Strategies for Personal Trainers to Attract More Clients and Grow Their Business

Being a personal trainer offers an enriching and fascinating career path. You get to make a real difference in people’s lives and pursue a path that aligns with your passions. At the same time, it’s vital to understand that you’re effectively setting up a business. 

While the independent nature of personal training offers flexibility, it also requires you to find clients. Having a steady supply of fresh customers is key to keeping you financially stable and growing in line with your ambitions. You’ll need to focus your efforts on a range of measures.

Building Your Brand

The personal training landscape is certainly not short of competition. Standing out from the crowd is key to attracting more clients and growing your business. Taking the time to develop your personal brand helps potential clients quickly understand who you are, what you can do for them, and what your values are. When done well, your efforts resonate with your audience and start to build trust that leads to conversions.

Just like when branding a big business, it pays to be strategic. There are a few things to focus on here, including:

• Reviewing your current brand: It’s important to understand what your current personal brand represents. Look at your social profiles, your website, and marketing to see whether they give a clear sense of the training experience you want to communicate. Ask others, too, including current clients. Doing so gives you data to improve on your branding or even to start again from scratch.
• Clarifying your key brand attributes: If you don’t know what you want your personal training business to stand for, potential clients won’t either. Narrow down a handful of key values and attributes. The simpler you can make this, the easier it’s likely to be to communicate your attributes in your personal branding. For example, you could brand yourself as an online personal trainer who specialises in body confidence or a London-based fitness professional with expertise in bodybuilding.
• Creating relevant materials: Once you have your attributes, it’s time to start creating materials that reflect these. This may be a logo and brand colours you use on your website and social media channels. Applying a little colour psychology to connect your brand to the feeling you want your clients to experience can be a useful part of this. Using your brand attributes to drive the topics and presentation of blog and video content is also smart, alongside reinforcing your personal training expertise.

When building your brand, you need to be consistent. All your posts should reflect your brand identity. It’s even important for classes you plan to reflect the core tenets of your values. This helps to set client expectations and makes your presence in the market both clearer and stronger.

Commit to Development

Your skills are your ticket to a personal training career with longevity. After all, expertise helps you to get the best outcomes for your clients. This, in turn, may well lead to positive in-person and online recommendations that result in more clients. At the same time, sticking with the basic skills can only do so much. It is in the best interest of your growth to invest some time, energy, and money in continued skills development.

This begins with regularly updating your knowledge of current training practices. After all, standards in the industry can change over time. Not to mention that new training technology and equipment you can incorporate into training routines emerge frequently. Fitness wearables and exercise apps have changed the game for at-home and in-gym exercise; they should change the game for your training regimen, too. Refresher courses and discussions with fellow personal trainers can help you stay up-to-date and meet clients’ needs.

Beyond this, it can be wise to expand your skills into niche areas of personal training. Doing so empowers you to offer more services, opening you up to a wider range of clients. This might include courses on aging-related fitness that empower you to support more client demographics. Corporate wellness education may help you gain lucrative business consultancy contracts to build and maintain companies' wellness programmes.

Manage Your Reputation

Your reputation is vital in personal training, given that many new clients will base decisions on recommendations. The reality is that you don't always have full control over what your status is in the community and wider industry. Nevertheless, you can take the time to implement some strategic reputation management practices to help influence the perceptions of new customers.

One relatively simple way to do this is to encourage reviews and testimonials. In the digital age, a lot of consumers will head to review sites — such as those operated by Google or Trustpilot — to get a sense of your reputation among clients. Set up accounts on these platforms and ask your current clientele to leave reviews, preferably providing specific details about what they feel is positive about your business. You can also create a template for personal trainer testimonials to email to clients, making it easy for them to fill in their details and return them to you. This gives you material to post on your website that can be a good trust signal to new visitors.

Occasionally, you might have a dissatisfied client post online. Taking the time to combat negativity on social media about your business helps you manage your reputation and provide great customer service. Respond as quickly as possible, using empathetic language and inviting them to contact you privately to address the issue. You can then take reasonable steps to find solutions and then post about the outcome on the same complaint post. This highlights to other potential clients that you’re a skilled personal trainer dedicated to high levels of service.

Conclusion

Growing your clientele and business as a personal trainer requires a strategic approach. You’ll need to schedule time for mindful brand-building and reputation management alongside your training sessions. Don’t forget to refresh your strategy occasionally, though. Your current measures may not always work, and branding can become stale. Be open to reviewing what’s still working, what isn’t, and how you can adapt.