Market Research 101 for Personal Trainers

According to Wellness Creatives, 90% of personal trainers leave the fitness industry within their first year. It may be that the personal trainer qualifications leave a lot to be desired in understanding how to actually run a business.

Market research is an important tool at every personal trainer’s disposal to help them to understand the needs of their audience and clients. And there are a lot of free options available to help you get started.

How Market Research Can Grow Your Personal Training Business

Once you have conducted your market research, that data will give you information on how to plan your business strategy around the services you offer, how best to deliver them and what content would work best to market yourself online.

Reaching a Specific Audience

By using your existing network via your email list or your social media channels you have access to a warm audience (that already know, like and trust you). If you need a broader audience for your survey, you could ask a specific demographic to share your survey (if you’re a woman living with knee pain and over 55, please send this survey to a friend) and incentivise it for them so they’re more likely to help. 

Analysing a Target Market

In your planning for your personal trainer business, you need to be confident that you’re putting your efforts into the right things. By doing regular market research, you can improve the quality of your business decisions and be intentional about any spending you do.

Get Insights Into Your Audience’s Needs

Using online survey’s to determine what your audience wants to learn more about and get more support with is an efficient way to make sure that you’re giving them what they want. This can help you to offer programmes, packages and services that are in demand - driving growth in your fitness business.

Use Social Media

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have built-in options to post polls. Posting similar surveys across each platform can give you a good idea of how to re-purpose content for the demographics on each channel. 

What Tools to Use

One of the most accessible methods to conduct market research for personal trainers is a survey. There are many free softwares available, and you can use them to find out just about anything you need to know.

Some good free software choices include Google Forms, Facebook polls, or Survey Monkey. There are paid options available, like Wufoo that offer improved integration on websites but that probably isn’t necessary if you’re just starting. 

Surveys talk to your audience directly and ask them what they need help with. This is useful for a personal trainer because sometimes it isn’t what you'd expect. This can save fitpros time and effort in creating resources that our clients don’t want or need.

Market Research How-To for Personal Trainers

Once you picked the way you'd like to conduct your survey for a specific purpose, you just need to understand how to design the questionnaire and what principles to keep in mind so you receive useful and valuable information back. What to do with the data will also be a crucial point so you can get the best out of your market research project.

Be Clear On What You Want To Know

To help you to define the problem clearly, know what you’re trying to figure out with the data you collect and how you intend to use it. By knowing this before you begin, you can restrict yourself to asking only relevant questions and wording them in a precise way. “How many times a week do you work out?” is a better question than “Do you work out regularly?” if you need to know how many days to write a training programme split for.

Target Your Audience

If you’re looking to target a niche within your audience, it can sometimes be difficult to get enough people to answer the questionnaire. In this instance, you could encourage them to share with friends who also meet the criteria.

Set Your Parameters

You may want to consider:
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• When you’ll send your survey out
• How you’ll send it (email, social media etc)
• How many times can you send it without annoying your audience
• When will you “close” the survey and stop collecting data

These are all considerations which may impact the quality and quantity of the responses you receive. 

Analyse The Data

Set time aside to read carefully through the responses. There are export options that allow you to see the range of data presented in a spreadsheet that can be really helpful. This can help you to see patterns in the data, or answers which come up time and again that could be addressed in your content or services. 

Thank Your Respondents

Find some way to acknowledge the people who took time to answer your survey. Sending a personal message of thanks, explaining how you’ll use their data is a professional touch. You may prefer to record a short video addressing the things they talked about in the survey.

​If you make content addressing their issues, or change the services you provide based on what they told you - follow up with them. Tell them that because of their feedback, you’ve changed the way you do things, or created something to help them. 

Wrapping Up

When you use surveys to improve your personal training business, you are responding to the needs of your market. You’re demonstrating that you’re attentive to customer experiences, and your clients feel as though their voice matters.

​You can use surveys every few months to make sure that you’re addressing the needs of your audience and this might form the basis of your content planning for several months at a time. It can give your business clarity in planning the services you offer, and help to uncover demands for features and products that you might not have otherwise known about.