Building brand awareness as a fitness professional is crucial if you want to stand out amongst a plethora of competitors. There will always be other coaches, trainers and experts, but if you can be recognised and known for who you are and what you do then you’ll be in a great position to grow your audience and client base.
Take the Coco-Cola brand, for example. The product itself is good, but it’s not head and shoulders above its competitors. There are lots of great alternatives for carbonated soda beverages.
However, the key reason behind Coco-Cola being the biggest of all the carbonated soda drinks is because of how well known it is. You can go to any country on the planet and find Coco-Cola products. Guaranteed!
So, as a Personal Trainer, you’re standing alongside every other Personal Trainer in your area and each of you are offering a similar service with differences in price, features, selling points, past results and so on. Every PT will be in a similar position UNTIL they become well known for who they are and what they do.
Remember this: it isn’t the best product/service that wins. It’s the best KNOWN product/service that wins. Every time.
You may have a better service than the next guy or gal, but if no one knows about it then how many people can you expect to sign up and give you money? Probably not very many!
If you know that the service you provide is good but you just need/want more clients, then you should focus on creating a greater awareness of your product/service and start building that rapport with people, at scale.
Here are our Top 3 Tips for doing exactly this:
1) Become an Authority
This one may sound daunting, but becoming an authority in your area/niche is a great way of attracting the attention of new faces. Once you make the conscious decision to become an authority and start putting yourself out there to be noticed and recognised, you’ll notice that people are more interested in what you have to say. Once you have someone’s attention, they’re an awful lot more likely to invest into you as their coach.
You can do this through guest blogging on other peoples websites, collaborating with others on social media, producing your own original content and so on. Do this regularly and you’ll begin to build traction.
2) Consistent Branding
Having a consistent brand image is a great way of being recognised BEFORE someone consumes any actual content from you. If they’re already familiar with you and your work, then they should subconsciously also recognise your colours, your logo, the language you use in video and text and so on. All of this ties into your brand image. The more robust this can be, the more people will recognise you for it, regardless of where you appear in their newsfeed or in real life.
Overall, this helps create a sense of conscious and subconscious omnipresence for those that come into contact with you online and offline.
Again, if we go back to the Coco-Cola Brand, pretty much anyone in the world will recognise it instantaneously purely from the colours and typography.
3) Sharable Content
The final step is sharable content.
Creating content that others are willing to share and expose to their own network of friends and family is a great way to tap into a wider audience very organically.
If you’ve taken step 1 onboard then you’ll have some great content at your disposal already, however, the next thing you can do to expand on this is to build your own internal network of friends, family, clients and colleagues who perhaps wouldn’t mind investing a few seconds into helping you out.
If you have a network of 100 people, and each of those also has their own network of 100 people, then you’d only need 10 individuals from your network to share a post and suddenly it’s been exposed to over 1000 people.. 90% of which perhaps have never heard of you before!
Overall, your goal should be to become a valuable authority amongst your existing network and consciously look to expand into new territory at any given opportunity. It’s hard work and it can take a while to really build momentum but it’ll pay off when you have a fairly constant stream of new clients knocking on your day on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
I hope you’ve found this short blog post valuable and I’ll hope to see you for the next one!
All the best,
Jonah Cockshaw
fitmedia.net
