Fitness Industry Lessons From 2020 & How to Kill It In 2021

2020 has been a dumpster fire for a lot of fitness businesses while some businesses have thrived. Why are some personal trainers crumbling at the early signs of stress where others are flourishing under the pressure? What’s the common denominator between the businesses that are successful?

Fitness Business Lessons From 2020

We've been lucky enough to work with thousands of personal trainers via the Institute of Personal Trainers members and My Personal Trainer Website. We get to see insights from the hundreds of websites we manage and offer advice to hundreds of questions in the community group. Here’s what we learned so far:

1. People Will Always Want Training 

Probably one of the most interesting things about 2020 is that the demand for personal training never went away. Personal training is still considered a luxury item so you’d expect most people to stop spending on it.

Check out the Google search trend for "personal trainer". There's a sip around march but then we get right back on track again.

While some people certainly did due to budget constraints, especially in March of 2020, the vast majority of people continued to look for personal trainers.

2. People Are Willing To Go Online

Fitness business mentors have been preaching about taking your business online for years, right. It seems they were on to something.

Sure, for most it was just a way to get you to spend money on their particular system but for the most part, the advice to take your business online was spot on. The timing was just off.

Check out the Google trends for "online fitness". Where we saw a drop in Google searches for personal trainers, we see a spike in searches for online fitness.

People didn't just look for 1:1 personal training alternatives, they looked for them immediately.

At the end of 2019 online businesses were already a thing but weren’t as widely accepted by the general public. 2020 kind of forced people into a new way of thinking. Work went online, socialising went online and so did personal training. It became a normal thing and likely will be for a very long time.

3. Personal Trainers Can Get Great Results Online

With everyone taking their personal training online, it begs the question; can you even get results for your clients online? According to the Online Trainer Academy and their students, not only can you get great results, they can often be better and come in at a lower cost for both the trainer and client.

It's no surprise when you take a look at the Online Trainer Academy curriculum.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think online personal training is better suited to clients that are more motivated and wouldn’t rely on a 1:1 meeting to ensure they got their session done. But online training has swayed the strategies of most trainers from exercise prescription to habit coaching and that’s a big deal.

Exercise without habit coaching might get results. Habit coaching almost always gets results. Exercise and habit coaching together is one of the most successful strategies employed by trainers that get their clients results.

4. They Still Use The Same Methods to Find Good Coaches

Despite the massive changes in the way we interact and work with businesses in 2020, people are still using the same methods to find trainers as they were before and trainers are still using the same methods to obtain new clients.

Year on year we've seen the same pattern. More people use Google than ever, Facebook ad spend has gone up and other marketing methods are trailing at the back.

Some trainers assumed more people would be online and went the Facebook ads route. This method interrupts the news feed of as many people as possible in the hopes that a small percentage of the audience are ready to buy, and when done properly can be a great strategy.

Other trainers went for a more tactile approach and went looking for potential clients who are already sure they want a personal trainer. Specifically, those who searched on Google for a personal trainer.

Interestingly, the trainers who seemed to do the best online were those that took advantage of their local audience. In other words, trainers had more success persuading local clients to work with them online than non local clients.

How to Thrive and Grow in 2021

With all of these things is mind, what can you do to ensure your business thrives and grows in 2021, which will most likely be just as volatile, if not more so than 2020?

1. Pivot Your Service to What People Want

If you don’t already have an online personal training service, build one. It can seem daunting at first but creating a minimum viable product is pretty easy. You could probably even take some of your existing face to face clients online.

Whatever you choose to do, you’ll need a way to train clients when access to certain areas like gyms or parks are restricted.

2. Build Out a System for Tier Changes

When access to gyms and parks do get restricted on the fly and you’re not even sure what you can and can’t do, both you and your clients will benefit from a system whereby you switch things up to match the level of access you have with them.

For example, if you can train people outdoors on a Monday but not on the Tuesday, what’s your plan? A lot of trainers just cancel but the best trainers take that bootcamp online. All you need is access to a group calling software like Zoom and all your clients need is access to a smartphone.

It’s probably worth sharing this system with your clients too so that when tier changes happen, they already know what the protocol is.

3. Position Your Business Professionally (With a Website)

With most personal trainers taking their businesses online, the demand for personal trainer websites has gone up. While there’s loads of data to show that a professional website performs better than a DIY, a lot of trainers know this intuitively and they’re upgrading their online presence.

Check out what we built for Robert Cotterill.

The decision to work with you is dictated by how your business looks online now more than ever. If you don’t have a half decent website, get one. If you can’t afford one, be sure to stick to the theme and layouts of a DIY website.

4. Position Yourself in Front of Clients Who Are Looking for You

With a professional website in place, you’ll need to position that site in front of as many people as possible. 

You could go the Facebook ads route and push as much traffic to it as possible and hope something sticks, or you could rank your fitness website at the top of Google and attract people who are already searching for your services online.

We're big fans of ranking our client websites on the first page of Google.

While there's certainly a cost for fitness SEO, the return on investment is crazy high because you attract ready to buy leads for years to come, with minimal upkeep.

5. Do Great Work (Get Results)

It goes without saying, the trainers who do well are the trainers that get their clients results. Nothing, literally nothing will move your business forward than getting great results for your clients and making sure everyone knows about it.

Set up a testimonials page, get as many reviews as possible, ask for before/after picture, get video testimonials as much as you can. Collect as many as you can in any format and publish them everywhere.

Talk about your clients success on Facebook, tweet about them on Twitter, include reviews at the end of your emails, create image reviews and have them go out on to your Facebook page regularly.

6. Create a Consistent Lead Generation Strategy 

Finally, the one thing where most personal trainers have struggled is lead gen. They think that because they aren’t spending, no one else is spending either.

This simply isn’t true. It doesn’t matter how much you’re struggling, your neighbour might be doing just fine and be willing to spend some of their spare cash on your services. Get your head out of the mud and remember that not everyone is in the same space as you.

With that in mind, you’ll need a constant lead generation strategy. It doesn’t matter what it is but you’ll likely do better if you work to your strengths. 

For example, if you enjoy writing, write, a lot. If you happen to be a Facebook ads ninja, do that. If you have time and patience, learn how to SEO your website or pay someone to get you at the top of Google. If sales calls are your thing, get as many people on the phone as you can.

Work with what you have until you do so well that you can outsource the things you’re not so good at or don’t enjoy doing.

No matter what you do, remember that this isn’t the end of personal training. This is just a new chapter in the fitness industry and you’re a part of it.