Your clients are looking for results. You’re looking for revenue. Your nutrition expertise can help both you and your clients meet your goals. Advertising that nutrition expertise in your fitness marketing plan are the first step.

Why Advertise Nutrition Expertise?

If you or someone on your staff has earned a sports nutrition certification, that sets your personal trainer business apart from your local competition. But that only earns you more clients, and hence more revenue, if your potential clients know about it.

You need to let your clients know about your enhanced qualifications. You need to let your clients know how these qualifications will help them meet their goals. This is from Marketing 101: any good fitness marketing strategy involves informing clients of the benefits of your services, not the features.

How Do You Advertise Nutrition Expertise?

Clients don’t want to know that you or someone on your staff is a certified nutritionist. They want to know what’s in it for them. So what is in it for them? Clients can see faster results if they follow a sports nutrition regimen that aligns with their recommended workout.

Clients are interested in faster results. Therefore, convince them that a carefully structured menu and workout combination will earn them those faster results, and you’ll bring them in the door.

Where to Advertise Nutrition Expertise?

This is a little trickier, and it depends on your area. Overall, most clients looking for a personal training business will either perform a Google search for personal trainers, or they’ll ask about personal training services at the gym. Read more…

What are you spending your advertising dollars on?

You may be wasting your fitness marketing dollars on useless ads. Marketing dollars are only worth spending if they bring you new clients.

Therefore, you need to figure out which ones are bringing in the clients, and can the rest.

Your money is better spent on that vacation in Costa Rica you’ve been planning for five years.

So, how do you figure out which ads are bringing in the clients? Finding the right fitness marketing strategy is all about asking questions and seeking honest answers.

Using Consumer Feedback to Massage Your Strategy

Consumer feedback can help you get rid of fitness marketing strategies that aren’t working. You may be spending money unnecessarily, because potential clients aren’t noticing your ads anyway. You can determine which ads are working and which ads are not working by polling your clients.

First, you have to collect the data. The easiest way to do this is to survey your clients with a form.

Collecting the Data: Surveying Your Clients at Registration

You should be using a registration form of some kind anyway to enroll your clients in fitness instruction. If you aren’t doing this, consider creating a simple sheet that your new clients can fill out. It should include the client’s name, contact information, service or services that he or she is interested in or enrolled in, fitness goals, and any other information that you find yourself asking verbally a lot. Read more…

Certified nutrition expertise doesn’t just help grow your personal trainer business client base. Your fitness boot camp business can benefit from nutrition expertise as well. Unless you’d rather get out the elephant costume and wave at cars again, try hiring a certified nutritionist for your fitness boot camp staff.

It beats sweating under all that fake fur and pink tutu, not to mention the blow to your ego and your personal trainer business credibility.

Fitness boot camps come in any number of shapes and sizes, but the overall goal tends to remain the same. Clients can enroll in your fitness boot camp and achieve their difficult fitness goals in record time. They do this with concentrated effort and your expert help. Focus, achieve, and win the prize – a fitter, healthier, sexier body.

Nutrition expertise from your certified nutrition specialist can help clients win the fitness race that much faster.

Qualifications Win the Race

Clients are looking for results, not elephants in pink tutus. Without results, your fitness boot camp service is a waste of clients’ hard-earned cash. Clients enter into a business arrangement with a fitness boot camp instructor with the expectation that they will achieve their fitness goals. This is why you can assume that potential clients looking to pay for fitness boot camp services are likely to be swayed by qualifications and a great personality.

With this in mind, a certified nutritionist might be just the ammunition your fitness boot camp marketing strategy needs to kick the competitor’s butt.

Fitness Boot Camp Marketing Strategies that Win the Competition

Kicking your fitness boot camp competitor’s butt in the marketplace is about winning market share. It’s not much different from competitive sports. Technique, practice, drive, some amount of natural talent, and sometimes a touch of finesse are what it takes to win in the business world. Read more…

Folks, we’re in a recession. And while I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about “these difficult economic times” and “our struggling economy,” you have to face facts if you want to make the rent. Unemployment is at ten percent in the United States. That means that only ninety percent of people can afford your services.

But ninety percent is still more than you think. You’re only tapping a tiny fraction of that population, so the trick is to maximize exposure, and to reach out to clients you haven’t been able to before.

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What makes you the personal trainer that clients come to see? You’re a personal trainer in a market saturated with probably dozens of local personal trainers.

What sets you apart?

If you don’t have an answer to the question, you might want to spend some time thinking about it. And for your reading enjoyment, here’s one idea.

Visions of Sugarplums Danced in Their Heads

You guide clients in their exercise regimes. You motivate them. You help them meet your goals.

If you’re good, you might even tell your clients what to eat. And if you’re anything like me, you’re probably recommending a high quality, organic, raw, sprouted rice protein shake with almond butter and flax seed oil, and a steaming cup of organic, fair-trade coffee for breakfast.

Duh. Isn’t that what we all want for breakfast?

Here’s the thing: your clients are not personal trainers. If they were, they wouldn’t need a personal trainer. With that in mind, you have to step back and think like a client instead of a personal trainer. The majority of your clients are motivated by their goals.

They have a vision of their final state. But they also have visions of sugarplums dancing in their head. And by sugarplums, I mean beer, wings, and chocolate. Read more…

Have you ever thought of marketing your fitness business to Seniors?

This niche could fill in all of the “dead-time” in your schedule. Of all the market segments in the fitness and personal training industry, there is one group of people that will work their schedule to fit yours – Senior Citizens.

Retired seniors in particular have a lot of available time, particularly during the day. Enterprising personal fitness trainers can fill in the blanks in their schedule of corporate training sessions, fitness classes and one-on-ones with the busy executives by offering special classes for retirees, classes that are tailored for their needs and physical limitations. Senior classes could be put together to fill in mornings and afternoons, when most clients are still at work.

The seniors market will run the gamut from fit-as-a-fiddle to couch-potato-with-health-issues, but programs may be devised to achieve their fitness goals. Most seniors will appreciate low-impact exercises and those that don’t overextend their arthritic joints, but there will be those occasional very fit septuagenarians who have been athletic all of their lives. These folks will have maintained some semblance of fitness and are capable of handling a more strenuous regimen. The only cautionary note is to warm them up first, then get them stretching before launching into the program.

Marketing to Seniors

Some of the means of marketing to seniors are through many of the organizations that cater to that crowd. Also, it may be possible to establish a relationship with assisted living centers to provide morning and afternoon sessions for their residents. Not only will you be building your business during normally unproductive hours, but you will be performing a service for these aging people as well.

Special Considerations for Senior Fitness

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If you’re trying to grow your client base, word-of-mouth advertising may no longer be cutting it. It may be time to take your marketing to the next level. Assuming you’re already familiar with the marketing basics, which are: (1) providing a solution to client problems, and (2) offering that solution at a price the customer is willing to pay, your job now is to raise customer awareness of your offerings. You know that you offer the most desirable personal training services in the area, but you can’t build your client base if potential customers don’t know it, too.

Raising Awareness among Potential Customers

This is where a market analysis would be helpful. You only have so many advertising dollars to spend, and you want to get the most bang for your buck. You do this by targeting the most effective advertising media for your specific business. You have to think like a customer: If you were looking for a personal trainer, where would you go to find one? Would you conduct a Google search? Check the Yellow Pages? Would you spy a flyer on a bulletin board in your local gym and snag a tear-off phone number?

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You’ve done all the traditional marketing. Your name is in the yellow pages, the white pages, and the yellow book. You have a website, so you’re on the Internet. You even paid for a big sign in front of your business that stands out among its neighbors. But most of your competitors have done these things, too, so it’s time to apply some innovating thinking to your marketing strategy.

And when it comes to creative fitness marketing, it’s not so much where you advertise as how you advertise.

Gaining Competitive Edge

Forget the phone books. Don’t pay huge sums for big partial- or full-page spreads, because very few people use them anymore. If you want to hit a large audience, you’ll find it online. You’re already online (or you should be), so it’s not a matter of where. It’s how you sell your services.

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So maybe you’re not new to the world of personal training. In fact, you may have been successfully performing services for your local community for years, and you’ve been making decent money at it. Your business has grown through word of mouth, and you’re at capacity. You couldn’t possibly take on another client, even though it breaks your heart to say, “No.” It breaks your heart, not just because you’re missing out on that income. But let’s face it, you have a passion for fitness, and a struggling soul is asking for your help. You want to help.

When You Have Reached Capacity

Believe it or not, you can help this client reach his or her fitness goals, despite the fact that you’ve reached capacity. You could do it one of two ways. You could refer the client to a friend or acquaintance in the personal training community, one who you know will provide the same quality service that you would provide. Or you could hire another trainer to work for you, who can pick up this client and any new clients who come along. The latter alternative has the benefit of lining your pocket.

Next Steps

If the idea of growing your business is appealing, the next step is to hire that employee. If you know someone who would love supplemental income, and who, in your opinion, would be a good personal trainer, then you’re good. Work out an arrangement with the person as to how much you’ll pay per hour, per session with the client, or on whatever basis you both agree is fair. Hiring requires the same negotiation savvy that you’ve demonstrated in the process of growing your existing client base.

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So, you would like to dip your toes into the world of personal training. Maybe you lost your day job, and as the fitness nut you are, it occurred to you that your skills might be marketable. Or maybe you have already tried the path of working in the fitness business and found that you are proficient at it, but you’re tired of working for someone else. If you’re in the latter category, you’re in better shape to start up and market your new business. If you’re in the former, you may have some work to do. Either way, these basic fitness marketing principles will help you get on the right track.

The Recipe for Fitness Marketing Success

The basic principles of marketing are the same in any industry. Successful fitness marketing follows the same model that the likes of Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart have followed for decades. The recipe begins with providing customers with a solution, offering the solution at a fair price, and making the customer aware of your offering.

1. Provide a solution to a customer demand or problem.

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