the first offer you give them.

If they don’t go for the discount, it’s important to remember it isn’t necessarily so much about getting the purchase but rather developing a relationship with the customer.

That’s why it’s important to repeat the process of sending a couple helpful and informative emails before you go for another discount or product offer. Jumping the gun to early with a product offer immediately after you just sent one is often a red flag for most people.

Re-targeting Ads

Much like the re-targeting section earlier in the blog, this one is all about audiences. Here you can create audiences based on people who have not seen your “Thanks for Your Purchase” page.

What does this mean? It means they have not purchased anything from you yet.

For these types of ads, you can use an image of yourself training or a creative image with a fancy caption and a CTA that says something like “Sign Up” or “Choose My Package”.

Upon clicking the ad customers are brought to your checkout page where they can use a discount code you gave them or simply just check out.

Summing Up Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers

This was a long one, but it needed to be. This whole process sounds very involved. However, once you dive in you’ll realize most of the work goes into setting the whole process up.

Thanks to technology, once it’s set up, your job is to then optimize your ad campaigns for their best performance.

Once you have a marketing funnel built out, then it’s all about optimizing your ads to perform better. Using tools like Google Analytics can help you monitor your data and see how your marketing efforts are performing.

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