Let’s talk about a fun and fulfilling part of launching your personal training business - Marketing. It may feel complicated but let us simplify it for you with this cheat sheet.
For every business, marketing is the most essential part. One of the major platforms you can’t ignore is Facebook and Instagram, or Meta platforms. Being the most wallet friendly option, it’s a no brainer to kick start your marketing here before expanding on to other platforms such as TikTok, Youtube, and even Google.
As a business owner myself, I rely heavily on social media marketing. Because of this, I constantly engage with experts in this field to get their advice, best practices, and tricks they’ve kept up their sleeves. I’ve gathered all the best tips into this one pager for you to get started with. Let’s get to it!
Whether you’re planning to join a Big Box Gym, be a freelance PT, or join a more specialized personal training studio - you need what we call ‘Leads’. Leads generation is essential for every type of Personal Trainer. It helps you find clients, be self-sufficient, run a sustainable business.
Start with the Basics
Create your business’s FB/IG account
Build your Follower base to at least 100: add friends, family, colleagues, tinder dates
Populate your page with articles, memes, news, selfies, and more
Don’t rush, give your page about a week (prevents seeming like a scam account)
You’re ready to launch your first PT ad over at Facebook Business Manager
Zone into Your Business
Before creating your ad, decide what your PT niche is. We’ve identified 10 profitable niches, all can be found in our $100/hour PT Income blueprint. You’ll be tweaking your campaign perimeters according to your niche.
Once you’ve zone in on your niche, tap on your creative juices and create your first ad. If creativity isn’t your speciality, spend some time on TikTok or IG and they should give you some great ideas to adopt. When your ad is ready, you can reference these setup suggestions below:
Campaign Level
For Campaign Objective select Leads (why? FB will show your ads to people most likely to convert, and buy from you)
Ad Set Level
Assuming you have no website, select Ad set → Conversion Location → either Instant forms (this directs your potential clients to fill up a form) or Messenger (Your potential clients will chat with you on Messenger directly)
Instant form - PRO: Ability to capture emails. You can also pre qualify your leads and get quality ones by asking relevant questions CON: You’ll need to setup a third party system to get real time notification when a lead signs up (Eg. Zapier automates the process and notifies your email when any lead signs up. Without this, you’ll need to manually check your lead signups on FB Ads Manager)
Messenger -
PROS: Little setup required. This potentially shortens your response time. CON: Without pre qualifying your leads you can expect high volume with low quality, which means you’ll spend more time filtering quality leads from the pool
Budget: Minimum of $5/day to test your response. Scale up once your ad starts bringing in results you want to see.
Audience: Location (Target the areas you believe your clients are at. For eg. If your gym is in Takashimaya, you can target 1 to 3 miles around Takashimaya. Size of radius depends on your budget.)
Age & Gender: Depends on your niche
Detailed Targeting: Demographic
Education (High earners generally have higher education levels)
Fields of study (IT, Banking, Medicine, Law, etc)
Schools (NUS, NTU, RI, RGS, etc)
Life events (Away from Hometown, could mean expats with more spending power)
Newly engaged (Interested in pre-wedding prep)
Parents with toddlers (Post natal moms wanting to get back into shape)
Work → Industries → Job titles (Certain industries have more generous remunerations)
Detailed Targeting: Interests
Target those interested in food
Target luxury brands that are less accessible and common eg. Goyard (more common luxury brands such as Rolex captures too wide an audience)
Target FB Business page admins (Most likely business founders who earns above the average)
Detailed Targeting: Behavior
Expats
Frequent international Travelers (Assume correlation to high earning power)
*Using the ‘must also match’ option decreases your pool reach
*Avoid selecting too many detailed targeting or your pool reach will be too small
*Preferably turned off at the start - Advanced Detailed Targeting
*Choose the appropriate language that your ad will be in
Placement: Select Manual Placement. Turn on all except ‘Audience Network’.
Let’s Setup Your First Ad
Ad level
Best practices for Image:
Create it in a 4x3 vertical ratio
Prioritize 1 key message, with 2 other sub messages, make it snappy, or even rhyme!
Avoid cluttering your image with too many words or photos or it might be completely dismissed by viewers
Use fonts that are easy to read, refrain from creating an ad that is too abstract to grasp
Best practices for Video
Create it in a 4x3 vertical ratio, or a 9x16 vertical
Start the first 3 seconds with a message that your viewers can’t ignore!
Keep your video length short under 20s is the most favorable
Always have accompanying music, and keep it upbeat
Best practices for copy
Look at your ad preview and judge from there. Make sure it’s attention grabbing.
Always have a ‘call to action’ such as “Sign up now” or “Chat on Messenger now”
Offer an irresistible deal that’s hard to turn down
Write to their needs, make it personable and something that’s more unique to your services. Avoid simply listing down your services.
Create scarcity such as “This offer expires in a week” or “Only 5 slots available”
How to Tell if Your Ad is Doing Well?
It is essential to track your results after launching your ad. Here’s a reasonable real life example of how you can tell if your ad is performing well:
You spend $200 to get 20 lead form signups
Out of 20 signups, 6 engage in conversation and agree to a trial session
Out of these 6, 3 turn up for the trial session
Out of the 3 trial sessions done, you convert 1 and he/she buys a 12-session package at $1200.
So in this example, you spent $200 and made a sale of $1200. That’s a return on investment of 6 times. With this in mind, you can make a decision to increase or decrease your spend. Without tracking, there’s no way to know if your ad works.
Do expect some trial and error that comes with social media marketing. The ultimate rule of thumb is to plan out your steps, be patient, and you’ll see results!
Final Tips for You
“Can I just keep to my IG page?” It’s good to expand out to FB. You’ll reach out to older folks who have higher purchasing power and are more willing to splurge on wellness. FB also boast a wider range and diversity to reach out to.
“How fast should I reply to my leads?” Fast response is the most effective, and follow up with them every step of the way. Clients tend to research and reach out to multiple options, usually the quickest reply lands the deal.
“How do I know my ad has reached ad fatigue?” Generally, every ad should only run for 2 weeks at max, then swap for another. There should be a gap of 2 months before your prospect sees the same ad again. The ultimate goal is to create 5 best performing ads, and rotate amongst them. This is a formula that you can adopt, feel free to develop a formula that works for you as you go along your marketing journey.
Do note that all these above are recommendations. There’s no hard and fast rule, so test and play around with your ad ideas and targeting.
Now it’s your turn to go out and smash it! Have fun!
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