As a personal trainer, you most likely depend on word-of-mouth advertising and client recommendations to stay in business. However, what if you want a different strategy for attracting new clients? Facebook ads may help your personal training business reach new heights.
For personal trainers to be effective, they must become more personal; the clue is in the name, after all. You meet with prospective customers daily, have in-depth discussions about their nutrition and fitness objectives, and engage with them as they learn to improve their health.
Facebook ads for personal trainers are an excellent tool for establishing contact and sparking discussions. Ads can be tailored to any message and run various offers for customers at different points in their fitness journey.
This article will look at how you can create Facebook Ads yourself in 5 steps. Some personal trainers might want to outsource this to a social media agency. Still, you might want to understand how it works and how you can ensure a Facebook ads campaigns are successful.
How to create Facebook Ads in 5 steps
As the Meta Universe keeps developing, the tools they offer you become more and more sophisticated. When you want to create a new ad, you'll need to head to your Business Page's Meta Business Suite and click on the Ads menu on the left. Then you'll see the main dashboard with the 'Create Ad' button at the top right. That's where you start. You can also use the Facebook app on your mobile when you open your Business Page and click the Ads button on the top.Step 1. Determine the goal of your ad
Before putting any content up, you must decide what you want to accomplish with your Facebook ad. Only when you know your goal can you create the right ad. Luckily Facebook is very helpful and provides you with a few options as the first step:As Facebook got more and more feedback, they refined the objective categories so anybody could understand what they meant. If you know what you intend to achieve, find the type that suits that goal best:
- Get more website visitors
- Boost a post
- Boost an Instagram post
- Promote your Page
- Promote your business locally
- Get more leads
- Get more messages
For the sake of this article, we chose the 'Get more website visitors' goal, one of the recommended goals by Facebook and will take you through the rest of the steps with this example in mind.
Step 2. Design your ad
Or, as Facebook calls it, add your creative. This is the step where you will decide what type of content you'll be using. You can use a post you already published on Facebook or Instagram or create the visual from scratch.You will need to create the following elements in this step.
- Description - when your goal is to get more website visitors, you might want to use an article that has already been popular among your audience. In that case, the description will be a short overview of the article.
- Headline: In our example, this would be the article's title.
- Media - You can add up to 5 pictures or video files, choose them from your Page or Instagram posts or upload them.
- Button Label - You decide what the CTA should be for your ad. Read More and Learn More are only examples.
- Website URL - You'll need to add the full URL here in our example. That would be the direct URL to your article.
If you're working on your desktop, you'll see a preview of your creative on the right as you make changes to it.
Step 3. Target the right audience
In this step, you'll need to define your audience as best as possible so the Ad will be seen by people who will most likely want to engage with it. There's a 'Smart audience' feature where Facebook chooses this for you based on all the info it already knows about you, but if you want to be more specific, it's worth setting up your audience yourself. Especially if it's a niche article or offer, you're going to promote.You also have the following choices:
- People you choose through targeting
- People who engaged with your Page
- People who engaged with your Page and people similar to them
- People who engaged with any post or ad and people similar to them
- People who like your Page
- People who like your Page and people similar to them
- People in your local area
If you've created specific audiences in the past, they'll also appear on this list.
There are specific parameters you can set up when creating a target audience. These are:
- Gender
- Age
- Locations - you can add multiple and a radius as well.
- Detailed targeting - here, you can choose demographic data like education, life events, financial situation, relationships, work, interests, fitness or non-fitness and behaviours like mobile device use, digital activities, etc.
How do you know whom to target? Doing in-depth market research regularly is useful to determine who your ideal clients are. You can ask your current clients what they're most interested in or what brought them to you in the first place. Send out questionnaires or survey people in your local area about their habits and interests in fitness.
Step 4. Technical details
In this step, you'll decide how long you'd like your ad to run and how much you're willing to invest.You can choose a fixed schedule between two dates if your campaign is about a limited-time offer, or you can run it continuously if the goal is to grow your audience, drive traffic to your website and so on.
Facebook will also ask you about your daily budget and show estimates on reach and link clicks based on the budget and audience details. The more you invest, the more people will see your ad. Just remember to choose a budget well within your capacity.
Step 5. Choose your placement
The question is where you'd like your ad to appear for prospective leads. Facebook only, or are you active on Instagramand Messenger enough to place it there too? In this step, you can also turn on your Facebook pixel, which means you'll be able to target those who have once already clicked through to your website in a future ad.
BONUS. The Smart Ad feature
If you don't want to go through the steps above, Facebook offers a feature to take you through these steps. You'll find a 'Get Started with Automated Ads' option in the list mentioned in Step 1, an intelligent feature that creates personalised ads that may change over time as your business changes.Facebook asks you questions to learn more about your business, how you want prospects to contact you, where they're located and their interests. You can then create up to 6 versions for your ad that Facebook will test and recommend the one that gets the most engagement. This option is best for the objective 'Get more leads', before activating the ad, you can choose if you'd like people to fill a form, the budget, duration and audience.
