Fitmedia’s Top 5 Tools to Grow Your Fitness Business

Being a Personal Trainer / Online Coach can be fun and incredibly rewarding, but it’s not necessarily always easy-peasy. I mean, running a business of any kind is tough… but when you’re the CEO, the Customer Support, the Finance Team, the Marketing Team AND your own biggest cheerleader all wrapped up into one human being, things can get especially interesting to say the least! For this reason, we always recommend that our clients make good and proper use of a range of high-value tools and software to help make their day-to-day life as a Personal Trainer / Online Coach / Business Owner and Entrepreneur that bit easier. In this article, we’ll be covering the top 5 tools we recommend to our clients to help them grow and manage their business more efficiently.  

#1 Email Marketing + Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Our go-to Email Marketing + CRM tool is most certainly ActiveCampaign. We recently wrote an article about AC, where we detailed how you can best use it to automate your Sales and Marketing for your fitness business. For us, ActiveCampaign is a true, all-encompassing tool that has allowed our clients to build both simple and more complex automation sequences, as well as keeping a record of all leads that are coming into their pipeline. Having a system like this allows you to keep track of Sales and Marketing Campaigns, follow-up with contacts based on where they’re at in your sales pipeline/funnel and so on. Overall, this will drastically increase your ability to market and sell yourself effectively. You’ll be able to focus more on your overall strategy rather than worrying about spending so much time delivering on that strategy.  

#2 Social Media Management

For many, Social Media becomes a big part of how they engage and build their audience. And rightly so, too! However, Social Media can quickly require a lot of time if you don’t manage it effectively. For example, manually posting across each of your pages at different times of day with different content isn’t always the easiest thing to do as a ‘one-man band’. In fact, many of you probably aren’t posting multiple pieces of new and original content to different platforms each and every day for that exact reason. So, to tackle this, we love using and recommending Buffer. In many cases, you can get away with using a free account with up to 3 profiles and make a great start in offloading lots of your social media time.  

#3 Website Builder

Websites can (and should) be a really powerful asset to have in your marketing toolkit. A well-made website will work wonders for your business in converting traffic to warm leads and ready-to-buy customers. Building custom websites is a big part of what we do here at FitMedia and we’re passionate believers that having a decent website is a must if you want to really scale your business online. However, outsourcing your website build to an agency isn’t a feasible option for everyone when you’re just getting going (if it is for you, then we’d love to chat! ). Using something like Wix or Squarespace can be a superb way of getting yourself online and be able to easily manage/update it as and when you need to. Alternatively, you could also consider using something such as LeadPages if you think you might want to build several landing pages for different sub-offers and services. Doing this may mean you don’t ‘need’ a website at all, and instead have several different pages for people to visit depending on their interests.  

#4 Payment Processing

This is a huge one that lots of people overlook completely. We see so many fit-pros spending time chasing payments from clients and customers when this really shouldn’t be happening at all. We understand that taking bank transfers means you don’t have to pay fees on your hard-earned cash, but there’s no way of knowing for sure that your client will pay when the payment is due. For example, if someone pays you £100/mo for your service and you leave it up to them to pay on time each month, then the chances are that it simply won’t happen. And that’s not because they don’t want to pay you, but because paying you is likely going to be pretty far down on their list of priorities until it becomes overdue. So, a great way of saving both yourself and your clients time is to simply get some kind of an automated payment system that collects money from your clients account and deposits it in your account without either of you having to do anything. Some great options here include Stripe and GoCardless. Both of them are free, secure and easy to use and incur just a small 1-3% fee on each transaction. We have seen many trainers set up their recurring coaching plans on My PT Hub (which uses Stripe as their payment management software) to automate this entire process. It’s super effective and rules out you manually having to keep track of everyone!  

#5 Client Management System

This blog post wouldn’t be complete without another shameless plug of the incredible My PT Hub software, would it? Well, although lots of us will be familiar with what My PT Hub has to offer, we didn’t want to miss this one out as we’ve seen first hand the difference this has made to so many of our clients and their businesses. Services like My PT Hub haven’t been around very long in the grand scheme of things. Before they existed, Personal Trainers relied on pen and paper, spreadsheets, working exclusively on the gym floor, only being able to take on a small number of clients before needing to increase pricing and so on. Managing clients will have required much more time and effort from you as the coach in order to deliver a quality service. However, times have changed, and with software such as My PT Hub, delivering an incredible service to your clients is now a lot easier as you’re able to spend less time actually delivering the service and more time making sure that the quality and results are as high as possible. Things like assigning and tracking workouts and meal plans, completing check-ins, recording progress, taking payments etc are now all under one roof! So, if you haven’t already, or you’re on the fence…Get involved!   Anyway, that sums up today’s top 5 tools for growing your Personal Training Business. We hope that you’ve found value in this and are encouraged to sign up to some free trials for some of the tools we’ve recommended. And, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach us via any of our social media pages or by emailing us directly. All the best,  

  Jonah Cockshaw fitmedia.net