The More Lines in the Water, the More Likely You Will Get a Bite

Don't monkey around with fishing for new clients!

What does fishing have to do with the business of personal trainer marketing in Alberta? Maybe more than you think. Too often, especially as a solo personal trainer, our time is spread very thin amongst a variety of tasks. When we think of personal trainer marketing and attracting new clients we often become really focused on one idea or promotion. Soon all our efforts are wrapped up in one thing at a time, though once in a while this may produce a dramatic result; most often it will be pretty discouraging.

Effective and continual client attraction and business growth requires you to have more lines in the water. One promotion leads to the next or simple awareness marketing needs to run parallel to your latest offer. Each new avenue will provide more credibility to the other campaign. Now a word of warning, I am not suggesting that you have several deep discount offers running at the same time as this will only confuse the consumer. My point is to make sure you always have a plan B, C and so on. The more lines in the water the more likely you are to get a bite.

Here is an example of multiple streams of marketing that reinforce each other within our business. Each one makes the others more successful than they would be on their own.

Let’s say we were running a newspaper ad or a direct mail flyer on a deep discount training program to generate new clients.

Facebook Advertising – Running a free consult ad on facebook continually provides local, targeted branding. If people who seen the flyer were skeptical about the discount program this may provide a comfortable alternative to seeing what we have to offer without feeling any sort of obligation.

Articles – If you are writing articles make sure they get posted online but more importantly try to get them out in your immediate area. I’ve been writing for our local paper for over 3 years and now when someone sees our ad and follows it up with reading my column in the Sunday paper we have developed a great deal of credibility. This makes all our marketing carry more weight.

Radio Branding – Not that I necessarily suggest this, but for us it is so inexpensive that a basic radio branding commercial brings the appearance of our print ad or flyer back to top of mind awareness and maybe increases our conversion slightly with those that had already forgotten about it.

Free Newsletter – If they seen our print ad or flyer, and/or maybe our facebook ad or heard our commercial or maybe all of the above, curiosity may overwhelm them to make them visit our website; just to see who we are since they keep hearing about us. If they are still afraid to feel pressured at all about using our services they can find out more without ever talking to us by opting in for our free newsletter which puts them in our marketing funnel. This gives us an ongoing chance to offer them our services or another promotion in the future.

The only one of these that presents significant cost to a new trainer is the radio branding, and it’s by far the least important the larger your market. We only use it because in our market it’s very cost effective. I hope I have illustrated my point, don’t really on attracting clients through one campaign at a time. Make sure they overlap or blend into ongoing items that ultimately create your marketing system.