To grow your personal training business, you need more clients. But before someone ever becomes a client, they first have to become a lead.
Generating personal training leads (and then converting them into customers) is the main purpose of all your marketing efforts, and though it can take time and strategy, it’s the best way to keep a steady influx of clients and to maintain a profitable business.
This post is all about why generating personal training leads is so important and how to do it. Whether you’ve been working as a trainer for a while or just trying to get your first few clients, we’ve got you covered.
Let’s jump in.
Table of Contents:
- Chapter 1: What Is A Lead And Why Do You Need Them?
- Chapter 2: How To Generate Leads
- Chapter 3: How To Convert Leads
What Is A Lead And Why Do You Need Them?
Before we talk about leads, let’s briefly touch on the basics of a sales funnel.
Simply put, a sales funnel is a path a prospect takes to become your paying customer. When most people first hear about you or stumble across your website, they are not quite ready to buy from you. These are often called “cold” leads. These leads still have a lot of unanswered questions and will take some convincing before they pull out their wallet.
Your sales funnel is how you answer these questions, form a relationship, and help these leads get to know you. This warms them up to the idea of spending the money to work with you. By the end of a good sales funnel, these leads are more familiar with you and your brand, and are more primed to buy from you.
A lead is someone that knows who you are, and has expressed some interest in your business. You can say they have some skin in the game! A lead may simply follow you on Instagram – you’ve still got some convincing to do! Or go as far to book a consultation with you – they are more interested, but still not totally sold.
As you can imagine, not all leads end up buying from you. However, casting a wide net for ideal clients and nurturing leads through your sales funnel is one of the best ways to grow your business.
Getting a lead means opening a communication channel with your ideal clients who are not there yet, and it is your opportunity to educate them why you are the best.
How To Generate Leads
Some leads will find you organically, but it’s also important to constantly be working on lead generation.
There are many ways to go about generating interest in your personal training business. But we’re going to share a simple three step formula that is guaranteed to bring leads to your door.
Step 1: Create a Bait – AKA a Lead Magnet
To attract and entice new leads, you need some bait to hook them! This means giving away something of value in exchange for contact information. These freebies are called lead magnets, and as the name implies, they are intended to draw leads in.
A few popular ideas for personal trainers are:
- A free guide or resource like 10 days of at-home workouts or a healthy meal guide
- Free personal training session
- Free fitness assessment
Of course, some of these offerings will take more of your time than others, but some will also convert better than others, too. The idea with a lead magnet is to give prospects a taste of what it’s like to work with you. Your lead magnet should provide some sort of value or benefit that makes them interested in coming back for more.
Keep your ideal client in mind when creating lead magnets. Think about the kind of problems and challenges they have and what type of freebie will be of most use to them. One 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.
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.
Step 2: Create a Landing Page
Unlike your other website pages, a landing page is a page built for a single outcome. And the outcome in this case is for generating leads by sharing your lead magnet and giving prospects a place to sign up.
Basically, a landing page is where a prospect “lands” when they are interested in your lead magnet. Landing pages serve as the gatekeeper for your freebie or discounted offer. Let’s say you’re using a free “5 Days of Healthy Eating” meal guide as your lead magnet. Your landing page is where you’ll send interested leads to download this offer in exchange for their email address.
Landing pages need to have strong copy that drives conversion. Some of the important elements to include are:
- Hero section that highlights benefits over features
- Client testimonials or social proof
- Details of what’s inside the freebie
- Short bio section
- CTA/form where leads can provide their email
Once again, keep your ideal client in mind when creating your landing page. Think about their problems and make sure your landing page speaks to them. Share exactly how your lead magnet will provide a solution for them and make it easy for them to sign up and receive it.
For more tips on building a great landing page, check out our blog on the subject:
How to Create a Personal Trainer Landing Page (Template + Examples)
Step 3: Get the Lead Magnet in Front of Your Ideal Client
Creating your killer lead magnet and landing page are the foundation of lead generation. But now, it’s time to get your lead magnet in front of your ideal client so that you can start gathering those leads.
Let’s go over some ideas:
Social Media
Social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Facebook should be big players when it comes to marketing your business and can be great platforms for generating interest in your lead magnets.
Use your content to promote your freebie and include links to your landing page on your socials. To really boost interactions, run ads that advertise your lead magnet and get more eyes on your page.
Write Content and Use SEO
Online content can also be a great way for people to discover you and your lead magnet. In order to get noticed online, it’s important to optimize your content so that search engines find and promote it.
Let’s say your lead magnet is targeted towards busy working moms. Think about the kinds of questions they might be typing into Google. You can also use sites like AnswerThePublic to see what people are searching for online.
From there, optimize your content to include relevant keywords and to answer the queries commonly being typed into Google. This makes it so that when a busy working mom googles a solution to one of her problems, then your page is more likely to show up. This equals wayyy more eyes on your landing page.
Linking to your landing page on other places of your website is also important for SEO and can drive even more traffic. To learn more about blogging and creating content with SEO in mind, be sure to check out this other great resource:
In Person
You can also promote your lead magnet in person. Post and hand out flyers at your gym or studio. Tell your existing clients about your offer so that they can share it with their friends. Consider booking events and attending seminars so that you can network. Even if this doesn’t directly lead to someone visiting your lead magnet landing page, it can help you get more followers online, which ultimately can lead to the same end.
How To Convert Leads
Once you’ve gotten someone to offer their email in exchange for your lead magnet, you are one giant step closer to converting them into paying customers. Let’s talk about what you need to do to ensure that happens.
If given the opportunity to talk to a lead in person (maybe through a free fitness assessment or training session), you need to do your best to get to know the clients goals and explain how you can help them.
Find out:
- Where they are
- Where they want to go
- How have they struggled so far to meet their goals
Then, show them how your plan will work and how it will help them avoid their past struggles.
You can do the same thing through email (typically over a longer period of time). Create intentional email sequences that share value, dispel doubts, and convince clients that you know your stuff.
Be sure to share your offer clearly and make it easy for clients (in-person or via email) to commit.
Incorporate Online Personal Training to Convert More Leads into Paying Clients
Even if you follow all the steps above, it will be hard to convert leads into paying clients if they ultimately aren’t interested in your offer. One way to ensure that you can convert more leads is to have an offer that works better for more people – online personal training.
With online personal training, you deliver some or all of your training to clients remotely. Online training can include pre-recorded workouts, educational content like recipe guides, virtual check-in meetings, online messaging, community support, and more.
The nature of online personal training makes it more flexible for your clients as they can complete their training on their own time, and more affordable since you’ll be spending less one-on-one time with each person.
This offering can be super enticing for people that aren’t a good fit for the traditional personal training model and gives you the ability to train clients from all over the world. Online personal training can be the added edge that helps you convert more leads into paying clients.
To easily incorporate online personal training into your repertoire, use an online personal training software like TrainerFu. TrainerFu can help you organize your client workflow and deliver all of your training to clients online – this helps you not only convert more leads, you’ll also retain them for the long haul.