Grow Your PT Client Base With Social Media

The emergence of social media has presented people from all walks of life with an amazing opportunity to market themselves and their services to audiences that they may have never had access to in the past.

You can get fantastic exposure for relatively little investment of time and money, as long as you play it smart. Using social media to attract new clients for your personal training business can be easy with the right approach meaning you can experience more clients than you would otherwise have been able to.

Have a Consistent Brand Image

You are your brand so make sure you decide what you want to be fun, professional, exciting or something else entirely. However, it’s important that you stay consistent in your approach. Whether you have a casual relationship with your social media community or take the approach of keeping things very business-like, it’s important not to waver in the way you do things.

Consistency is key. If your brand is fun and exciting, maintain that through your posts. If you’re interested in presenting the hard science around fitness and only attracting serious clients, then try not to deviate from that path. It’s ok to mix it up occasionally, but always keep in mind that your brand image is extremely valuable.

Add Value

Inform, educate, entertain or inspire. When you’re creating a post for any social media network, you should have one of these goals in mind. If you want people to hit that “like” button, you’ve got to add value to their day.

Informative posts can revolve around new updates in the fitness industry, special offers on fitness products (or your own sessions), major events, and more. Education posts can include daily exercise tips, nutrition tips, or simply debunking a commonly accepted fitness “fact”.

Entertaining and inspiring your followers is a great way to build rapport and form a closer relationship with your community. Many personal trainers have built their entire social media presence around entertaining and inspiring followers, and it’s incredibly effective.

Post Regularly

Depending on the social media platform, you should be posting as often as possible. If you’re producing great posts that are keeping people engaged, you won’t seem as though you’re spamming them – just entertaining them.

On networks such as Facebook or Instagram, don’t be afraid to post up to 6 times per day. On Twitter, you can post even more often. Mix up your post formats, including quotes, memes, videos, testimonials, fitness tips and more.

Include a Call to Action

All this effort isn’t for free! You shouldn’t do it in every single post, but it’s important to remind your followers that you are a professional personal trainer with a great service offering, and they should try it out sometime.

Your entire social media activity should be geared towards converting followers into clients or brand advocates. It’s not enough to simply motivate and inspire your followers – you’ve got to provide them with a call to action, the impetus to make the decision to pick up the phone and book a session.

Calls to action can be as simple as “give us a call to discuss your personal fitness goals” or something slightly more advanced, such as “download our free workout planner” to get people into your sales funnel. Once you have their email, you can market to them outside of social media.

Be Shareable

The quickest and easiest way to expand your social media presence is to get your followers to do the hard work for you. When you create top quality, truly engaging content, you’ll start noticing that your posts are getting a lot more shares.

Try and tap into people’s emotions. Entertain them, and provide posts that you’d share with your friends. Stay up to date with modern trends across social networks and capitalize on that. Take advantage of trending hashtags to get a little bit more exposure for each post.

When you have awesome posts, people will share them. The key is to get this to occur for every post you put out there. As each post performs better than the last, most social media platforms (especially Facebook) will be more inclined to give you increased reach on your next post.

Use Tools and Resources

Take advantage of the tools and resources available across the internet. You can schedule posts to a Facebook page, which means you don’t need to be active every few hours to keep a consistent stream of content going out.

Try free online software such as Canva to put your images together. This free and easy to use software also ensures that your images are just the right size for the platform you are using. No more half cropped images for Facebook as Canva gives you the right template to use. You can use Google’s advanced search function to find images that are licensed for reuse, ensuring that you don’t need to pay for stock images. Look for free images or royalty-free images that have a Commons Licence for sharing too.

Do your research. Understand how each platform works and how you can use different tools to expand your following and create a bigger impact.

If you want to learn more about where to start, get in touch with us today or view our Complete Personal Training Course.