Who are you advertising to?
The most important thing when it comes to advertising your personal training services in London is to know what kind of customer you are trying to attract.
Do you specialise in going to people’s homes and charge £100 per hour? This will dictate which areas of London will be appropriate to focus your advertising on and which areas are going to be unproductive to target.
In the case mentioned above, you might need to target a few different areas spread around town. Maybe some central postcodes. If you go to North/North-West London you can look at NW3, NW6. Or TW9 and SW19 south of the river. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, it’s meant to illustrate that if the services you offer require it, you might need to spread your campaigns around London a little bit.
On the other hand, if you have a local personal training studio and are hoping to get people into group sessions for £15/session you might want focus more locally.
Instead of spreading your advertising around London, you want to focus on areas within walking distance from your location.
On top of that, you might want to research how long it takes to drive from other/neighbouring postcodes and target the areas which are reasonably close. You can also consider what are the best public transport connections connecting your local area and see which parts of London are still within a 20-minute commute to you using public transport.
As you can see, these two approaches to advertising are very different. The type of client you are after should dictate how and where you will be advertising.
There is almost no situation in which you should be advertising to the whole of London. Always narrow down your targeting. Never just blast your ads to the whole city.
Separate the advertising of different services
You can also separate your advertising for different services you are providing. If your provide group classes like mentioned above but a part of your studio’s focus are also one-on-one back pain management sessions. You probably want to consider separating your advertising of these two different services.
You can for example have your back pain management sessions advertised at almost any time of year. On the other hand your group sessions might benefit from a push at the beginning of the year when people are likely to get motivated for this kind of activity.
Ultimately, you want to avoid advertising too many varied services with a single ad/medium at once. Whether you are advertising on Facebook or with leaflets. Make sure your ads are focused and simple to understand.
Advertising personal training services Offline
At The Private Postman we specialise in what we consider to be the most effective offline advertising method in London – flyer delivery. We have a whole blog dedicated to the topic of flyer delivery for personal trainers (see it here).
For more details have a look at the link above. We can, however still share some flyer delivery basics with you here.
Keep it simple
Keep your flyer design and your campaigns simple. Use a single page A5 flyer with a great quality image on one side. You can use the other side of your flyer to elaborate on the details of your services with more text.
Select the best areas you want to advertise in according to what we discussed in the first part of this article and don’t overcomplicate your targeting. Depending on your goals keep your campaigns between 5,000-50,000 flyers
Repeat drops
Most advertising works best when some element of repetition is present in your campaign planning. Talk to your delivery company about their view on how many times you can repeat your flyer campaigns in particular areas and how long the break between each drop should be.
Don’t overdo it with too many repeated flyer deliveries but don’t be afraid to target a particularly important area a couple of times at a crucial time of year.
To find out more about repeated drops, have a look at our article dedicated to the topic.
Work with professionals
As flyer delivery has a non-trivial entry cost due to flyer design, printing and the cost of delivery itself, try to work with professionals to maximise your chance of success.
Get someone who understands flyer design to put your flyer together. Get a reputable printing house to print your flyers. Work with professionals when it comes to delivery.
You want to get the most out of your investment and any mistake in design or delivery, can cost you. Work with professionals and get the most out of your flyer delivery efforts.
Online marketing methods for PTs
Nowadays a good chunk of your advertising will be happening online. Let’s have a look at some of the online methods that should be the most productive for you, when it comes to advertising your PT services.
Social Media
Social media is an obvious choice for a personal trainer. The way you approach it however, will ultimately have a big effect on whether your social media can bring in customers.
Social media is heavily saturated with content. Especially in the fitness realm. For you to punch through the noise and organically reach large numbers of people is possible but very unlikely unless this is your primary job.
As a local business or a personal trainer, you can use social media as a form of social proof and source of information for people that are potentially already interested in your services.
You can simply post regular updates about your classes, details of your own training routine or maybe some information about workshops you are attending. When you do this, people that have found you online or through your advertising can have a look at your posts and make a decision whether you are a good fit for what they’re looking for.
Is your training focused on hard core powerlifting, kettlebells, body weight training or high intensity interval training? If your posts reflect your focus, people get the idea about what you do very quickly.
This can help tremendously as this can act as a form of automatic selection. The people that want to do the kind of training you are offering are going to be more likely to call you and book a session after visiting your social media. People who are not interested in the training modalities you are using will be less likely to call you and spend unnecessary time figuring out that you are ultimately not a good fit for their needs.
Paid Ads
Social media sites can allow for some great targeted advertising. You can push your posts and ads to very specific demographic groups, with concrete interests in particular locations. These ads can be in the form of an image, video or a regular post.
Just from this description, It should be pretty clear that social media ads can be very effective tools, when used correctly. You can target the kinds of people that are the most likely to be interested in your services, with a high level of accuracy.
SEO and your website
Having a quality website is still an important part of presenting your personal training business. Even though your social media activity can be informative to your potential clients, the amount of well structured information you can have on your website is unique to the medium.
Your website doesn’t have to be very complicated. If you want, you can have an interactive booking system on your site, but it’s not necessary.
You can look at your website as the place to put all the relevant information about you and your personal training services. You can include videos of you training, your accreditations, blog articles on relevant topics, testimonials.
Due to the way you can structure your website, you can include a lot of information without having to worry about overwhelming people too easily.
If you want to take your website to the next level, you can look at Search Engine Optimisations (SEO). This is a field that focuses on optimising your site to come up closer to the top of searches on google and other search engines.
It’s a large topic to get into, but when approached correctly, it has huge potential benefits. It might be worth doing some basic research. You can maybe start looking into SEO here.
