Marketing Content for Personal Trainers

Every business is made up of three components: operations, marketing and finance. For personal trainers that maps to:

• Operations — programming
• Marketing — branding, blogs, social media and adverts
• Finances — collections, payments, profit and investment

To succeed, you need to define your product, keep a plentiful supply of content for social media, adverts and local marketing, and be organised enough to track your finances. This piece focuses on the part most trainers get stuck on: building marketing content.

Start with a free write

Content creation is about finding out what actually matters to you — avoiding cliche and mining what you genuinely think and do. The first step is a free write.

Write or dictate your thoughts daily. The rule is simple: write anything, and keep writing. Fill blanks with "errm" and "um" if you have to, but keep going. Don't edit and don't judge. Spend at least 10 minutes a day on it. At FASTER we do this at least weekly in our FSQUAD and Digital Presenter groups, precisely to avoid cliche and keep a rich vein of content.

Find the key points

Once your thoughts are on paper (or in a doc, or recorded), look for the points that matter to you. Stay away from cliche and instead notice the things you keep repeating — topics that mean a lot to you and are desirable for your client.

Riff on the theme

Take a topic and start to improvise. Write notes on it using these prompts:

• Improvise ("yes, and…")
• What you wish was true about the topic
• What the science says about the topic
• What you think the client wishes was true
• The opposites of all the above
• How a client can solve the issue
• How hiring you can solve the issue

That alone gives you a stack of ideas for social content.

Structure it with the story spine

Now go back to writing and use a story spine to shape it:

• Once upon a time there was a character called… (character)
• Who every day… (daily routine)
• Until one day… (the event that disrupts the routine)
• Because of that… (consequence)
• Because of that… (consequence)
• Because of that… (consequence)
• And as a result… (resolution)

It feels like a faff, but the payoff is many ways to structure the same theme across images, videos, posts and blogs.

Build the content

Start with a long, rambling blog post, then edit it down to a decent read. From that edit, summarise the remaining post as several statements, images, a single line, and maybe a video story. Some of you could get real mileage out of short video with this approach.

In future posts I'll cover how to build and structure different post types, including MAYA, the 5-point structure, and how to define your visuals, sounds, audience and posting times. But most of you can already do a lot of this for personal training with what's above.