Are you a personal trainer who's looking to try and expand your reach? Maybe you want to get more clients in your local area or venture into online coaching. Either way, marketing is the answer. You need to make sure people know who you are and what you do. Not only that, but you also want to build trust and show competence that you can help them achieve the results they desire.
If you understand the importance of marketing but find it hard to find the time in your busy schedule, then here are the steps to fit marketing tasks into your schedule.
Step 1. Assess Your Current Schedule
I would highly urge you to put a few hours aside sooner than later to figure out how you spend your time. Here are some questions you can answer to get started but feel free to add anything that's relevant for you.- How long does it take for you to write exercise plans?
- How many hours do you spend texting, sending emails, confirming sessions, and generally communicating with your clients?
- How many hours do you spend aimlessly scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or other social media apps?
- How much time do you spend on your own fitness and health?
- Do you spend much time in front of Netflix and the like?
- How much time do you spend on your marketing, and what are those tasks?
This exercise aims to find areas where you might spend too much time that has no real benefit to you and identify areas where you might be able to improve with some planning.
Step 2. Set Yourself Time Management Goals
If your goal is to grow your fitness business to help more clients and earn a better salary, you may need to make sacrifices in other areas. Like sticking to fixed times for social media and using it primarily for your marketing, cutting down on how many shows you watch, or managing the expectations of your family and friends by letting them know you need to focus more on the business for some time.Ensuring you get a decent amount of sleep and exercise is also part of taking care of yourself, thus taking care of your business. Scheduling workout sessions in advance and setting yourself a reminder for bedtime can be productive. Don't forget the activities that make you feel fulfilled, either. You don't have to give up socialising altogether. Just find the right balance so all sides receive the right amount of your attention.
Once you see your schedule clearly, commit to spending a specific number of hours on your marketing every day even if that means cutting out some of your relaxation time, or forcing yourself to be more efficient with your internet use. If you're at the start of your career and need to build your reputation from scratch, this time is ideally a more significant chunk to get a lot of the groundwork done. Think of creating social media accounts, launching a blog, getting your website up and running, and creating content for all your marketing channels.
Step 3. Set Up Your Marketing Channels
Now you've dedicated a specific time to spend every day on your marketing, it's worth digging into where you'll be best to market yourself. In other words, which platforms are the best suited to find your ideal clients.If you've got a solid personal presence on one particular platform, say you've been on Facebook from the beginning and have a decent circle of friends and acquaintances on your profile, that might be the best place to start, so long your target audience is there too.
You don't have to start on ALL the platforms, however. First, you can choose to build your audience on one or two and maybe start building an email list. If you want to hit the younger audience and you're great with videos, you might choose to go for TikTok and Instagram. If your clients are more Gen X, Facebook/ Instagram and LinkedIn might be better choices.
The bottom line is, to figure out where your clients hang out, choose the platforms you know well first and build from there. Once you master one, you can start building on the others. Another important thing is to keep your promise to yourself when it comes to the time you spend on your marketing.
Step 4. Create and Employ Systems
Once you've found your tone and platforms and know what you'd like to post where and how often, you might want to focus on creating systems that save time.Think about using platforms like Later, Recurpost or Hootsuite to sort out the majority of your social media posts ahead of time so you only need to spend time on the ones that are based on new events or need your timely and personal comment, like newsjacking content.
If you want to build an email list, It's good to employ an email marketing software to ensure you adhere to data protection and GDPR but also, so all you need to do is add the content, and the software will deliver it.
Step 5. Outsource
Once you start making a profit, consider reinvesting some of it into outsourcing tasks that take too long for you and you don't enjoy. Not every personal trainer enjoys writing and spending too much time on marketing. If you're one of those, then long-term, the best course of action for you is to find competent people in their field to help you out.You can outsource all marketing tasks, from copywriting to creating and updating your social media content regularly, hiring a web designer, and working with a virtual assistant to do all the paperwork and scheduling, onboarding or even first-time consultation calls.
