8 Personal Trainer Marketing Strategies

To be successful as a fitness business owner, you need several personal trainer marketing strategies you can use to grow your client base. Every day you should be doing a couple of things to grow your business and generate new prospects. Here are the fitness marketing strategies I’d recommend focus on:
1. Public speaking - If you’re not doing at least 2 speaking engagements per month you’re leaving money on the table. If my numbers were low, I’d be doing one speaking engagement per week. Fitness marketing strategies don’t get more powerful than this one.
2. Networking - Nothing sexy about it, but you should be passing out 2 week trials – preferably 3 per day, attending networking events on a weekly basis and reaching out to everyone already in your personal network.
3. Business of the Week - Identify a local business in your community each week and give their employees a free trial of your services. You should be contacting 4 businesses per month at minimum.
4. Fundraisers - Great for business growth and great for your community. A win-win for sure. Just identify an organization that needs to raise money and reach out to them with your fundraising opportunity. They keep all the proceeds and you get all the leads. Of all fitness marketing strategies, this is the most underutilized.
5. Ask For Referrals Early - As soon as someone joins camp or becomes a client - even on a trial – ask for referrals. Ask them to give you the names and contact information of 3-5 people that they might like to join them in camp and you’ll provide their guest with a 2 week free trial. If that person joins you’ll give the referrer $50 off their next month. This is the easiest of all fitness marketing strategies, but missed by 90% of all trainers.
6. Be Easy To Pay. Implement auto-renewal. Use EFT billing and set up your business so you’re not chasing money at the beginning of each month. With auto-renewal the responsibility to stop working with you is now on the client instead of the burden of re-signing people falling to you. This simple step will improve retention 25% for sure.
7. Move People to 3 Month or Longer Commitments. From this point forward, start selling 3 month contracts to all new prospects. Don’t get caught up in moving your current campers to anything beyond auto-renewal – but all new people make 3 month commitments.
8. Have a Downsell. If someone can’t continue at 3, 4 or 5 sessions per week, offer to downgrade their program to 2 sessions per week.

There are certain personal trainer marketing strategies that, if implemented, will provide a big surge in business. Start with my suggestions above – and start growing your business today!