As a personal trainer your primary method of gaining clients is referrals. You want your clients to become walking, talking billboards for your business. If you work with the knowledge that you are excellent at what you do and market yourself the right way, managing to bring in a steady stream of referrals is relatively easy.
It doesn’t matter if you are working for a big chain or running your own business, if you don’t know how to attract and retain clients as a personal trainer, your business will head south.
Every new personal trainer struggles with getting new clients. And you are likely to be marketed by many experts who sell you the “secrets of success”. So! how can you break through this barrier and become comfortable with selling and advertising yourself as a personal training powerhouse.
Make sure you are are offering significant value
Nobody can promote your business for you other than yourself. Tell them (clients) to talk about you with their friends. Tell the referral source everything about and become friendly with them. Help them understand that you are the source for personal training and that they, as a client, are luck to have you. Be sure to emphasize the results they are seeing. When you rave about how great you are at getting from your clients results, it can seem a little pompous. But when your client does it, its great marketing.
Differentiate yourself from other trainers
Doing your things differently gives you leverage and a comparative advantage over others. This will make your business to stand above others. Using thank-you cards and gifts to create a steady stream is one of the best differentiation tactics you can employ. Human behavior can be molded with positive reinforcement, reward referrals; this is because you’ll end up receiving more of them, a lot more. Send a handwritten thank-you card immediately after the discussion you have about referrals. Thank them for listening, for their patronage and for the referrals they will send to you.
Let us assume that you might have invested in your education and you are providing valuable services to your personal training clients, how do you attract new clients?
1. You need to upgrade on technology that generates new leads.
2. Leverage technology to close and retain the sale.
How does technology assist in getting personal training clients? First off you can win the local search engine war for your business. Due to the internet becoming a huge source of referrals for successful trainers and getting to the number 1 position on Google is possible for some key phrases inyour market as long a you are willing to put in a little effort.
Secondly, to close the sale you can offer great value added services to your clients like professional meal planning and goal tracking online tools.
Checking out tools for training clients both online and offline is also advisable. You will soon see how easy it is to be the top trainer at your gym or to turn a new client into a loyal client and long term recurring revenue streams.
