How to Get Personal Training Clients From Facebook

Using social media to benefit your business is nothing new, so why not learn how to get personal training clients from Facebook? This can be a budget friendly way to advertise your business and make real conversions.

That's why we have put together this guide, discussing 7 things that you can do to get more clients from facebook. Those are: 

1. Connect With Groups to Get PT Clients From Facebook
2. Use Facebook Ads to Get New Clients
3. Get More PT Clients from Facebook With an Effective CTA
4. Produce High Quality Organic Posts to Reach PT Clients
5. Use the Correct Image Resolution to Maximise Your Success on Facebook
6. Utilise and Design Your Own Graphics

If you’re yet to get your qualifications underway, then get started with a personal training course here at OriGym. You can find this and many other health and fitness courses in our downloadable course prospectus here.

Make Sure You Have a Facebook Business Page

Before we break down some ways to get personal training clients from Facebook, there's one thing you need to do first. It may seem obvious, but before we go any further, you need to create a Facebook page.

If you already have a personal Facebook account, you can do this easily by heading over to the ‘Ad centre’ tab which will pull up a page like this:

If you don't already have a personal account, you'll need to create one which you can then turn into a business page. 

Setting up a business page allows you to utilise business features like advertisements and tracking important metrics. You'll also be able to make use of the Meta Business Suite, you can see below what you can do within the business suite to manage your page:

It is super easy to set up an account, we have an extensive guide on how to set up a Facebook business account here so you can follow this first if you’re yet to have an account. 

Once you have actually set up your account, you can then find the metrics and utilities that will help you actually gain clients and market your PT business successfully.

The insights that you can track with this page include factors such as:

• Actions on page
• Page views
• Page likes
• Post reach
• Story reach
• Recommendations
• Post engagement
• Videos
• Page followers
• Tagged product clicks

These are all useful metrics that can help you to not only measure your current success, but alter anything that isn't working so you’re able to predict and thus implement a more positive outcome.

Once you have engagement levels to measure, you can view it all on a visual dashboard, like this:

This can help you to visualise on a weekly basis what needs to change and what is working well in terms of Facebook engagement. Engagement is what you need to get clients on board so ensuring that you’re keeping track of all of these factors are important. 

Now you know what you can track and how this can help you get more personal training clients, here are some ways to actually get this engagement up, get some metrics to measure, and most importantly - get clients!

How to Get PT Clients From Facebook

#1- Connect With Facebook Groups to Find New Clients

One of the best ways to network with your clientele and find new clients is to connect with and be an active member of fitness-related groups on Facebook. 

Social media users are always using facebook groups to find like minded people who they can ask for recommendations, advice, and support.

This is beneficial if you have a particular PT niche since you can find your audience coming together for support in specific Facebook groups, and be the person to offer that advice or support, and even recommend your own PT services as a solution.

For example, if you have a particular niche that offers personal training services to people who suffer with endocrine disorders such as PCOS, then Facebook can be a great place to offer your support and show how you can help.

You should look for Facebook groups that have a mixture of people looking for more information, seeking support but also seeking actual help from a professional, like a PT. For example, take a look at this public Facebook group below that brings together women from all over who suffer from PCOS.

As you can see, this is a public group with 4.8k members. This is a huge scale target audience all looking for support in one place. 

There are two ways that you can use a group like this to get new PT clients from Facebook:

1. Post about your business on the page
2. Respond to posts from people looking for advice or recommendations

After looking in some different groups, it seems that this one is happy with allowing members to post services that can help others. For example, take a look at this post in the group below:

As you can see, there is some conversation too that goes on in the comments and it is a great way to start a discussion on the benefits of exercise for whatever the problem may be, which will encourage members of the group to contact you about your services. 

There is also no reason why you can’t reply to people reaching out for help and advice around their health or fitness goals.

Whether it is endocrine disorders, pregnancy or postnatal care to diabetes and obesity management, there are Facebook groups for just about everything. Nonetheless, there doesn’t always have to be a particular ‘problem’ in order to engage with potential clients on Facebook.

For in-person, rather than online, personal trainers, you can mirror this strategy for 'local groups', where people may be looking for general fitness advice or for PT recommendations in their area.

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For some more helpful resources on getting personal training clients, head over to these articles below:

• 8 Powerful Methods of Personal Trainer Digital Marketing
• 7 Effective Strategies For Personal Trainer Lead Generation 
• How To Get Personal Training Clients Using Instagram: 9 Expert Tips 

#2- Use Facebook Ads to Get Personal Training Clients

Facebook advertising has made the world of online paid advertising easy, meaning you don’t have to be a big time business owner or have a huge investment fund to start using it right away.

We have an extensive guide on how to create fitness Facebook ads here, so we will just go over the basics of what you can expect them to look like and how they can really benefit your business.

When you build an advertisement, you’ll be asked a range of questions to specify your target audience, these will try to get to the core of what your business is and who will want to engage with your ads. Expect to define your audience, since you’ll be asked things such as:

• Location 
• Age
• Gender
• Language 
• Interests
• Behaviours

With that in mind, it is important to do some prior research into who your personal trainer target market is so you know the answers confidently to all of these questions. 

This will help to narrow down who the advert gets shown too and it creates a more streamlined and budget friendly campaign. This is because the larger your target audience is, the more you have to pay, similarly the longer you want your campaign to run, the more you will have to pay. 

Nonetheless, it is a hugely effective way of increasing engagement, building brand awareness, and of course getting new clients.

Personal training advertising on Facebook can be the direct line between you and somebody sending an enquiry. So that you can see what this may look like for a PT, take a look below at this example:

As you can see, this is a great Facebook ad since it is not overloaded with information, but still has clear call to actions. This is the kind of ad you should have in order to catch attention, but not drone on too much so that people scroll on past.

They are a surefire way to get people at the very least over to your website, but hopefully also actually onboarding as clients.

#3- Always Include a CTA in Your Posts to Convert More Clients

We briefly touched on calls to action in our above example on Facebook ads, but what are they and why are they so important?

Here’s a definition from Investopedia:

A call to action (CTA) is a marketing term that refers to the next step a marketer wants its audience or reader to take.

For personal trainers, a good CTA to use on Facebook could be anything that directs their audience to sign up for a PT session there and then. The ‘Apply Now’ button used in the Facebook Ad we discussed in the previous section is a perfect example of this.

That said, CTAs are not only important to include on Facebook ads. You should also include a CTA in your Facebook bio and in all of your posts, even if they’re not directly sales-related.

Including a CTA in your organic posts is what takes your Facebook content from just being informative and building brand awareness, to actually getting you new clients.

On these less sales-related posts, a good CTA to use is one that encourages the audience towards becoming a paying client without directly asking them to enquire or sign up there and then. 

Basically, you want to take a softer approach to getting new clients to contact you. 

A good way to do this is by including a CTA that encourages clients to book a free consultation. This is an effective way of getting clients as booking a consultation doesn’t require a great deal of commitment from the potential client, meaning more people are likely to do it.

You can then use the consultation to convert the potential client into a paying one! 

Read our guide on how to do a personal training consultation to find out exactly how to do this, or watch our video tutorial below:

Alternatively, you could simply direct your audience to send you a message for more information, as this personal trainer has done below:

The premise of this was to share their opinion on christmas and handling the diet changes however, they have still included a CTA.

In this case, they are calling their audience to make the action of messaging their page. Once an interested individual contacts this PT, they can then begin to start selling to the prospective client and convert them into a new customer.

You can find our expert tips for selling your personal training services here.

#4- Produce High Quality Organic Facebook Posts to Attract Clients

Another way to get personal training clients on Facebook is to ensure that your content is always of high quality. 

These posts will be separate from your paid ads, as instead you will be producing content that organically reaches the right people, without the need to pay for your post to appear on their Facebook feed.

The purpose of creating organic content is to boost engagement. Engagement is what is going to boost your post and ultimately make your page stronger whether it is in terms of visibility or follower count. 

By building the visibility of your page and posts, and therefore your business. The logic is simple - the more people who see your posts, the more potential clients know about your business, and the more enquiries you can generate!

If you're unsure of what kind to post to encourage engagement, we have a full article with tons of personal trainer social media ideas here. 

Other than posting interesting, informative, and shareable content, there are some ways that you can increase engagement, the first one being the time at which you post.

You can do A/B testing on your own terms on what works best for your page specifically, but there are some general times that have been backed by reliable sources such as SproutSocial. 

For example, below you can see a graph from SproutSocial on the best times to post on Facebook for engagement (worldwide):

As you can see, the most engaging times to post are in and around 6am to 3pm. If you do want to ensure that you’re making the most of these engagement times but struggle to stay on schedule, there are softwares that can help you manage.

For example, you can use softwares such as:

• Sproutsocial
• Asana
• Hootsuite
• Buffer

There are tons of others but these are a mixture of the most popular and free ones too, so be sure to do some research on what works best for you and your budget. 

As well as the post itself being at the right time, think about the content of the post too, make it easily shareable, useful and informative. This will increase your chances of gaining attraction and getting your post across multiple like minded Facebook feeds.

Thus, the more exposure you have, the higher your chances are in gaining clients.

#5 - Use the Correct Image Resolution

Imagery is huge when it comes to making your Facebook business page stand out from the rest. You want to keep your page looking as professional as possible so by having some high quality imagery makes all the difference.

The Facebook timeline photo and post sizes are best at the recommended size of 1200 x 630 pixels, the minimum size however is 600 x 315 pixels.

Whilst the image quality of your Facebooks posts might not get clients alone, poor quality imagery could be the reason a potential client chooses a competitor instead of your business!

Think about it, if you were to see these two images below in separate PT Facebook feeds, which page would you trust more?

The image on the right has the wrong resolution and looks careless. It doesn’t connotate any trust worthiness and makes all the difference in the post itself.

Ensure you’re always keeping your images to a high standard on regular posts and on advertisements since this is going to be a key communicator between you and the end user. Images in personal training social media posts are a huge aspect to gaining some trust from anybody interested.

This is because progress pictures should always be consistently updated in order to show off your potential as a PT and what you can do for anybody who may be considering your services. 

That being said, you want to show these images in the best possible light, so ensure you have a consistent and professional looking feed of transformation posts. 

This goes for graphics too. We will talk more about how to create graphics in the next tip, but ensure you’re doing all you can to make your images look professional and legit or you may run the risk of looking unreliable. 

#6 - Utilise and Design Your Own Graphics to Create A Strong Brand Identity

Having branded posts can boost how people view your business. You should have consistent branding across all your channels, include your business logo and keep the basis of your branding colours the same.

So how can this actually help you to get more clients?

Here’s what mailchimp have to say:

“Brand consistency is important because it leads to brand recognition. When customers recognize your brand (and have positive associations with it), they’re more likely to make purchases and commit to your company for the long term.”

Essentially, designing your own graphics can help you get personal training clients from Facebook by giving your business a strong brand identity. 

If you have consistent and recognisable branding, you’re then allowing potential clients to easily spot you among the masses.

This kind of consistency and repeated messaging makes your content more memorable and thus, much more effective in building a B2C relationship. Think about branding that is dissimilar to what is already out there, particularly in your area. 

Use colours and relevant graphics that are going to be memorable but easily digestible to find the sweet spot within your branding plan. You can do this relatively easily with the help of Canva. This is an easy to use and free graphic design tool. 

You can save things like branding colour packs so when you create a new design all of the correct colours are waiting for you to use. You can even design your own branding board, which is great if you ever need to share your branding with another professional or refer back to it too. 

You can put this in your business plan and it is a way of keeping your image consistent and professional, this is what a branding board can look like if you make it on Canva:

You can either create a blank brand board from scratch or use another template as inspiration and adjust where necessary. 

You can even design your logo on canva too and have a go-to place for everything branding. Creating it and storing it all in the one place is a handy way to keep it consistent and easily accessible. 

Bonus Tip: Utilise Video Content Where Possible

Any kind of video content is good for your social media account, with video content on the rise in popularity using this to your advantage is going to help with engagement and thus, is a way how to find personal training clients on Facebook.

Facebook is hugely popular when it comes to live streams. You could potentially offer a free live streamed personal training session where people can come try out and work out at home with you live. 

This would not only increase engagement but it gives potential clients the opportunity to see who you are and how you train your clients. 

Similarly, if you already have a fitness Instagram you may be already creating Reels. These are becoming increasingly popular and there is no reason why you cannot share them to Facebook too since Instagram and Facebook are both under the umbrella of Meta.

You can of course use video marketing, but you should focus on creating valuable content that people are going to keep returning to since this is going to go further than an advertisement. Save the video marketing for your paid adverts or every once in a while.

Whereas general informative and fun videos should take charge over this as a priority. 

Before You Go…

Now that you know where to start when it comes to how to get personal training clients from Facebook, waste no time in getting your page up and running.

Don’t forget, you need some credentials behind you before you start building your brand so if you’re yet to qualify or want to advance onto the next level, take a look at OriGym’s personal training courses. Find this and many other health and fitness courses in our downloadable course prospectus.