Social media marketing is essential for growing businesses, including personal training services. 

Platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can help you showcase your skills, connect with clients, and elevate your brand.

Here are some strategies to help you effectively promote your personal training services on social media and turn followers into clients:

Build a community 

Set yourself apart from the competition by building an online community for your services. 

Create a Facebook group for sharing useful content such as healthy recipes for building muscles, the benefits of your training services, the dos and don’ts of exercise, lifestyle tips, etc. This way you can position yourself as a thought leader in your domain and encourage your potential and current clients to engage with you. 

Start a discussion on a fitness-related topic through your Instagram posts that urge your followers to give their opinions. For example, you can create a post with two images of a person doing the same exercise with different postures and write the caption “Which one do you think is the correct posture” underneath.

With PosterMyWall, you can design engaging posts for your training services in no time. Browse through our personal training Instagram post templates, select the ones that match your brand, and customize them to convey your messages. Then you can publish them to your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter directly from PosterMyWall.

You can also post Instagram stories with polls and questionnaires to prompt your audience to engage with you.  

Additionally, you should conduct Facebook and Instagram Lives so that your audience can interact with you in real-time.

Create shareable content

Keep your social media audience hooked to your accounts by creating quality ‘edutainment’ content. This useful, funny, and relatable content, such as reels about your diet as a personal trainer or memes about fitness freaks, is bound to get high levels of engagement.

If your Instagram posts receive a lot of likes, comments, and shares, they might appear on the explore page of your target audience. This way you can attract new followers and grow your account. 

Leverage hashtags 

If you add a hashtag in the captions or comments of your Instagram posts, they will appear on the feeds of the followers of that particular hashtag. Therefore, adding fitness-related hashtags in your posts would be a great way to reach out to people who are likely to be interested in employing a personal trainer.

Use hashtags that are relevant to your training services but don’t have a very high volume of posts. This way your posts have higher chances of being viewed by your target audience, as compared to very broad hashtags such as #fitness. 

Instagram recommends using 3-5 hashtags per post. Posts with more hashtags than this look messy, unprofessional, and overwhelming. If you want to use more than 5 hashtags, you can add them in the first comment under a post. 

Share client testimonials

Happy clients are your biggest asset as a personal trainer. They are living proof of your expertise, and the most important factor influencing people to hire your services.

Share videos of customers describing their positive experiences with your service on your socials. These can be YouTube videos or short-form videos like Instagram stories and reels, and TikToks.

Create a story highlight on Instagram dedicated to client testimonials, so that new people visiting your profile can easily find and go through them. 

You can also ask your clients to share their before-and-after photos with you so that you can share them on your social media accounts if they are comfortable with it. 

Collaborate with influencers

Working with industry experts and fitness influencers is perhaps the most efficient way to reach out to newer audiences. They have highly engaged and loyal followers who value their opinions. So, if an influencer gives rave reviews about your services, their followers will be interested in trying them out too. 

Instead of collaborating with influencers with very large followings, go for micro (with 10,000 to 100,000 followers) and nano (with less than 10,000 followers) influencers that post quality content and have high engagement on their posts. These partnerships are budget-friendly and have the feel of a friend recommending something worthwhile, as opposed to an influencer pushing you to buy something. 

Run paid ad campaigns

Targeted social media ads are very effective in reaching out to specific demographics.

This is because you will be paying for your audience’s undivided attention, and will not have to find your way around the ever-changing algorithms of social media apps.

Convert your audience into leads by incorporating the following in your ads: 

• Images of your professional certifications
• Client testimonials and before-and-after photos
• Infographics about the expected outcomes of hiring your services

Depending on your budget, you can decide the number of days the ads will run. 

Keep a daily track of your campaign analytics and adjust your ads according to their engagement rates. If one type of ad is doing particularly well, you can increase its duration and reduce that of another.

Final thoughts 

Social media marketing is the most cost-effective way of promoting your personal training services. It allows you to interact with current and potential clients, build client loyalty and trust, and generate leads. For businesses today, it is a strategic imperative.

By following the essentials of social media marketing mentioned in this blog, you can grow your personal training business in no time.