The Trackster

The Trackster is online software that helps Personal Trainers communicate with and motivate their clients.

Marketing is probably the most talked-about aspect of business, even for personal trainers. That’s because marketing is what gets you customers, and getting customers is how businesses make money.
When you are set  up your marketing plan, ask yourself some questions about your business, your clientele, and your competition. Answering these questions helps you develop a comprehensive plan for drawing in customers, competing with other businesses, and generating revenue.

Who Are Your Customers?

Many personal trainers believe they offer their services to the world at large, but that’s rarely the case. Even in fitness, you sell your services to a limited segment of the population.

Establishing your target market demographic helps you market your business more effectively, honing in on exactly the people who want and need your services. Knowing your targeted audience is crucial for advertising.

Ask yourself who needs or wants your services – specifically. Are you planning to attract professional athletes, people who want to lose weight, or hardcore fitness fanatics? Do you want to help new mothers lose the extra weight their pregnancy left them with? Are you into taking an inactive individual and helping the person establish a training program for more flexibility and better health?

The more specific you can be about the profile of your ideal client, the better you can market yourself. Know the life habits of your targeted audience. Are they busy people? Do they have children? When do they have the most free time – weekends or evenings? Are they motivated people or hesitant?

Each type of person has particular needs. Each person is a potential customer, and you will need different tools and techniques to appeal and convince the person to patronize your business.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Before you launch your business, you need to keep an eye on your competitors. For example, if a gym in your region has just purchased state-of-the-art equipment and launched a huge price special, there’s a good chance you may struggle to market to perspective customers.

However, if you’re paying attention to the competition, you’ll be able to develop a plan in a timely manner that allows you to compete and draw customers to you.

Know what the competition offers, and more importantly, know what is missing from their game plan. Find out whether they offer personalized service, and if not, use the one-on-one personal training angle strongly in your marketing message.

Try to determine the challenges that your competitors seem to be facing, too.  If you live in a small town with two gyms already and a third that just closed due to lack of business, then you might want to market to another town nearby and offer to travel. Or, you could find a niche market and open a gym that caters to a particular demographic (for example, senior citizens or yoga practitioners).

Branding and Identity: Who Are You?

Marketing specialists love to talk about branding and identity. That’s because branding and identity are the heart and soul of your business. Together, they form the image that you project to your prospective clients. Your brand and identity should be attractive, compelling and designed with both you and the customer in mind.

A business identity conveys a personality. It may also come with an attitude and a slogan or tagline that represents the benefits you offer. Your business brand should always include a logo, which is your stamp. It should appear on all your business cards, fliers, stationary and advertising materials. If you have a website, the website should reflect your image, too.

To start building your business identity, ask yourself what personality you want to convey to your potential customers. Are you a relaxed and friendly trainer, one who will gently coach people toward getting in shape? Are you hardcore and driven, more like a drill sergeant building athletes into optimal performance machines?

Build a brand that communicates the two most important aspects of your business: who you are and what you have to offer. Also, your brand should work to convince potential customers that they need the services you’re offering – and that they should get those services from you.

Advertising

Establishing your identity is a huge step but there’s more. You have to get the word out to the public that you’re in business and ready to serve. You don’t need to tell the whole world; remember your target customer base?

In advertising, your goal is to let your specific targeted audience know that you exist.

You can do this through various methods. Millions of web pages offer advertising space, and the phone book sells listings and large ads. Newspapers, magazines, television commercials and direct mailings (sales letters, brochures, coupons) are all effective advertising methods, too. You can cold call or hand out business cards and fliers.

As a personal trainer, though, there’s a good chance that you only need to advertise to people in your immediate geographic area. Look for advertising opportunities that let you target the people you want to in the very geographic area you live in.

Putting together a marketing plan for your personal trainer business may seem complex, but it really isn’t a big deal. All you have to know is exactly who your ideal customer is, how to reach that person with marketing strategies that resonate with his or her needs and advertise in ways that resonate with your perfect client.

Came across a great article on Personal Fitness Professional website by Kaiser Serajuddin about keeping in contact with your clients.

I was especially keen on reading about Kaiser’s ideas on keeping in contact with current and old clients.  In his article Kaiser says “Staying in touch with them will cause them to adhere to their regimens, leading to better results (which is what it’s all about, anyway). This naturally brings higher value to your training experience, which justifies higher rates without taking up any more of your time.” This sums up what we are on about with The Trackster, and why we built it.

Kaiser offers up some great advice about new leads as well, with some simple tools to add to your website.  Well worth a read.

Kaiser also has his own blog Super-Trainer.com that offers some great advice for Personal Trainers.

Today we have our first blog interview.  As mentioned previously, we want to make this blog a resource for Personal Trainers to improve their business.  One of these resources will be interviews with successful people in the industry or successful small business people who we think can pass on some lessons and advice.

Our first interview is with John Miller.  John owns a Brisbane based physiotherapy, massage and sports injury clinic called PhysioWorks.

Can you give us a brief run down on how you got started in Physiotherapy and also how you came to own your own practice?

Sport has always been an integral part of my life. I also believe that you should really enjoy your work. I couldn’t think of a better way to be involved in sport for the rest of my life than as a sports physiotherapist.

Owning my own practice was an evolution. After working in hospitals and other private practices, I identified areas of patient care that I believed could be improved but the management never implemented. If they weren’t offering a high quality product, someone else should. The rest is history.

What’s the hardest part of being the boss?

It’s the work that goes on behind the scenes. You wear many hats: human resources, marketing, legal issues, mentor, finance, administration, strategic planning, networking etc. Patient treatment and consulting is only one hat.

What’s the best part of being the boss?

I love being able to make the ultimate decisions that matter and you think will have a positive impact on your clients, staff and practice.

What marketing do you do for your practice and what is the most effective marketing that you do?

I’ve always strongly believed that people only seek your service if they have a need. Education of the public into the why, how and what of an injury is invaluable. Only then do they understand that it’s needless to suffer when an effective solution is just a phone call away. Only you know the skills that you posses. The difficulty promoting any solution is explaining the benefits to the public. In order to do this we primarily utilise our website and newsletters.

Do you have any professional partnerships or associations with any personal trainers?

All the physiotherapists within the clinics have personal trainers that they recommend. Ultimately, we recommend the personal trainers that our patients utilise and have good rapport. Otherwise, we do discuss the individual needs with a patient and provide a suggestion based on who we think would best fill their requirements.

Is that a mutually beneficial partnership of referring to each other?

If you think that you can fix everything yourself you are sadly mistaken. The best synergies we have do provide the best results for the patient. We’re more than happy to meet or chat with personal trainers about any patient or potential patient. Personal endorsement normally follows good outcomes. I certainly would only recommend another health professional who I believe is the best option for that patient’s desired outcome. Likewise, I should never expect a referral from someone who didn’t think I could help their client.

Have you felt the effect at all of the downturn in the economy, and if so, are you doing anything to appease that effect on your business?

Fortunately, physiotherapy is reasonably immune from an economic downturn. Pain is the primary reason why a patient seeks the assistance of a physiotherapist. Luckily, pain doesn’t ease up in a recession.

However, I believe that as unemployment increases there will be additional pressure on the family budget. In this instance a budget decision needs to be made. Sadly, personal trainers and remedial massage will and have become options to some families. The general public sees these great services as luxuries. At PhysioWorks, we employ several massage therapists and suspect that we will notice the downturn in massage first.

What can be done about it? I think that it will be survival of the fittest. If you are offering an exceptional product of customer service, fantastic results and at a fair price, you’ll gain customers from the weaker businesses. It’s up to you to be the best option.

Do you have a mentor, former boss or colleague that has helped you in your career?

I confide in numerous mentors from all spectrums of life. Being a good listener has its benefits. There is a lot of untapped wisdom in this world if you are simply prepared to let them speak.

What’s the best thing about working in the Health and Fitness Industry?

Caring for patient injuries has always been my primary concern. The satisfaction of an outstanding result that allows someone to walk, sit or run painfree again is extremely rewarding.

What is the best advice you have ever been given?

Be good to your mum.

Thanks John for your time.  I think you have given people out there who want to work for themselves something to think about.

You can visit the PhysioWorks website for more information, including a bio of John and his experience.  And I can tell you from first hand he is very good with fixing minor shoulder problems!

Is there anyone that you want us to interview?  Any type of profession that might have some links with the Personal Training business?  Just add a comment below and we’ll do our best.

Ever since we had our  launch of The Trackster a few weeks ago, I’ve had a number of people ask me why we built it?  It’s a good question considering I’m not a Personal Trainer myself.

One piece of advice that is constantly thrown around when people advise others on what business to start or what web site to build, is to “eat your own dog food”.  This essentially means to work on something that you want to use.  Solve a problem that you have.  If you have a certain problem that you need solving then it’s reasonable to believe that others will have the same problem – solve that problem and there you have the start of a business.

Like I said, I’m not a Personal Trainer.  However, I have been to many PT’s in my life time.  Most of them were good trainers, and I have enjoyed doing it.  Although I have enjoyed working with PT’s, I always felt that there was something missing.  You do your session and then that’s it, off you go until next week.  I was looking for that extra motivation to help me continue the program or keep going along to the trainer.

If you do a quick 5 minute search on google about motivation, you’ll quickly discover that some of the keys are to set S.M.A.R.T. goals and to keep track of your progress.  Also having someone help you (the PT) and giving you a kick in the pants when required is extremely helpful.  This is where I thought The Trackster could help.

Obviously the seed was started there and after a lot of research and talking to PT’s, The Trackster developed and was built with the intention of helping Personal Trainers run their business and also help their clients become more successful in achieving their goals.

The Trackster is a communication tool at heart.  Helps keep the communication between the trainer and client ongoing and consistent, without being overbearing and time consuming.  We have many more ideas to keep adding to The Trackster, and if you have any suggestions or comments please get in touch or comment below.