How to Avoid One of the Biggest Mistakes Most Fitness Professionals are Making

Video Transcript

In today’s video, we’re going to take a look at one of the biggest mistakes a lot of fitness professionals make that is costing them clients and we’ll take a look at how you can avoid making this mistake…

One of the Biggest mistakes fitness professionals make when they are putting their marketing message out there…

Is they often create a massive disconnect with people who see their marketing material because their message is WAY too broad. It doesn’t connect with the people who would take action and come in and train with you.

Now, This applies to every aspect of your marketing and your business.

This applies to your website, your Facebook page, your print ads, squeeze pages, videos and emails – this applies to everything you put out there. 

I see a lot of trainers failing to do this all the time and it is costing them clients. When I ask some fitness professionals who their ideal clients are, they come back to me with things like; ‘anyone who wants to get fit’ or ‘anyone who needs to lose a few kilos’ and what’s even worse is when they say “anyone who’ll pay me”.

This is not the approach to take if you want to build a sustainable business that you love. If you focus on doing this right, you’ll really stand out from the crowd and you’ll attract a lot more clients and the kind of clients you want to work with. 

So this is how to make sure your fitness marketing message is focused towards who you want to train.

Your marketing message must speak directly to your ideal client. You must understand their demographics but more importantly you need to know the psychological side of things too…

You want your marketing message to enter the conversation that’s already going on in their head and then from there you want to lead them to you and your product being the solution to the problem they’re likely to be experiencing.

Now this might sound a little bit tricky so let me break this down for you because it’s super important to growing a successful fitness business.

Let’s get into more detail about what you need to start to understand about your ideal clients in order to get your message across effectively.

So besides knowing whether your ideal clients are male or female, how old they are and where they live you’re going to want to find out a lot more about them.

Let’s break this down.

Creating your ideal clients profile…

When you think about the type of client you want to work with, think about what stage of life they’re in

Are they uni students, starting their career, beginning a family or are they heading towards retirement?

What characteristics do they have? Are they adventurous, intelligent, fun, optimistic, energetic, have strong ethics and morals?

What problem do they need help solving?

Why haven’t they been able to solve it in the past?

You want to think about why they train with you. Now we both know one of the reasons is because you’re an awesome trainer, but let’s get more realistic about this. Is it because you can help them lose weight before their wedding day, is it responding to a health scare or a sports injury, is it to increase their energy levels or are they looking to be an elite sports person?

You want to get super specific with the type of person you want to attract, because you want these people to sit up and take action and they want you to demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of what is important to them.

Have a think about what hesitations they might have when it comes to hiring a personal trainer?

Get detailed, what is causing them pain emotionally about this area of their life? Do they feel unattractive to a partner, are they being bullied, are they unable to play with their kids. What is the real emotion behind why they want to work with you?

Have a think about the type of clients you don’t want to work with, this might include people who are unstable, highly stressed or financially disorganised.

Most importantly, who are the people you want to work with? 

Now, this part is all about you. What type of person inspires you to show up to work every day? What kind of client helps you to be the best trainer you can be, who is fun to work with? And who will help you enhance your reputation and continue to help you grow?

The best way to answer a lot of these questions, is to ask as many of your current clients as you can.

Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and casting a wide net, start to focus on attracting the type of client you really want to work with.

The moment you start to truly understand what’s going on inside their head and connect with them, the easier it will be able to help them overcome their objections quickly and convincingly. You will be able to provide more information and better answers to their questions.

Now, one thing I want to make clear is that your ideal clients, won’t be your only clients. Building a business that accepts only ideal clients takes time. But what I want you to do is to start working on it. Get a piece of paper and write down exactly who your ideal client is. I want you to answer the questions I talked about before which will be listed below this video (above this post) and then in everything you put out there in your fitness marketing material, whether it’s your Facebook page, your website, your print material or videos, always imagine that person as if you’re having a conversation with them.

You could be the best personal trainer, pilates instructor or health coach in the country but if you can’t convey what you can do for people in a way that gets them excited about working with you, then you won’t reach nearly as many people as you could be reaching if you had a message that truly connected with them.

That’s it for this video. If you liked it, as always make sure you share it with your friends. If you want more free training like this then make sure you head over to thefitnessentourage.com and sign up to receive more free training videos!

I hope you have an amazing day and I look forward to seeing you again soon!

We got such a great response from this video… Check out our follow up video which shows you exactly how to tailor your marketing message depending on who your ideal client it!