How To Generate Leads For Personal Training

How to generate leads for personal training

I have a confession to make.

I’m not a personal trainer.

I’m not even someone who works in the fitness industry.

So why am I talking about how to generate leads for personal training?

Because I am a digital marketer.

And my entire business is all about helping people to increase their visibility and authority online.

I know what works and what doesn’t work.

It’s why my clients pay me thousands of dollars to work with me because the things I do get results.

So hopefully you’re still with me, because I have no doubt that what I’m going to tell you can absolutely revolutionize your personal training business and keep you booked solid.

Sounds intriguing, right?

I think so too.

This isn’t going to be your typical run-of-the-mill post that has a bunch of stuff you’ve heard before.

We’re talking about employing tested and proven tactics and strategies that have been used in the marketing world for a hundred years or more and leveraging them in your personal training business.

So how do you generate leads for personal training?

First, you have to define your dream customer. You need to know what that person is struggling with and where they’re looking to get results. Then you need to lure them into your world by giving them something that will help get them a quick win that establishes your authority. Then you need to present them with the opportunity to climb your value ladder.

What is a value ladder?At this point, you’re probably asking “what is a value ladder” and how do I get them a “quick win”?

Granted, that may bit a over-simplified, but I wanted to give you the bird’s eye view of how this all works so you have an idea of where we’re going.

And we’re going to talk about all that in detail, so stick with me – there’s so much good stuff here!

How to Generate Leads for Personal Training

How to generate leads for personal trainingLet me start with a story.

As I mentioned before, I’m a marketer. I do high-level web design & development for all kinds of clients – big corporate clients, and associations, and companies of all sizes.

My clients pay thousands of dollars to work with me.

That’s not a humble-brag – it’s the truth.

And the reason for that is that I get results for them.

When me & my team create a project for a client we not only build them a beautiful online presence that represents their brand well, but we also work closely with them to establish a plan to attract their dream customers and repel the ones they don’t want to work with.

And that’s the most important part.

Attracting the right people, and repelling the wrong ones.

And I had to learn this idea the hard way.

When I first got started, I’d work with anyone who had the budget to pay me to do the work.

I was just getting started and desperate.

As a newly married father I would take anyone who walked through the door.

And that was a HUGE mistake.

I had one client who was so difficult to work with that I got to the point where I had to fire them.

I’d have these calls with this client that would seemingly go on for hours about minor tweaks and adjustments they wanted to make.

I dreaded every time I got on the phone with that person.

And the whole reason that person ended up in my world is because I hadn’t defined my dream customer.

Because if I’d have done that, that person would NOT have been anywhere on my radar.

Here’s the deal:

If you don’t have a very clear picture of who you want to work with, what they’re struggling with, and matching up how you can help them with that struggle, you’re going to end up in the same place – working with people that you dread working with if you find anyone at all, and trying to appeal to everyone.

In the end when you’re trying to appeal to everyone, you’re really appealing to no one.

Here’s what you need to do:

Create your ideal dream customer profile.

Write down everything you can think of about who your dream customer is – their name, their age, their marital status, where they work, what they earn, and what their dreams are.

Once you figure that out then write down what they’re struggling with.

This is the most important part.

What your dream customer is struggling with is exactly the same area where you can help them!

It shouldn’t be a vague description of their struggles either. It should be as detailed as you can make it.

Because when you do it right, it should give you a crystal clear picture of specific problems you can solve for them.

  • Is your dream customer trying to lose weight?
  • Are they training for an endurance race?
  • Are they established athletes looking to take their performance to the next level?
  • Are they housewives who are looking to stay in shape?
  • Are they primarily men?
  • Are they primarily women?

All those scenarios are wildly different for you as a personal trainer, but every one of them could benefit from the value you bring to the market with your knowledge, skills and abilities.

First figure out who exactly you want to serve, then the rest of it will be much easier.

Another quick story.

You can read Russell's dream customer story in his book, Expert SecretsRussell Brunson, the founder of the marketing platform ClickFunnels, tells the story about how in the early days of his business, he was being successful, but he got to the point where he was dreading getting out of bed in the morning because he didn’t enjoy working with the people that were buying his stuff.

And it got really bad.

That’s when he figured out that he needed to figure out who his dream customer was, and when he did, something magical happened:

He realized that virtually none of the people that he was currently working with fit his dream customer profile.

And he also figured out that his dream customer was asking a whole different set of questions than the ones that he’d been answering – that was why he was attracting the wrong people into his world!

Once he figured out what the questions that his dream customer was asking really were, he was able to pivot to talking directly to his dream customers.

He created a lead magnet (which we’ll talk more about what that is here in just a minute) called “108 Split Test Results” something that his dream customer would specifically be interested in, and those who were NOT his dream customers wouldn’t really care about, and it changed everything for him.

So for your personal training business, it’s vital that you figure out who your dream customer is, what questions they’re asking, what problems they’re having then, enter into the conversations they’re already having in their own mind, and you’ll be on your way to attracting the right people into your world.

Elevate your voice above the internet noise

Here’s where it starts to get real.

As a personal trainer, you have to figure out a way to stand out from the crowd.

You’re in a highly competitive industry with little barrier to entry, so in order to generate leads for your personal training business you’ve got to elevate your voice above all the other noise that’s in the ears of your dream customer.

Here’s the deal:

Virtually everyone around you wants to “get in shape”. On top of that, virtually all of them could probably afford to work with you if they saw the value in what you do.

So what you’re going to want to do is establish yourself as an authority in your space by creating prolific amounts of content.

And when I say you need to create prolific amounts of content that means you need to publish something every single day for 365 days a year.

That could be a blog post, or an Instagram post, a YouTube video, or something else.

The single-best thing you can do is to build a personal brand and start associating value with your name.

“But that’s going to take a lot of time” you may complain, and I get that.

As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.

You’ve got to start somewhere, and if you’re not already publishing every day, then you need to get started today.

Seriously.

As soon as you’re done reading this post, go put together your publishing plan and hit ‘publish’.

Create a lead magnet that appeals to your dream customer

Next, let’s talk about getting your dream customer a quick win.

We’re going to do this by creating a really great lead magnet.

Here’s the deal:

If your lead magnet isn’t unique with a fresh take on how to get the result your dream client is looking for, you’re not going to have any kind of luck winning your dream customers into your world with it.

Think about it this way.

If you had a client with an unlimited budget, what ultimate result could you get for them?

This “ultimate result” is what you call a “flagship” offer.

This is the biggest, high-ticket, high-touch service and suite of products you can deliver.

But inside that flagship offer are several components, right?

There are the training methods – weight training, cardio training, endurance training, etc.

Then there are the nutritional tips and tricks, the personalized things you’d do for them to dial in their diet, and calorie intake, etc.

And more.

I’m sure you could come up with all kinds of things.

We’ll call each of these major areas a “core” result area.

All the “core” results, when combined make up your flagship offer.

Then within each of the core result areas, there are still some smaller components and we’ll call those micro-result areas. When you put together all the micro result areas you end up with a core result area. See how that works?

For our example, let’s use the nutrition core result area, and one of the parts of the nutritional core area is meal planning.

Again, for our example, let’s say that your dream customer is helping people get in shape who’ve suffered from challenges related to diabetes.

Because of your background training athletes that are diabetic, you’ve got a really great stack of meals that you always recommend that are a fantastic way of managing their health issue while helping them make great training gains.

And if you’ve been a personal trainer for any period of time, I’m sure you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeve – things that you’ve seen work that not many people know about, or are doing.

So what we’re going to do is create a free guide from one of your core service areas, using the micro result area of meal planning for diabetics, and put together a list of your top tips that you’ve learned that are most helpful.

See how that works?

Create an online sales funnel

Next, we’re going to create an online sales funnel to send people to so they can get your lead magnet for free.

Using what we call an opt-in page, we’re going to send them the meal planning guide for free in exchange for their contact information.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

The traffic that you send to your sales funnel is going to be FULL of your dream customers from the beginning because it’s highly targeted specifically to them!

And the way we’re going to send that traffic is one of two ways that I’ll cover next.

Generating Personal Training Leads with Organic Traffic

Remember all that content I was talking about publishing before? This is what is going to serve as the source for all your organic traffic. There are different tactics for each social media channel, and we’re not going to get into all that here.

The point is that your publishing efforts are what you’re going to use to drive traffic organically to your lead magnet.

And because you’re committed to success here, you’re going to be publishing prolific amounts of content!

Generating Personal Training Leads with Paid Traffic

Next up is paid traffic. And before you get all flustered thinking about how you need to figure out how to do paid advertising I’m talking super simple stuff, like boosted posts on Facebook that will get your message out in front of a very targeted audience.

Paid traffic is how you overcome not having an email list already in place, or having any kind of online following.

Paid traffic can be really complex, and it can be really easy to lose a lot of money fast using paid ads, but I want to point out that when you get them dialed in correctly, and they’re working for you, it’s literally like pouring gas on the fire that powers your business!

Generating Personal Training Leads with Dream 100 Traffic

You’re probably thinking, “what on earth is a Dream 100”?

The Dream 100 is a list of the names of people who relate to your niche that have already found success in the space.

These are the people who have already gathered your dream customers and are already talking to them about stuff that’s relevant to what you do and how you help.

Creating your Dream 100 list can be one of the most important things you can do when it comes to your online business.

They’re already established online and who’ve built an audience that’s full of your dream customers.

Your job here is to get involved in their communities and become a resource for them.

Let me just be super-blunt here.

Your job must be to give until it hurts.

Then give some more.

You want to build a reputation of being someone who is an asset to their community and get noticed for the right reasons.

These are Facebook groups, podcasts, YouTube channels and more.

This is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Dream 100. I don’t have a lot of time to get into the details here, but Russell Brunson covered this in detail in Traffic Secrets and I’d highly recommend you check that book out.

Generating Leads on Autopilot

Now that you’ve got your lead magnet and you’re starting to generate traffic, it’s time to start qualifying the people that have opted into your free lead magnet and find out who’s serious and who’s not.

We need to figure out who’s going to be ready to take the next step and who’s not, and we’re going to do this by creating a quiz funnel.

This is where it starts to get fun!

Create Quiz Survey Funnel

What we’re going to do here is present your visitor with a quiz that will get them engaging deeper with you and you’re going to blow them away with this insightful quiz.

The quiz should only be a few questions long. The longer the quiz, the less likely your visitors are going to be to complete it.

The questions you have on your quiz should relate to your dream customer.

It could be a quiz about something like “What kind of foods go with your body type”, or what

And you finish by telling them you’re going to create a customized report specifically for them, and gather the info you need to do it.

When your visitor is done with their quiz you take them to a thank you page where they can schedule a one-on-one consultation call with you.

You do this by using an app like Calendly where your visitor can choose from some specific dates and times you’ve already selected to make it faster and easier for them to get scheduled with you.

Here’s a great thing about your quiz funnel:

You can run this as an ad too, and send traffic directly to the quiz!

It’s always best to give yourself plenty of options so you can test and see what converts best for you in your specific situation.

The Results

Using this formula, you will be generating leads for your personal training business in no time at all.

In fact, you could probably have all of this up and running in just a day or two!

And to be honest, I’m just scratching the surface here.

This is enough to get you started generating leads for your personal training business online. But it’s just the beginning.

The solution here is simple enough:

  • Find out who your dream customer is
  • Find them where they’re already hanging out
  • Figure out what problem they’re having
  • Show them how you solve it.

It’s simple – but not necessarily easy.

It’s going to take some hard work to make all this happen.

And if you’re not a web developer, there’s a perfect solution for taking care of all the tech stuff you need to have in place.

There’s a platform I recommend called ClickFunnels that has everything you need to do this.

Can you do all this WITHOUT ClickFunnels? Absolutely.

ClickFunnels just makes it faster and easier.

 Next Steps

You may be feeling like this is a lot of information.

You may be feeling overwhelmed.

I get it – it makes sense.

But here’s the deal – just start.

Just do the next thing you need to do.

It starts with a single step. Then do the next thing after that.

Don’t worry if you feel like you’re behind the game, you can catch up.

To help you accelerate your path, I’ve got a free ClickFunnels template designed for specifically for personal trainers that you can use here:

If you want to learn more about what ClickFunnels is, click here.

One of the cool things about ClickFunnels is that you can test it out for yourself with a free 14 day trial, so if you’d like to test it out for yourself, there’s no risk just to kick the virtual tires on it and see if it will work for you. You can start your free trial here.

It’s time for you to start working on generating leads for your personal training business.

Have any questions about any of this? Just leave me a comment below.

OR

If you’d like some help implementing what you’ve learned here I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group, Digital Marketing Mastery – would love to have you over there.


Disclaimer: Some of the links you’ll find here are affiliate links and proudly so.

I recommend them because they’ve helped me do what I do and I have great confidence that you will get value out of them as well – hence the recommendation and affiliate links.

It’s my belief that if a product or service can help me in my business then it can help you in yours too. I’m either currently using, or have used these products and services I recommend – I will never support or feature something that I don’t believe in completely!

So by following any of these links and making a purchase, I’ll receive a commission. I always recommend you do your own independent research first before you purchase anything.

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