If you’re a personal trainer and want to take the leap and sell your courses online, or you simply want to start making business in the fitness industry, you’ve made the right decision. Personal training is a growing field, with an annual growth of rate of 2.6%, globally the industry doesn’t look like it’s slowing down its growth anytime soon. With 87.5 billion in global revenue for 2018, it seems like the chances are high that you can take a little cut of that this year.
But where do you start?
It can be overwhelming changing your career or taking on a side project. Chances are, you’ve spent the last months or years studying personal training or perfecting your course content, so hopping into the digital world can seem like a big leap – to say the least. Fortunately enough, with a growing industry, also comes a large amount of resources, blogs, and other individuals with experiences you can learn from if you get stuck. But, it seems that maybe they’re already lightyears ahead of you, talking about fancy social media strategies and affiliate programs. This automatically contributes to your overwhelming feelings and puts a stall to you starting up.
Although, the reality is – just like in fitness; all you have to do is just get started! Selling a product online has never been easier than it is now, especially in the fitness industry. So, we’ve simplified the process into 3 easy steps, so you can start selling your fitness training online, and stop worrying about all the small details….
Perfect The Product
The reason why you’re creating this product is to help people, right?
So creating a product with that in mind makes a recipe for success – the rest of it is just making decisions about packaging, what workouts fall into what exact product and how you will market it. A good tactic here is to essentially work backward.
Say, for example, you’re a successful personal trainer and you have many before and after photos and testimonials about the progress your clients have made in 3 months. Here, you could make a 3-month program reflecting this. Using your results from your current clients is a form of market research, without all of the fancy graphs and spreadsheets. It’s probably likely you already stalked all your competitors on Instagram.
If you haven’t – do it right now. Boom – that’s another form of market research. Find your muse companies/trainers and copy what they’re doing. It’s really that simple. It’s obvious that you will not be able to copy exactly what they do consider you probably won’t go to the extent of buying their workout plans, but forming a plan of action around what you like and don’t like in their strategy is worth gold. It will create your own unique value proposition, and therefore define your niche and differentiate your product from the rest.
Once you have an idea about what type of workouts you want to include and what is offered in your workout plan, break them down into further categories.
What is the the schedule of your workout plan?
Is it over a few month period or weekly sessions?
What about the equipment needed? Blocks? Resistance bands? It’s important to add these into the description.
Once you’ve got the content, schedule, and equipment needed for your workouts, now it’s time to envision what it will look like. (See how we worked backward there?) At this step, you’re going to want to start thinking about how you present it online.
Do you have a website?
Do you want an online library?
What about an online store? Chances are, you either have a website and would like to use another hosting service (like Kajabi or Udemy ) to sell it online. If you don’t have a website, it’s not a bad idea to make an inexpensive one on Wix or WordPress, and in the meantime, leverage the power of selling on Instagram and Facebook ads. (Keep reading to learn how)….
Manage The Marketing
The sad truth is that even if you have an exceptional product, if you are not marketing it to the right audience, then you may be missing a big percentage of sales that you could be making.
The good news – marketing a product online is easier than it’s ever been!
So, what are the first steps?
Look at your current personal training business. (Don’t have one? Look at your favorite personal trainer).
Where do you think most of the sales happen? Is it new people who are wanting to try out working out for the first time? Or what about experienced fitness people who have tried everything? Is it dancers and athletes? Or what about new parents?
Whatever your niche is, you’re going to have a defined audience. The more you can define this audience the better. Although, if you’re not sure how to find this out, observe what you already have. Take a look into your records and see who has bought your product in the past, or make a consumer persona for the person who is likely to buy your product. From this information, you can then work on your marketing. You can either hire someone for your marketing or tackle it yourself (i.e. researching many tutorials and articles).
Either way, you’re going to want to try out social media without promoted posts first. This means posting relevant content on relevant social networks (hint: the most relevant for the fitness industry is, of course, Instagram!). This will tell you who has engaged with your posts, therefore giving you more insights about how to make an audience for trying out paid promotion. Here’s a guide about how to kill it on Instagram. Once you have gotten some experience in the world of social media and your product (or the marketer you’ve hired has) a great way to expand your network (to other peoples networks) is to try out an ambassador program. Here, you ask people with a larger following than yours to promote your product or service. It’s probably you’ll have to either give them a free product or service, or a discount so that they can review your product and talk well about it (in order to figure out what you can offer, search case studies about influencer/ambassador products in your niche). You can also take a look at referral bonuses for these users. If your product is well thought out and offers value – you’ll be able to take off with social media and ambassador programs alone!
Many times, people get overwhelmed with marketing and miss out on a large group of people that are interested. Instead, take into consideration if you have the budget to hire someone for marketing or if you have the time to take on the project and learn a lot for yourself! You can always hire someone else down the road.
The Goal is Growth
When anyone starts an online venture, it only makes sense that they start with the main goal of growth. Although, it’s easy to get lost in anything else related to your business in the grand scheme of things – especially if you’ve taken the route to manage it yourself! Regardless if you have some help managing it, or you’ve started the venture on your own, make sure that there is also a long term goal of growth in the plan. This could be joint with other goals, such as making an app or partnering with others in the industry – but each goal has to be able to trace back to the growth of the company.
Is your 3-month workout plan causing people to sign up for 6 months afterward? Or what about your two for one offer influencing people to refer a friend to get the same discount? There really is an endless amount of possibilities that you could get your company to grow – you just need to try them! Running an online business with a growth mindset means that you’re going to be putting efforts and funds into what works, rather than what doesn’t work. When you find something that doesn’t work – you’ll readjust your strategy. This will ensure that your profits will rise, instead of fall and that you’ll be able to expand into the industry – and have fun with it too! Good luck, and stay strong 💪💪💪
