Personal trainers build wealth by securing roughly 1,000 high-value clients, not thousands of social media followers. The most effective approach is face-to-face conversations in your local gym, where you can convert members into paid sessions without advertising spend. Overdelivering on results turns clients into organic referrers.
Welcome to Module 9. It's Marketing Principles Part 1. Now we are going to get into marketing a lot more depth in Certificate 3 of the Fitness Business Certification Program, but again, I wanted to give you an overview of your marketing. So where a lot of trainers I find go wrong in marketing is they focus on the wrong things. They focus on going online, they focus on Instagram, they focus on being Insta-famous on Facebook, on doing ClickFunnels, doing Facebook ads, and being an influencer. It's how many likes and follows they get. That is not the game. It was never the game. The game that we are playing is cash in the bank and getting clients results. Your game as a trainer is a geographical game. And what I mean by that is for you to be wildly wealthy, wildly wealthy, you really only need 1,000 customers. You don't need 100,000 followers on Instagram unless you're doing an online program and selling it for $9 a week and having the turnover that I spoke about before in the fitness business models, the fitness business models module. So in saying that, if you had— I mean, you're a solo trainer, right? If you had I don't know, let's say 20 clients training with you twice a week, that's 40 sessions from 20 clients. So you don't need likes and follows and all this kind of stuff. Yes, it can be helpful in building a brand and a business and all this kind of stuff and having staff work for you. But even still, like for us, if you look at Enterprise Fitness, we don't have a huge following on Instagram. It's okay, but it's not, it's not our focus. It never has been. We focus on marketing that has a return on investment. Simple as that. What's going to have the biggest return on investment is marketing to people in your geographical area. So let's go into some fundamentals, right? If you are at a big box gym, your market is held captive, right? Your market, the reason why you're paying rent, let's say a Fitness First or a Goodlife or a Jets or any of those big box gyms, is to get access to their clientele. That is your marketing there, done, paid for you. So the best return on investment is you work walking the floor, talking to people face to face. It's the cheapest way. It's also the most effective way because on Instagram, let's face it, you're competing with everyone. And that's not to mention the copy, the advertising, the images that go into it, and the fact that people on Instagram just flicking. Yeah, they're not looking for personal training. If I have somebody in the gym, they're there to train, they're there to improve their life, they're there to get some sort of result. That's why they joined the gym in the first place. So I'd much rather take 5 minutes out of my day and say, hey, how's training going? I'm a trainer here. I thought I'd introduce myself. I just saw you doing this exercise. Do you mind if I offer you a tip? Yeah, sure. Okay, great. Well, you're doing lat pulldown, you know, pull your scapula back when you do lat pulldown. Do you feel it more? I do. Okay, great. Well, I'd actually love to offer you an introductory session. To see what personal training with me is all about. Would that be of value to you? Yeah, sure. Sounds great. Awesome. Well, I've got 2 times available, 6 o'clock or 7 o'clock. Which time best suits you? 6 o'clock. Fantastic. Book them in, do my thing, wow them with the session, and then simply offer, hey, would you like to continue? I really see— do my whole sales process, which I spoke to you earlier about, handle the objections, collect the money, and now I have a client. And that's all done without me spending a cent. Just being at the gym. So social media obviously can work. It can be great and it's part of building the audience and getting people to your website, leaving your details. But ultimately all those things, social media, Instagram, Facebook, ClickFunnels, all of it, what it's about is leading someone to having a real face-to-face connection with you. And that's how you're going to collect the money. So marketing, essentially, if you're going to move out into those areas, fundamental place of where to start with your marketing is to understand your client, understand your client, understand the prospect. And the best way to do that is to get in front of people and actually talk to them and be attentive and be empathetic towards their goals and what they're actually trying to accomplish. So marketing, I really feel, is like the kind of best piece of advice I give is to be just ferociously empathetic and ferociously curious about the other person, because when you do that, you learn about the person, and then you're able to apply your message in marketing towards that person. I'm going to back up a little bit and just be even more simple, right? So if we put out an ad, let's say, or any business puts out an ad, right, that ad is always going to be based off the target market. So to understand the target market, you need to understand the singular person that you're talking to. So what that basically means is that every business has an avatar of their ideal client. Call it avatar, ideal client, same thing. Or taking stock is what some marketing people call it. And that's basically just understanding this person. And then when you understand this person, you write your message, your blog posts, your ads to that one person. But the journey of understanding that person, I think for personal trainers, is really do a lot of personal training and get face to face and hear all the objections from people because you'll hear it in your sales consults. Oh, I have this problem and this problem that actually is going to formulate a lot of your marketing, truth be told. So in short, focus geographically because the reality is if you're going to not be an online business, you're going to be face to face. It's the geographical location within that hour radius, usually for most people, half hour radius where you're going to have the most impact. It's not a game of followers and likes. It's a game of cash and getting referrals. Overdeliver. Your product as a personal trainer is your best marketing. Your clients getting results is your best marketing. Instead of spending hours and hours on Facebook and Instagram, double down on your learning. Focus on getting that client the results. Focus on wowing them where they say, wow, you really didn't have to do that for me, but you did. You wrote me a full shopping list. You took me to the supermarket. What personal trainer takes their client shopping to show them how to do food? You can be that trainer. And then I guarantee you that client's going to talk about you to everyone and say how amazing you are and how much you helped them in life. That an hour doing that with the client, for them remembering, they're going to tell everyone. That's going to be a lot more impactful than a Facebook post.
