Become a Successful Personal Trainer With this Foolproof Blueprint

Success is one of those vague words that can have many different meanings to different people.

But most personal trainers can agree that success entails:

• Having plenty of clients
• Charging premium prices and making good money
• Maintaining a work/life balance

All of these components of success are possible. And we want to share the process that will get you there. It’s simple – not easy. But with commitment and strategy, you can carve out your dream life and career and become a highly successful personal trainer.

6 Steps to Become a Successful Personal Trainer:

• Step 1: Find a Niche
• Step 2: Find Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
• Step 3: Build a Sales Funnel to Market Your Business
• Step 4: Automate Your Process
• Step 5: Further Narrow Down Your Niche and Increase Your Market Size
• Step 6: Reiterate What’s Working (And Ditch What Doesn’t)

Step 1

Find a Niche

If you haven’t already, your first step to becoming a successful personal trainer is finding your niche. Your niche is the segment of the population that you will market your training to. It’s the group of people that your training is built for and will bring the best results.

Marketing takes time and money. Finding and marketing to only your niche will help ensure that you get the best return on investment of those precious resources.

Need help figuring out your niche?

Think about who your happiest clients are : these are the people that understand the value of your service, have worked with you the longest, and are eager to share their positive experience. Are they busy women looking to lose weight? Or are they seniors looking to gain more strength and mobility? Which client have you been able to bring the best results?

If you’re just starting out, think about who you want to work with, and which segment of the population you think you are most qualified to help.

Make sure your niche is the right size : So when thinking about the kind of clients you want to serve, you’ll also want to make sure that the segment is the right size. For example, targeting “people that want to get in shape” might be a bit too broad. Whereas, “people with rotator cuff injuries” might be a little too narrow.

You’ve got to find the sweet spot, where the market is large enough to meet your revenue goals, but not so big that you aren’t able to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.

Pick a niche that matches your passion and your skills : Lastly, an incredibly important part of niching down is making sure you are qualified to work within your niche and that you actually enjoy doing so. This part is especially vital because it determines how you will excel in your business and build your reputation. The passion for what you do will come in handy when things get tough, and your expertise/experience in a certain area makes you more qualified than others to serve your particular niche.

Step 2

Find Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

Once you know your niche, you can determine your unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is “a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer’s needs and what distinguishes you from the competition.”

When trying to determine your UVP, think about your competition – fitness businesses that are serving the same niche as you. Keep in mind that your competition might not be who you think it is. For example, your biggest competitor may not be a personal trainer in another town. Instead, it might be a local fitness studio that your ideal client might go to instead.

Next, think about how your way of doing things differs from your competition. What’s your unique experience, background, and method? How does it shape the impact you make? Think about the unique benefits you can provide that your clients truly care about.

If your niche is busy moms that want to get in shape, how exactly do you help them do that? What makes you stand out from other trainers helping the same group? Be sure to focus on what you do well, not what other trainers do poorly.

Get clear on your UVP. Turn it into a mission statement. This is important because it will appear prominently in all of your marketing materials and help you stand out in the oversaturated fitness market.

Step 3

Build a Sales Funnel to Market Your Business

A sales funnel is a path a prospect takes to become your paying customer. When most people first hear about you or stumble across your website, they are not quite ready to buy from you. These are often called “cold” leads. These leads still have a lot of unanswered questions and will take some convincing before they pull out their wallet.

Your sales funnel is how you answer these questions, form a relationship, and help these leads get to know you. This warms them up to the idea of spending the money to work with you. By the end of a good sales funnel, these leads are more familiar with you and your brand, and are more primed to buy from you.

There are three main phases of a sales funnel:

1. Attract
2. Nurture
3. Convert

Attraction

The first step in getting leads is to attract them. This step is sometimes called the “awareness stage” as it just means getting people to find you and become aware of who you are and the problem you solve.

There are quite a few different ways you can go about attracting ideal clients. You might offer free fitness assessments or personal training sessions. Social media is another great way to build awareness. Sharing the right content that encourages people to share with their friends gets more eyes on your pages.

Basically, the intended result of the attraction function of a sales funnel is to get a prospect to decide they want to get to know you a little better. They might follow you on Instagram or share their email address. Once they’ve agreed to open an ongoing communication channel with you, the next part of the funnel begins.

Nurturing

A prospective client finding you online is a big win! And though they may already be slightly interested in your services, they will still have a lot of unanswered questions and concerns that are holding them back like:

• Do I have a problem?
• Do you have the solution?
• Are you an expert?
• What’s your offer?
• Etc.

The nurture stage is where you answer those questions and convince these prospects that you are the person that can help solve their problem. You are building trust and nurturing your relationship with these clients – a crucial part of marketing and making sales.

You can nurture leads through various communication channels, like email or social media. We’ll go through some specific examples of this soon.

Conversion

You’ve attracted your ideal clients and opened a communication channel with them. Now, those prospects know that you have a solution to their problem and have the expertise that can help them reach their fitness goals.

It’s time to close the deal with your unique offer.

You need to get clear on the services and packages you are offering and explain those offerings to your prospects. This is the part where you directly ask leads for a sale. If you’ve built out the earlier stages of the funnel, it should be no problem converting your leads to clients.

To build a truly irresistible offer, we recommend combining in-person training with online training. We have a great resource that tells you everything you need to know about building an online personal training business. Expanding online is a great idea and helps you offer something that other personal trainers aren’t offering. Plus, you can easily build out your online components using an app like TrainerFu.

Example sales funnel

Instagram post + content marketing (email + Instagram) + irresistible offer + sales call

This type of funnel is a great example of how to use many different methods for moving a prospect from the awareness to the conversion stage. Once you’ve got their attention with a great Instagram post, you can use a combination of both email and Instagram marketing to nurture those relationships. Eventually, you can share your offer in an email or even on a social media post. Use a strong CTA in your content and ask prospects to book a sales call. If your funnel has worked, those prospects will happily follow your directions to become paying customers.

In action, this might look something like this for a particular client – let’s call her Elise:

Elise finds you on Instagram and loves your content. She watches a really great Reel that you do on proper squat form and decides that she wants to join your email list for more helpful tips. You send her a welcome email as well as monthly newsletters that offer a lot of value and help her feel like she knows you on a personal level. After a while, she receives an email with your irresistible offer inside. She’s pretty interested! In that email, you include a link where she can schedule a sales call with you. Since your content has told her pretty much everything she needs to know about working with you, Elise is more than ready to commit to a package during the call.

Keep in mind that all sales funnels don’t have this many steps. When you’re first starting out, you may keep it more simple. As your business grows, you can experiment with more ways to attract, nurture, and convert your ideal clients.

Step 4

Automate Your Process

Nailing down your marketing strategies will bring you more and more clients. But what happens when you’re tapped out and don’t have the time or energy to take on any more work?

Does your business stop growing? Have you reached your income limit?

Not if you set up automations beforehand.

To be able to sustain the business as it grows, you need to automate the repetitive steps of your personal training process like onboarding, sharing workouts, supporting clients, and more. This is once again a great reason to have a strong niche: If you are training the same type of clients, what you do for one can be applied to others.

In a personal training software like TrainerFu, you can set up automations and create templates to save time, train more clients, and deliver more value. For example, create one template for a workout you give to clients a lot or a short nutrition guide that answers all your client’s nutrition FAQs. You can also automate client onboarding and use the app to schedule timely check-ins and reminders to keep clients on track.

Step 5

Further Narrow Down Your Niche and Increase Your Market Size

The above steps will help you build a strong personal training business. But you want more than that right? You want to go above average and be more successful than the average trainer.

Then once you have laid the groundwork and are ready to level up, it’s time to narrow down your niche even further. Yep, that’s right! Get even more specific about the kind of client you want to work with to increase your market size.

The ultimate game is to be known for getting one result to one type of client and being known for it. This is how the most successful personal trainers do it. Think about the kind of results you’ve gotten your niche. Think about the features and benefits your training packages provide and create something even more personalized for a unique type of client. For example: “Weight loss program for new mamas that are 40 lbs overweight”.

Narrowing down your niche makes your marketing even more specific and can help more ideal clients find you. It can also make your automation game that much stronger. If all of your clients are copies of each other looking for the same results, you can use your programs and materials over and over again. And this is your secret sauce for having a business that can train thousands of clients, deliver them amazing value, and still have a balanced life for yourself. Sounds like success doesn’t it?

Step 6

Reiterate What’s Working (And Ditch What Doesn’t)

As you specialize and have narrowed down your niche even further it’s time to revisit your UVP, sales funnel, and automations.

Once you narrow down your niche, you need to market accordingly. Some ideas for gathering leads?

• Join Facebook groups where your niche is likely to hang out
• Create YouTube videos that your target audience is searching for
• Start a blog that provides unique value to your niche
• Create highly personalized email sequences for your narrowed down niche

By doing these you can make sure that you are getting a constant stream of new clients but the time you spend on every client is getting reduced.

Pay attention to where you are already having success attracting clients. Is your YouTube strategy taking too much of your time without many results? Have any sales funnels that need to be reworked? Constantly check in and evaluate which of your processes are helping your business grow and which are just slowing you down. This is exceptionally important as your niche gets even more narrow.

Become a successful personal trainer with TrainerFu

Being able to take on hundreds of clients, make good money doing it, and still have a great work/life balance is truly a great definition of success as a personal trainer. If this is your dream, you can make it happen by following the right steps.

Make sure you are clear on your niche and what makes your business different. Be able to adequately explain it in your marketing and use it to inspire your sales funnels. Automate everything that you can from marketing to payroll to client interactions. As your business grows (and it will), narrow down your niche even further to become known for bringing a certain type of client a specific result. Lather, rinse, and repeat, making important adjustments to these processes as you go.

The right tools can help you manage your personal training business and make your life easier as your workload grows. TrainerFu’s personal training software can help you build your fitness brand and impress clients with the seamless delivery of your training packages. To truly become a successful personal trainer, start by trying the app for free today.