Personal Trainer Marketing | Fit Business Insider - Personal Training Business - Fitness Business

Personal Trainer Marketing Simplified

November 6, 2011 By admin 8 Comments

A Post On Personal Trainer Marketing By Pat Rigsby

You know how sometimes things seem so big, so daunting that we almost get paralyzed and stop making headway on them entirely?

When I talk to a personal trainer marketing his or her business, it often seems that way.

Well, I’m going to do my best in this post to simplify the whole ‘personal trainer marketing thing’ once and for all.

First – let’s get to the bottom of what marketing really is if you’re a good trainer or coach. Marketing is simply exposing people to your service and why it’s better than all other available options.

I don’t really care how you do it. If you’re really good at what you do and someone experiences it… I’ll take my chances on you likelihood of building a successful business.

So with that as the basis of a successful approach to personal trainer marketing, the real need is to get people to ‘test drive’ what you do.

Where do you get these people?

Well, it astounds me when fitness pros ask about doing a 5000 piece postcard mailer or running a newspaper ad but they’ve never actually told everyone they know about what they do and how they can help them.

Seems pretty backwards to me.

[Read more...]

Fitness Referral Strategies: Testimonial Acquisition System

August 7, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 4 Comments

A Post On Fitness Referral Strategies by Pat Rigsby

Tomorrow we’ll be launching Fitness Business Blueprint, but even though things have been busy around here with the big launch I still wanted to share a really valuable post on one of my favorite relatively passive fitness referral strategies that you could use to kick off the week.

Fitness testimonials are one of the most powerful fitness referral strategies you have at your disposal. If you’re like most of the fitness pros that read this blog, you take a lot of pride on the service you provide and the results your clients get.

If that’s the case you deserve testimonials. But there is a difference between deserving them and getting them, so I wanted to give you a simple plan to start capturing testimonials.

12 Steps To A Great Personal Training Career

July 19, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 11 Comments

If you want to enjoy a successful and lucrative personal training career then you need to do some work. There’s a lot of competition (which I think is a good thing as it weeds out the pretenders) and a number of factors that play into your success (or lack thereof.)

Here’s a list of 12 Steps that – if you adhere to them – will lay the foundation for a great personal training career:

Step #1 – Be A Great Coach: Being great at your craft should be the foundation that any successful business is built on. If you deliver a poor quality of service, marketing and sales ability can temporarily keep you going, but eventually people will figure you out.

Step #2 – Create Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Your USP answers the question, “why should choose you over any and all of your competitors?” This is the foundation of all your marketing efforts during your personal training career.

flow chart 12 Steps To A Great Personal Training Career

Top 10 Traits Of A Successful Fitness Professional

May 16, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 21 Comments

The other day someone asked me what the top 10 traits of a successful fitness professional are. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to answer. There are so many things that go into being a top flight personal trainer – I had trouble narrowing it to 10. Below is what I came up with – but I’d really like to hear your thoughts. So review my Top 10 and then let me know what traits I missed in the comments area below.

Education: The fitness pro’s education is not only extremely important, but it should be continual. Great personal trainers and coaches keep learning because they have a passion for knowledge, are driven to help the people they work with and want to stay ahead of the competition.
Integrity: Integrity is vital for the fitness pro. Integrity is a concept of consistency of values, actions, methods, expectations, outcomes and principles. It’s sense of one’s truthfulness and honesty in relationship to one’s motives and actions. Without integrity you really don’t have anything.

Screen shot 2011 05 16 at 10.05.27 PM 300x208 Top 10 Traits Of A Successful Fitness Professional

Fitness Marketing Success: Who’s Your Who?

May 8, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 12 Comments

who 300x220 Fitness Marketing Success: Whos Your Who?

One of the biggest hindrances to fitness marketing success I see made is not knowing ‘who your who is’… or who you are actually for.

This is a lesson I learned way back when I was coaching college baseball, and a lesson which every time I’ve deviated from I’ve suffered.

When I coached, I built a very successful program by recruiting blue collar type players. Young men from middle class or lower middle class families that were usually hard workers, had been overlooked by bigger colleges and had a chip on their shoulder – determined to prove that they were better than some of the ‘hot prospects’ that had kept them in the shadows.

I knew this was my type of player. It was who I identified with. Who I was most effective coaching. In fact, it’s probably who I’d been just a few years prior.

This worked for me. Recruiting those types of players was comfortable for me. Coaching those guys was fun… we even finished 5th in the World Series one season with a team comprised almost entirely of those types of blue collar players.

The only time I ever really deviated from that recruiting strategy was the point when coaching stopped being fun. After having a decent amount of success, I was now able to get the attention of some of the more highly touted recruits. I was a pretty good salesman so a number of them ended up choosing to become part of our program.

Biggest mistake I ever made as a coach.

The Most Overlooked Fitness Marketing Strategy

May 4, 2011 By Erik 4 Comments

Erik Rokeach shares a simple fitness marketing tip to help you network with the most influential people in your area

OK, so when it comes to a killer fitness marketing strategy, and ones that just plain ole’ kick butt, there was one that worked really well for me. That was networking.

network 300x200 The Most Overlooked Fitness Marketing Strategy

I know, I know. Networking is so cliche, and such a boring topic. But it’s that word of mouth that really makes things blow up quick.

Obviously when it comes to networking you can go to local events, health fairs, chamber of commerce meetings, leads groups, and all of those types of things.

At these events you have lots of people who you can network with, but a lot of times it’s people who are looking to do the exact same thing as you, and don’t have many great connections themselves.

So it’s important to be smart and leverage the right people. And you do that by finding the big players in the market who know everyone.

Who are those big players?

Business owners, politicians, PTA board members, presidents of youth leagues and anyone in the media.

Those are the types of people you need to network with, but sometimes there are so many layers to get through before you can even connect with these people.

But there is a secret ninja who can get you access to just about anyone you want.

The Easiest Way To Get Fitness Referrals

April 27, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 6 Comments

A Guest Post On Fitness Referrals By Paul Reddick

You can probably remember the last 3 people who said something nice to you about your fitness business, right?

Do you have them in your mind now?

Maybe they told you…

- How much weight they lost?
- What an inspiration you are to them?
- How much they enjoy training with you?

If you’re like me you would put on your best “aww shucks” and say something like …

“My pleasure”
“Thanks so much”
“That means a lot”

Well, like me, you’ll have to change that. Like, NOW!

Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics – Part 4

April 19, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 2 Comments

Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics– The Final Installment

Here’s the final installment in our Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics Series. Art McDermott, Kyle Harrod and Todd Lowder each share some of their best stuff. If you missed the other installments here are the links to those….

Part1, Part2, Part 3

art Rapid Fire Fitness Marketing Tactics – Part 4

Fitness Marketing Tactic: School of the Month/ Biggest Loser By Art McDermott

The first thing we did when deciding on whether this would be a good promotion to run was we mentioned it to some of the teacher who we already had as members to our boot camp. This not only informed them of the idea so we could get their reaction, but also got them to go back to the teachers at their school and market the idea for us to build up a following even before officially announcing it.

We then got in touch with the head HR person in Andover and pitched our idea to her. We had a nice little presentation for her explaining all the actual benefits of having the teacher take part in the contest.

After that we got in touch with all the nurses and explained how the contest would work and the part they would play. We limited their role into simply having to take the weights of their school’s participants day 1 and the last day, stressing we would do the rest of the work.

The One Hour Personal Trainer Marketing Plan

April 3, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 12 Comments

A Personal Trainer Marketing Plan Post By Pat Rigsby

timer 282x300 The One Hour Personal Trainer Marketing Plan

When it comes to marketing, personal trainers tend to procrastinate. They’d rather do about anything else – write programs, read or watch stuff online. Heck, they’d rather straighten up the gym than actually market.

But for a personal trainer, marketing is critical. No getting around it.

So what if I tell you that you only have to spend an hour a day to execute a personal trainer marketing plan?

Well – it’s true. You can accomplish a lot in an hour.

But it has to be a quality hour.

Personal Training Business Growth Using Infomarketing Strategies

March 30, 2011 By Pat Rigsby 8 Comments

A Personal Training Business Post By Pat Rigsby

There are a lot of different ways to build your personal training business. Infomarketing being one of them.

If you know anything about the infomarketing world, it is a pretty interesting one. There are a lot of smart, ethical folks doing really, really well – and a fair share of people that are, well…not folks that I’d consider ethical or even remotely close to being experts in the information they’re selling.

But pretty much all of them that are doing well have some stuff in common. They have sound personal training business models that they know inside and out. They track everything to see what works.

Because of this – they’ve developed pretty efficient ‘machines’ that fitness pros can learn a lot from. Here’s an overview of some of those infomarketing concepts that you can apply to your business.

Traffic – Most of the infomarketers I know are very good at using 1 or 2 sources of traffic. Some are great at media buys. Some are awesome at SEO. Some know Facebook or Google Ads inside out. Others are great at leveraging affiliates. I don’t know many – if any that are great at all of it.