3 Ways That Marketing Online Coaching Is Different From Face-To-Face Personal Training

If you’ve been a personal trainer on the gym floor at some point in your career and had a successful face-to-face personal training business, you may have used techniques to get clients that are quite different from the methods you use online.

In fact, if you’ve transitioned to offering any online personal training services, you may find the methods available to you quite ineffective - or at least that they appear to be slower than face to face personal training. You’d be right. But online marketing is hugely effective if you know how to do it correctly.

1. You Need A Much Higher Level Of Specificity Online

As a face-to-face trainer, it’s possible you could pick up clients simply from making an introduction and remembering their name. They have probably seen you working with your other clients, and either they’ve been considering making the first move to speak to you and have been curious about your service.

Starting and finishing a fitness class by saying, “my name is… and I’m a personal trainer here. I help [your niche] to achieve their specific fitness goals. If you’d like some personalised help, just hang back at the end of this class and let’s have a chat about what you need” is often enough to pick up enough clients to fill your roster in a busy enough gym.

If you’re smart about your marketing, you might even be known for training a particular type of client e.g. women over 40 that feel a bit intimidated walking in the gym and want to feel super confident with their training plan.

THE SOLUTION:
When you’re marketing online, it’s important to get as specific as possible. The more clearly you can speak to one very distinct type of person - and definitely not anyone else - the better your marketing message can be heard.

The online fitness space is pretty noisy. People are getting a lot of marketing messages every single day. So in order to stand out from the crowd, you need to be the obvious choice to your prospect - and you do that by being incredibly specific when you do your marketing activities.

You can do this by just being you. Seriously. The only thing better than a kick as marketing strategy is a hyper personlised approach to online personal training. The online trainers who are doing great right now wear their personality on their sleeve while communicating online.

2. Marketing Different Elements Of The Personal Training Service

When you work with people face-to-face on the gym floor, people might be looking for the accountability of having a personal trainer waiting for them during their appointment time. They like the idea of being held accountable in this way, and it’s a meeting that can go in the calendar regularly. This is often what people think they need.

Sometimes, people want to learn a very specific or highly technical skill - such as Olympic weightlifting, or gymnastics - and this can feel much easier to coach in person. The feedback is immediate, tactile and can be repetitively practiced with intention to drill the new neuro-motor skills. The client makes faster progress because the time between feedback and practicing the new movement again is much shorter.

However, when you’re marketing online, you can still mention the importance of all these factors. But the real benefits of online coaching are the flexibility and independence your client will get from working with you. They may not have to meet you at the gym at a specific time, but that doesn’t mean that workout appointment shouldn’t go in their diary and the appointment kept.

THE SOLUTION
It’s this level of independence that many clients need to deliver. If they’re paying you to meet them and count your reps… that’s a pretty fragile level of security for your professional expertise, and something which could be easily replaced by a training partner or even an app. Clients often may not recognise that the workouts they’re doing are fine but the area they most need help with is outside the gym.

Forming habits that can last a lifetime, learning how to nourish their bodies with wholesome food, making personal connections with other like-minded people that can support them on their journey. The face to face benefits are still there when you’re online, but talking about these other “non-gym” based benefits could make you stand out. Even if you’re using online marketing to promote face to face training!

3. You Can Pay For Advertising Online

Local marketing for personal trainers, such as posters, drop leaflet campaigns and ads in local newspapers or radio stations, while important, can be prohibitive for the new trainer that doesn’t yet have an established advertising budget. 

Online advertising, such as Facebook ads or banner ads on websites where your ideal client is likely to spend time online can also be expensive. However, it has the capacity to be far more targeted. Targeting is invaluable because that means the leads you get from the ads you run will be warm leads that are more likely to buy from you.

THE SOLUTION
Targeting your ideal customers means you can be incredibly specific about who you want your adverts shown to, and if you have a clear idea about your market and your ideal client, that allows you to get a better return on your advertising investment.

Summing Up

To be clear, both online and offline marketing methods can be used to sell both online coaching and face to face personal training. Regardless of which method of marketing you use, there is one major similarity. All marketing is about clearly explaining the service you provide your clients and showing that explanation to the right people. It’s often made more complex than this, and so it can feel intimidating.

Remember that all coaching is about relationships. Whether those relationships happen face to face on the gym floor, or they’re done online is almost irrelevant once you’ve understood that you’re in the business of building trusting relationships with your clients. That trust can be broken easily, so regardless of the medium you use to get your message across, remember that your integrity as a trainer is tied into your marketing.