If you’re a personal trainer looking to market yourself online and grow your fitness business to new heights, there are many strategies you’ll want to try.
Once you go through the trouble of creating a website and social media pages, your next hurdle is getting yourself out there, continuing to build your brand, and ultimately reaching and connecting to would-be clients.
A lead magnet (sometimes called opt-ins or freebies) is a piece of content designed to build your email list. Typically lead magnets are given away for free in exchange for someone’s contact information, most often an email address.
Successful lead magnets drive conversion. They draw potential clients in and get them excited to share their info with you in exchange for what you’re offering. You then try to convert them into paying customers by sharing valuable content via email or lead magnet itself. A good lead magnet will help you convert more visitors into email subscribers.
But most lead magnets fail to convert.
So we’re going to tell you everything you need to know about creating a fitness lead magnet that can help you grow your email list and build a profitable fitness business.
Steps to Creating a High Converting Fitness Lead Magnet:
- Step 1: Focus on your ideal client.
- Step 2: Think about your ideal client’s problems.
- Step 3: Develop your lead magnet idea.
- Step 4: Make your lead magnet easy to consume and actionable.
- Step 5: Create multiple lead magnets.
- Step 6: Start collecting leads.
Focus on your ideal client.
All online marketing efforts should be targeted to your ideal client — lead magnet included.
Taking the time to create a fitness lead magnet is about way more than just building a long list of emails. It’s about generating revenue for your business, and to do this, you need to make sure you are building an email list of ideal clients. If you’re sending out hundreds of emails but no one is buying your program or signing up to work with you, then your email list is of no use.
Instead, your lead magnet should attract people within your niche that you know how to help. Speak directly to your ideal clients when creating lead magnet content, and make content that is valuable to them and their unique lives.
So how do you do that, you might ask. That leads us to our next section: Digging into your ideal client’s pain points.
Think about your ideal client’s problems.
You’re clear on your ideal client, so how do you create a lead magnet that they will want to download?
You have to solve their biggest challenges with your content.
Start by listing all the problems your ideal client currently faces when it comes to exercise and nutrition. Be specific. For example:
- They want to find restaurants where they can eat healthy as a family.
- They try to prepare healthy food at home but get frustrated with how long it takes to look for a good recipe.
- They are busy and need quick and healthy lunches to bring to work.
An exercise like this can be helpful in determining what kind of lead magnet your ideal client would be attracted to. Additionally, you can even ask existing clients to share some of their biggest struggles with staying healthy. Use their answers to guide you.
Another technique for digging into your client’s problems is to see what’s working both in your business and with competitors. Have you shared a piece of content in the past that was useful and got a lot of positive reactions from your clients? What seems to be driving the most engagement on your competitor’s channels? This can give you a clue about what your ideal clients are the most interested in and where they need the most help.
Develop your lead magnet idea.
Now that you’ve worked through some of your ideal client’s biggest problems, it’s time to create a lead magnet that addresses one of the challenges your ideal client faces on a daily basis.
Use your knowledge as a personal trainer to answer your ideal clients questions and help solve their problems. Going back to our example from above, if your ideal client is struggling to cook healthy meals at home, your lead magnet might be something like:
“5 Healthy Recipes that You Can Cook in 30 Minutes or Less”
Or if your ideal client is a little lost when it comes to staying healthy while eating out, you might create a resource that shares the healthiest local restaurants or helps them decide what to eat at popular chains.
While developing lead magnet ideas, remember to address problems that your clients are currently aware of. For example, a few tips on improving squat form can be really valuable… unless your ideal client doesn’t know the importance of strength training or already have it in their workout routine.
This is where knowing your ideal client really well comes in handy. Make sure that the problem you are solving for them is one they realize they have.
It’s also important to make sure that the way you are solving your ideal client’s problems is unique. If your lead magnet is something that has already been beaten to death on the internet, like let’s say, “fat loss tips”, you might have trouble converting. Whereas, if you are able to shed light on a unique topic or offer a new perspective, people will happily sign up for your fresh approach.
Make your lead magnet easy to consume and actionable.
While developing your fitness lead magnet ideas, remember to keep them practical and actionable. For example, if you were a potential client, would you get more use out of a 100 page ebook or a 2 page PDF?
A good rule of thumb is that your lead magnet should be consumable within 10 minutes. Easy to consume lead magnets are more readily opened and used and make a better first impression with would-be clients. In fact, 59% of marketers claim that short-form lead magnets (like quick tutorials, checklists, and other smaller files) make for the highest conversion rates.
Another thing to think about is making your lead magnet actionable , meaning offering your prospects a quick win. This is better for prospects because they’ll be more likely to act and see results. And better for you, because it helps you prove you can bring them results sooner.
Think about it. A “7 Day Meal Plan” lead magnet is digestible and doable for would-be clients. While, a “12 Week Fitness Program” probably won’t have many people see it through.
Making your lead magnet both easy to consume and actionable, will help you provide real value to prospects and establish your expertise in the fitness space, making it easier to convert those on your email list to paying clients.
Create multiple lead magnets.
I know what you’re thinking… isn’t creating one lead magnet enough to get your ideal clients on your email list and interested in your services?? If you really want to grow your business and your email list, you’ll want to have several lead magnets in your arsenal.
When it comes to all of your online content, we recommend deciding on four content pillars. A personal trainer might choose these four topics to focus on:
- Workout
- Nutrition
- Mindset
- Habits
Each pillar can be broken down into subtopics. As you can imagine, within each content pillar are dozens and dozens of ideas for more content. Now, back to lead magnets — we recommend creating a lead magnet for each of your four pillars.
So let’s say your ideal client is busy moms looking to lose weight. Here are some lead magnet examples for each pillar.
- A video of a quick equipment free at home workout
- Grocery shopping guide PDF
- A week of journaling prompts
- Habit tracker
You can always create more lead magnets, but having at least four in your rotation makes it easier to cross promote on social media. Every time you share about one of your pillar topics, you can ask your followers to download the lead magnet to learn more and put the concept into practice.
Start collecting leads.
Once you’ve created a lead magnet, it’s time to go live and start collecting leads. Share your lead magnet through various channels, like a pop-up on your website and your social media pages. You will want to create a landing page, where leads can easily access your free resource. Make sure that your landing page does a good job of describing what’s in your lead magnet so that prospects are persuaded to provide their contact information in exchange for your content.
Email marketing platforms will send leads an email with your lead magnet and automatically add them to your email list. As your email list grows, you will be able to take advantage of this powerful method for connecting to potential clients and growing your fitness business.
We have more great resources on email marketing for personal trainers. Here’s what to check out next: