How to advertise personal training on Facebook

Facebook is the social network that really set the way we now communicate with the wider world in motion. Sharing photos, videos, thoughts and ideas with family, friends, and online communities has never been easier, and it's the perfect platform for personal training businesses to increase awareness of their services. Whether you're an established personal trainer in your local area or you're starting out, Facebook is a really important marketing tool. Following some simple steps, you can create a marketing strategy using Facebook to increase your online presence and grow your PT business.

Why Facebook?

Social media posts can help you to increase people's awareness of your services as a personal trainer. Every time anyone of us checks our social media, be it for business accounts or private accounts, we see advertisements, usually in line with what we've been searching online recently. Ensuring you have well-targeted ads on your social media is a great way to get the attention of anyone looking for fitness advice and personal training classes. Facebook is a great place to start.

Oberlo put together some telling stats that illustrate why Facebook is such an important advertising tool. With 2.80 billion MAUs (monthly active users) and 1.84 billion DAUs (daily active users), Facebook is one of the most widely used social media platforms in the world. In fact, 59% of social media users are on Facebook. From creating a business page and a Facebook group for your clients to taking out paid ads, you can increase people's awareness of who you are and what you offer.

The different ways to advertise on Facebook

As with the majority of social media platforms, creating a profile is free. You can create a business page and group without having to add it to your marketing budget and there are a number of ways to utilise them to advertise your personal training business with some simple tricks of the trade. However, you can also opt for paid ads on Facebook.

Starting with some basic pointers, we take you through the best ways to advertise on Facebook to promote your personal training business.

Be clear in your objectives when you use Facebook to advertise your business

Before you start planning your Facebook marketing strategy, you first need to set your objectives. What are you hoping to gain by utilising Facebook and how do you hope to achieve it. Here are a few ideas:

• Drive more traffic to your website — With decreasing organic traffic, or put simply, fewer people finding business pages and websites with a basic Google search, Facebook ads are a very useful tool to target your ideal clientele within the parameters you set when creating a Facebook ad for your personal training business.
• Target new clientele to increase memberships and revenues — Not only can you target clients in your local area, but with the increasing number of PTs taking their business online, you can start to showcase your classes and sessions to anyone anywhere.
• Create an online community for your current members — Facebook groups are a great way to encourage engagement for new members and established clients, and it also gives them another area to reach and engage with you outside of a class or session. Sharing tips and advice as well as setting challenges fosters a rapport between you and your clients, and between your clients themselves.

Once you've established your objectives, it'll become a whole lot easier to implement your Facebook advertising strategy

Create a Facebook page for your business

If you haven't set up a page on Facebook yet, it's easy to get started. First off, on Facebook, you want to click "Pages" on the left-hand column of the main page.

Then select, "+ Create New Page", and you'll then find yourself looking at this page:

When you add the description of your business, keep it informative but concise. You want to be clear as possible about what you offer clients in your personal training sessions while making sure you stand out. Once your page is set up, you have created the beginning of your Facebook community, a place where you and your clients can share content, field questions, and offer support and encouragement to the members, clients, and even prospective clients that find their way to your page.

Create good-quality and shareable content

Once you've got your page up and running, you need to create content that is going to grab people's attention for all the right reasons. It's easy to make basic videos and put up some photos of your workouts, but there is a big difference between good-quality content for a business and content intended for a personal account. Any videos you share should be of the best quality, the same that your customers would expect for paid content, such as on-demand. If you don't want to share full videos from your on-demand library because it's exclusively for your paid-up members, then there are two avenues you could take.

Use some snippets to create what is essentially an advert for what your non-members could access if they become full members:

Create shorter videos for Facebook explaining how to correctly perform certain exercises rather than sharing a full workout video:

Any photos you share of your sessions should also be high-quality. No blurry photos or odd angles. You're trying to showcase what you as a trainer can offer potential clients and to keep your current members engaged and interested in your classes. Creating high-quality content is more likely to get shared by clients as well, especially if any of it involves them achieving their goals during a workout in one of your sessions.

Create an online community with a Facebook group

An idea we touched on earlier, creating a Facebook group for your business will benefit you in a number of ways. Your shared photos and videos are great motivation for your clients to stick to their fitness goals. They can see all the fun you're having in your sessions and it's as though you have a free advert on one of the most popular social media platforms.

As well as sharing workout videos and photos, you can use it as a way to engage with your clients by creating an online community as a tool to retain new members. You can set monthly fitness challenges for your members and get them to share their photos and videos of them participating in the group. You'll find members encouraging each other and giving each other kudos for all the hard work they're putting in.

Join and participate in other Facebook groups

Setting up your own group is a great way of getting started, but engagement with other personal trainers and personal training businesses in other Facebook groups is not only a useful exercise, it's important for getting your name out there. These groups are created so that PTs can share tips and advice as well as promote their own services. Facebook now allows groups for paying members only, such as Lift The Bar who promote career development for their members, but there are also free groups such as UK PTs who aim to share tips, advice, and to help their members network with one another.

Why it's worth investing in Facebook ads

Sadly, as with Google, Facebook has updated its algorithms (formulas) over the last few years. What this means is that organic traffic is not as simple or forgiving as it once was. Facebook now favours posts from family and friends feeds over businesses, and since 2018, Facebook users have started to see a lot less content from brands and businesses.

It doesn't mean that you won't be able to reach your target clientele, but it does mean that if you want to have a wider reach, you will need to pay for Facebook ads. Paying for Facebook ads means being able to tap into Facebook's ocean of data. Their algorithms will help you target your ads to the correct demographic on their site, aiming it towards the groups and people who would be most interested in your services.

What to consider when setting up Facebook ads

Setting up Facebook ads for your business isn't a complicated process, but it does take some thought before you rush into anything. When you're planning your ad, there are certain things to take into account. First off you have to establish your target audience. When setting up your ad, you can decide:

• The key locations you want to target with your ad — You can specify communities, cities, and entire countries when doing this.
• Your key demographic — You're able to focus your ads towards your audience based on age, gender, education, job title and more. You're even able to track which demographics are responding the most positively towards your ads, but you won't have access to personally identifiable information.
• Aim your ad to people with relevant interests — As a personal trainer, you're obviously wanting to appeal to people with an interest in health & fitness. When creating your ad, you can select the hobbies and interests of the audience your ad will be targeting, so you can be sure that the people who spot it when scrolling through their feed are more likely to have an interest in it.
• Use people's purchasing habits to your advantage — Another useful avenue for you is to aim your ad towards people with specific purchasing habits. You can have your ad set up to target potential clientele who have a history of signing up for memberships or classes, and not only that but you can also target which device they use. Do you want your ad to be aimed at people using mobile devices? Desktop devices? Why not both?
• Choose if you want to advertise to your connections — You can opt for those who you're connected to, both on your own profile or your page followers, to receive your ad as well. However, this may be a little on the nose. Use your page to promote yourself and any offers you come up with. That way you can make them more personal. You know what makes your members tick, so utilise that and save your ads to get new clients interested.

How much should you spend on Facebook ads?

When any of us hears, paid ads, the immediate thought is do I have the budget? Well, according to Facebook Business, some people spend more on coffee each day than they do on their ads. On karolakarlson.com, we're told that between April 2020 and April 2021, the average CPC (cost per click) for Facebook ads was $0.35 - $3.50, and in March 2021, the average Facebook CPM (cost per mile which means the cost per 1,000 views) was between $2.00 – $20.00.

It really doesn't have to be an expensive investment, and you're far more likely to reach a wider audience with a paid ad on Facebook than if you solely rely on people finding your page. The most common way to buy an ad on Facebook is to set an upper limit for a bid and submit it to Facebook's ad auction. They won't spend a penny more than you specify. For a smaller business, you won't need to invest more than $100 per month for your ad to reach a good number of your target audience.

How should my Facebook ad look?

Brevity is key here. An image ad is a good way to go as you're able to give users an idea of you, and your business with a glance. An eye-catching photo of a workout in progress will catch the eye of any fitness fanatics quickly scrolling through Facebook. With your image, you need your message to be short and to the point.

1. Your headline shouldn't accede 25 characters.
2. The link description to your page or website should be similarly short. Aim for about 30 characters max.
3. Finally, your body text is there to give a brief outline about you and your business, and by brief, we mean brief. The maximum length should be 125 characters.

You don't have a lot of time to catch the attention of people scrolling through Facebook, maybe only a couple of seconds, so an eye-catching photo with a clear message attached to it is an absolute must.

Final thoughts about Facebook ads

Just by virtue of the fact that Facebook is still the most popular social media platform means that small businesses can't afford to not use it. Starting out by creating a page and group for your personal training business increases the engagement you'll have with your members outside of class, and by setting up paid Facebook ads, you'll reach more potential clients looking for someone like you to help them achieve their fitness goals. It's a simple thing to implement, and importantly it doesn't require a huge marketing budget.

For more information about marketing your personal training business, click here, and find out more about launching your business on social media here.

Thanks for reading!