Running your own personal training business isn’t easy. Actually, we’re going to say that even louder for the people in the back running your own personal training business isn’t easy.
Not only are you handling ownership, management, staffing, client relations, and customer service, you’re also in charge of one of the most important and most intimidating portions of any small business—marketing.
For people out there who don’t have marketing degrees, who barely care to run a personal Instagram, or who aren’t ready to dish out a ton of cash to pay for a top-of-the-line marketing budget from a professional, we’ve got good news—this article is for you.
While we can’t authoritatively say these are the only tools you need to hone your marketing skills (or that all of these will be right for your particular strategy), we can tell you that each of these tools can ease your marketing headache significantly.
From getting to know your audience to creating unique, compelling content, each of these tools contributes to your marketing strategy in a much-needed way.
1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
For those of you who don’t know much about marketing, here’s a quick, 101-style lesson for you. Sure, it’s got a lot to do with strategy and with creativity—but it’s got even more to do with data and how you analyze it for insight. While we could probably talk endlessly about this subject, we’re going to sum it up here for brevity sake—it’s impossible to plan a successful marketing strategy if you don’t know who you’re marketing to or who you want to market to.
In other words, if you don’t know your audience or who you’re reaching, you can’t create a successful marketing campaign. That’s where Google Analytics comes in. This free tool is set up to provide you with the valuable insight you need on who is visiting your website and other pages and what they’re doing once they’re there.
Not only can you figure out how long people are spending on your site, the demographics of your visitors, where those visitors are coming from, and the keywords people are using to find your site, but you can also compare non-organic to organic traffic, figure out how many people are coming to your site every day, week, month, etc., and so much more!
Google Analytics helps you understand where your visitors are coming from, who they are, and why they’re on your site—which can help you better understand how to market and where to direct your marketing efforts.
2. HOOTSUITE
Social media plays an enormous role in marketing (in fact, we have an entire article all about marketing that really drives this point home, check it out here)—but managing your social media, on top of, well, you know, running a business, isn’t always easy. That’s why scheduling tools like Hootsuite are such a lifesaver.
With Hootsuite, you can sit down, plan posts and content in advance, and then schedule it—that way you’re not scrambling to post something every single day. It saves you all kinds of time, consolidates your efforts, and enables you to create consistent content that brings value to your followers (something that’s hugely important in the social media sphere).
As an added bonus, Hootsuite has additional features, like influencer identification add-ons that let you identify who might be a great marketing partner, in-dashboard reply functions, and canned response recall to answer similar questions.
3. CANVA
This is a purely creative tool that’s a cheap, easy way for you—a personal trainer who doesn’t have hours upon hours to create crafty posts—to build compelling content for your social media and digital platforms. Canva lets you create graphics, helps you visualize data with engaging graphs, helps you build infographics, and overall, nabs your followers’ attention. You can choose from all kinds of photo options (or add your own, of course), font combos, color palettes, themes, and more! The best part? There are customized templates for every social media platform you can think of.
4. HUBSPOT
If you’re really, really invested in your marketing strategy, then you likely have more than just one channel for those marketing aspirations—we’re talking social media, email marketing, pay-per-click, lead magnets, analytics, and more (if you’ve never heard of some of these things, don’t panic—you’ll get there).
All of that is probably pretty dizzying, and to be honest, even though we have significant experience running our marketing, it can still be kind of a handful to ensure you’re managing every channel properly. That’s where tools like HubSpot (or similar all-in-one-marketing software solutions) come into play.
HubSpot is like an all-inclusive resort that brings everything you could ever want to your fingertips—especially marketing prowess. With HubSpot, you can grow your traffic, convert leads, improve ROI, build your website (even if you’re not IT savvy) drive traffic, and get your marketing content in front of the right audience.
The best part? They have intuitive add-ons for other segments of your business, like service, sales, and more, all working seamlessly together to make your job just a little bit easier.
5. MAILCHIMP
Email marketing, although a more dated form of digital marketing, is still an incredibly relevant, useful way for you to stay in touch with your clients (and draw in new ones). In fact, about 80 percent of B2B and B2C companies are using this technology to this day.
That being said, creating a hyper-successful email marketing campaign takes time, effort, and a lot of creativity—all of which you probably can’t bear to spare because you’re expending every last ounce of those things on your business. That’s why email marketing tools like MailChimp are so fantastic.
MailChimp helps you create customized, professional email marketing campaigns, keeps your data safe, and manages your email campaigns all in one, secure place. Further, they can take the data from those campaigns and transform it into insight in order to help you create more successful campaigns as time goes on!
wHAT NOW?
Like we said, we’re not trying to tell you that these five tools (and only these five tools) are the key to marketing success, but we do believe they can help ease the burden of your marketing stress. Give them a try and let us know what you think. Got another useful marketing tool that you want to share with the Insure Fitness Group Community? Reach out to us and let us know!
If you love our fitness biz tips and tricks, be sure to keep up with our regularly updated IFG blog! We’ve got the advice, inspo, and insight you need to create a successful, savvy fitness business.
