4 Effective Ways To Market Your Workout Plans

Selling workout and training plans online can be a highly effective method for fitness professionals to gain an additional income stream. Once you have taken the time to create a quality plan, the next step is to market and sell your plan to interested customers. This step can often prove a little tricky, as there is a multitude of potential routes to market yourself and your workout plans. This article outlines four ways to market your workout plans that are effective, affordable and efficient.

1. Face-to-face Conversations

Talking to potential customers face-to-face is often a neglected and overlooked method when it comes to selling and marketing workout plans. The temptation can be to jump straight into paid advertising on social media platforms or website creation, but make no mistake, by neglecting to take the time to hold 1-to-1 conversations with potential customers, you're missing out on a huge opportunity for sales.

Unlike any other kind of marketing, holding a conversation is infinitely more personable and allows you to take the time to form a relationship, understand the needs of the individual and assess whether your plan is right for them, and most importantly, be on hand to answer any questions/reservations a customer may have about the plan that would prevent them from purchasing.

It may initially seem counter-intuitive to spend so much time and effort talking to one individual to get a sale, but far better to spend 20 minutes talking to an interested customer, giving a comprehensive breakdown to your plan and getting a sale, than to aimlessly address 10 people and end up with nothing.

2. Create A Following On Social Media

Social media can be a very effective (and free) marketing method to drive interest in your workout plans through organic reach. Utilising social media is a fantastic tool to build credibility in yourself as a personal trainer and in your workout plans – both are essential for successfully selling your plans. Customers need to have absolute trust in you and the quality of your workout plan before they’re willing to make a purchase. By using social media to provide insights into your lifestyle and training methods, you can begin to build that credibility and trust.

Posting videos and images of yourself following the plan and carrying out the training sessions is a great way to develop interest and showcase the results that are achievable by following your plan. Just be honest, transparent and open about the hard work and behind-the-scenes effort that's required to obtain those results. Doing so will help massively in building your credibility and also help you cut through the noise of ‘quick-fixes’ and other dubious fitness methods.

Following up posts with live Q & A sessions to the full plan is a great way to capture interested individuals to address any outstanding reservations that they may have, and ensure they are fully confident before making a purchase. Limited time discount codes or a free giveaway can help to drive engagement and interest in the workout plans and are a great marketing method when you're releasing the plan for the first time.

3. Build An Email List

Building an email list is a more attractive marketing method if you prefer communicating using the written word, as oppose to the images and video that are more favoured on social media.

Sending out a regular email, whether it be daily, weekly, or even monthly with high quality and actionable information is a great way to build a following and your reputation as a personal trainer. A useful technique is to plan your topics/content to ensure you’re never short on ideas – consistency is the key to building an engaged and interested email list. Always write on topics that you’re knowledgeable on and would also be of interest and use to the reader. Actionable insight and advice often go down well here. If you’re ever stuck for topics to write about – ask your audience! If you’ve started to build credibility with your audience, individuals will be thrilled to be able to ask you a direct question and get your take on lifestyle, training, nutrition… the list goes on.

If you're looking for tools to capture emails and help you automate your email workflow, consider using a mailing platform like Mailchimp or Mailerlite. These can help with inbuilt drag-and-drop email creators, which are great for designing templates to add a bit of flair to your emails – although quality content should always be the focus. It’s also possible to create simple but effective signup web pages where interested parties can enter their name and email address to subscribe to your mail/newsletter. Having a signup page is a great way to capture additional subscribers with little admin work. The mailing platform takes care of adding emails to your audience ready for your next email. Most mailing platforms are also free to use up until a certain number of users, so they can initially be a free source of marketing, with the costs scaling in proportion to your audience base.

4. Start A Blog

While a similar style of marketing to an email list, a blog is better suited to longer-form articles containing lots of content and information. Writing long-form articles enables you to showcase your knowledge and experience to your target audience, and can go a long way if you’re tackling difficult subjects that people want to know the answer to. Alongside quality blog articles, additional topics such as client testimonials or case studies can be posted on your blog to help build your credibility and prove your track record to prospective clients.

A blog is more time-consuming than creating an email list due to the added complexity of designing and running a website. Some people, though, enjoy designing blog post layouts and web page designs. It gives you the freedom to design and create your very own corner of the web to create a whole catalogue of information of interest to your target audience.

If that doesn’t sound like you, no problem! There are a couple of ways to get the blog benefit without the blog. The first is to guest post on authoritative websites and blogs. This involves creating your article as you normally would, but then offering it to existing platforms to publish. The key thing is to make sure you write a strong biography which will typically be displayed at the end of the article. Consider including a contact email or a link to either your email sign up page or social accounts to make sure you benefit from the traffic your article is receiving.

An alternative option to guest posting is to create your articles on a professional networking platform such as LinkedIn. Using an existing networking platform removes all the potential hassle of running your own site, but still allows you to capture a lot of the benefits, with all your articles being linked to your profile, creating a single repository for all your content. If you do opt for the LinkedIn approach, be sure to keep your profile up to date with qualifications, experience, and any other information you think a potential customer would want to know. Individuals reading your articles will likely check out your profile to get more insight into the article’s author, giving you a great opportunity to grab their attention and showcase what you have to offer.

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Photo credits, in order: Photo by John Arano on Unsplash; Photo by dole777 on Unsplash; Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash