How to get clients for your fitness business

How to get clients for your fitness business

The world of fitness is super exciting. There are new things that are happening in this industry on a daily basis. It’s hard to keep up! As a personal trainer, yoga instructor, Pilates teacher – actually most professions in the fitness industry – you’ll be your own boss. You’ll have your destiny in your hands and will be able to decide how busy you want to be in your fitness business. And obviously you want to be as busy as you can be because the more clients who you train, the more money you’ll make!

However, in order to become busy and run a successful fitness business you need to have a steady flow of clients. But don’t think that you can just set up shop and expect people to come flocking to you. You need to let people out there know what you provide so that if they need you they know where to find you.

So how do you do this?

In a word: marketing.

What is ‘marketing’?

Before you think that you’ll need a business degree in order to figure out how to market your fitness business successfully, let’s break the concept down.

A lot of marketing academics offer a lot of definitions of what marketing is. And some of these concepts can get confusing as they use a lot of words to say what they mean when, in actual fact, you can use a handful of words to get across the meaning.

Very simply, ‘marketing’ is all about letting the market know about what you’re selling.

That’s it.

No need to hire fancy consultants to help you with your marketing because nine times out of ten, they won’t know your business as well as you do. This means that they will have a steep learning curve when they start and won’t hit the nail on the proverbial head the first time around when it comes to developing concepts for your fitness brand.

As a start-up fitness business, money is tight. This means that you’ll be wanting to spend your budget as cautiously as possible. So as you are the person who knows your business best, you’re the best person to market your business as you’ll be able to do it at the most affordable cost.

So the question is what do I need to know about marketing?

As we said earlier in this article, you don’t need a fancy business degree in order to market your business correctly. The fundamental principle that you need to know and understand is the marketing mix or, as otherwise called, the 4Ps. These are:

  • Price
  • Place
  • Promotion
  • Product

First of all, you’ll need to precisely define what the product is that you’re selling. So, for example, if you’re a newly qualified personal training graduate, you’ll need to set out what services you’re going to offer. For example, are you going to stick to the personal training basics or will you branch out into kettlebells?

Secondly, you need to tell potential customers where you’re offering your product. To carry on with the personal training example, are you going to be gym based or are you going to clients’ houses?

Then you need to figure out how much you are going to charge for your product. This can be a tricky one owing to the fact that many people who are starting out in the fitness industry tend to undercharge as they are wanting to make themselves as attractive as possible to potential clients. So before you set your price make sure that you do your research and see what other fitness professionals charge.

The final piece of the puzzle is for you to promote your business. A lot of fitness professionals – personal trainers in particular – like to use social media in order to attract clients as this is an affordable marketing and advertising medium. If you do decide to make use of these networks, make sure that you’re consistent with your posting. There’s nothing worse than an inactive social media account because if people see this they immediately assume that your business has closed down.

Finding clients for your fitness business isn’t an insurmountable task. All it takes is a little dedication and you’ll find that you’re A for away!