Online Fitness Trainers Marketing Primer

Online fitness trainers are supposed to be experts at providing fitness programs tailor-fit for clients whether at home, the gym or outdoors. However, because you don’t get to meet people face to face as you would at the gym, you usually have to aggressively market your services to people who are generally Internet-savvy and heavy users of social networks and various web applications. Lets face it, marketing a personal trainer business is never easy. Unless you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign, you must learn to do targeted, below-the-line marketing activities. Broad or mass type of advertising that you usually pay for when doing TV or radio commercials are expensive and might not be effective in your line of business. You get a better turnout when you are able to address the correct audience.

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Establish Authority in Your Industry

The first thing to remember when marketing your online service is that you need to establish your authority in your field. This way, the potential customers come to you, and not you to them. Several ways you can do this include publishing a blog, joining forums, and publishing an email newsletter. With a blog, you can regularly publish health and fitness tips and advice. If you start by doing daily posts about how to keep fit by doing simple, day-to-day activities, your blog will experience a gradual—but hopefully significant—traffic level. Once readers see your tips as effective, your brand and your name would then be considered among the top places to go when looking for information on fitness. The same goes with forums—you can join online communities on fitness and health, and post relevant responses to questions that you feel you can best answer as a fitness professional.

You can augment this with a regular opt-in newsletter, which you can send out through email weekly. The advantage of running a newsletter is that you can schedule this on peak days in your fitness training calendar. For instance, Monday mornings, your readers who work in offices would start the day by reading up on email, and your newsletter would be among the first things they read.

Find the Right Target Audience

Online marketing is best done when targeted properly. Contextual advertising networks like Google AdWords are effective because they publish ads only on sites that are relevant to keywords or themes that you define. For example, if you run an online fitness training website, you can run an AdWords campaign that only displays AdSense ads on websites and blogs that talk about health and fitness.

Networking is Key for Online Fitness

Another important aspect of marketing online is networking. Aside from building your authority through writing, you can also establish your identity among relevant user groups on social networks and social media sites. Some examples are Facebook and LinkedIn, where you can look for other fitness professionals or fitness buffs. It would be a good idea to exchange ideas with these people, and potentially gaining a few new customers in the process. The important thing here is that you’ve established your brand and identity through a network of individuals with shared interests.

Online marketing involves reaching out to a specific set of individuals with the intent of enhancing mindshare and spreading goodwill. Online marketing should not be pushy, because Internet savvy users usually shun these kinds of websites and content. Rather, be helpful and offer useful advice where relevant.