Marketing & Sales
Client Confidentiality Is Crucial
As a fitness professional and a business owner, you often develop close working relationships with your clients, and you learn a great deal about their lives, health, medical conditions, goals and fears. Your clients have every right to expect that such information will be kept confidential. It is in your best interests to ensure that it is protected.
Blogging for Financial Success
Blogging can provide a host of benefits for personal trainers and athletic coaches. It is a simple way to position yourself as an expert, and it’s an inexpensive means to boost your brand identity. You can also boost your income by using your blog to generate saleable content for booklets, minibooks, articles, manuals, eBooks and printed books. Apply these 15 simple recommendations, and build a blog that leads to business and financial success.
Refresh and Revitalize Your Identity
Has your client intake list leveled off? Or worse, taken a nosedive? While your skills and expertise may be up to par, the message or image you present might be hampering your progress.
“[The health and fitness industry is] a particularly crowded professional space, so standing out with a different message is really tough,” explains Lauryn Bennett, startup brand strategy consultant at www.lauryn
bennett.com. To really stand out, she urges, professionals must analyze and create a more appealing identity. Bennett offers this advice:
Small-Group Secrets: Marketing
Marketing is the process of reaching out to new, potential customers. Done right, it’s a systematized, targeted and reusable way to gather fresh sales leads. But marketing small-group training (SGT)—the profitable new industry trend wherein one trainer works with three to 10 clients at a time—has its own special considerations.
“Safe Harbor” for Home Office Expenses
Tax season may have just ended, but that doesn’t mean preparation should take a vacation. Here’s news that every fitness professional who runs his or her business from a home office or uses a home office for management chores will be happy to learn: The Internal Revenue Service has announced that beginning with the 2013 tax year, a new “safe harbor” will allow qualified taxpayers to deduct as much as $1,500 in home office expenses—while reducing the administrative, recordkeeping and compliance burdens of claiming this deduction.
Use Subbing to Market Yourself
Almost every role and function within the fitness industry involves marketing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fitness director promoting a group exercise program, a manager preparing for a membership drive or a personal trainer attracting new clientele—baseline knowledge of marketing is vital.
Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: An Update
The Federal Trade Commission has released its Review of Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents, and the conclusions indicate that there is still much to be done if industry self-regulation of food marketing to children is to become an effective way to protect the health of minors. The 2012 report is a follow-up to the FTC’s 2008 report, which Congress requested in response to dramatic increases in childhood obesity rates.
Four of the Marketing Methods
How to Get on TV
As a health professional who made the transition to television reporter, I was asked to host a “Fitness in Media” seminar at the 2011 IDEA World Fitness Convention™ in Los Angeles. I taught fitness pros how to procure a television spot on either a news report or an entertainment show. I then asked participants to submit a one-line pitch using what they’d learned.
How to Plan Your First Health Fair
“Me, plan a health fair? You must be kidding!”
That’s what I said when I was asked to organize our fitness facility’s first health fair.
Direct Mail: Now Fitter Than Ever
During my decade of experience in marketing, I’ve seen a lot of failures—and many more successes. With the Internet, the art of fitness marketing is more complex than it once was. However, many of the basic principles still apply.
5 Tips for a Successful Online Business
Jade Teta interview.m4v
Tricks of the Trade
As a stay-at-home mother of two, I offer only online training at this time. I find it fits well with my schedule and still allows me to work in the…
Selling Services in a Faltering Economy, Part 2
In Part I of “Selling Services in a Faltering Economy” (in the October 2012 issue of IDEA Trainer Success), I discussed five steps you can take to energize your business: target your expertise; differentiate your products, price and relationships; protect your current client base; develop multiple revenue streams; and give gifts that reward you, too. Here are five more steps you can take to boost sales in a weak economy.
Offer Multiple Purchase Options [subhead]
The HIPAA Effect
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (42 United States Code § 1320d), which took effect nearly 10 years ago, has had a profound impact on the healthcare industry. Though HIPAA covers many areas, the privacy rule in particular is noteworthy.
Financial Benefits of Daily Deal Sites
Have you ever wondered if partnering with daily deal sites is worth the investment? According to Bloomspot, one of many daily deal companies, the answer is yes.
The organization analyzed customer transaction data from about 2,000 participating businesses in core markets. Here are a few highlights:
30 Ways to Make More Money: Win the Leverage Lotto!
You don’t observe, research and report about the fitness industry for close to four cumulative decades without learning a thing or two about profit centers and revenue streams. As IDEA’s…
Measure Social Media Efforts
Wise fitness professionals take advantage of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter™ to increase Internet presence and enhance revenue potential. But how do you know if your efforts are hitting the mark? These social media measurement tools, courtesy of IDEA author Melissa Spraul, will help you gauge whether your message is being heard:
Radian6 (www.radian6.com). This paid social media listening, tracking, monitoring and engagement tool allows you to understand how social media and social customer relationship management can impact your success.
Facebook and Negative Body Image
Facebook. You log on to connect with friends and colleagues, post pictures and market your wares. But could that daily networking session be hurting your self-esteem?
According to the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt, in Baltimore, the answer is yes. Researchers reached this conclusion after surveying 600 Facebook users, aged 16–40.
Here are some insights:
The Anatomy of a Successful Client Testimonial
Customer testimonials can be fantastic tools for driving new business to your door. But boring, photo-free client comments buried deep inside your website are unlikely to do the trick. To quickly capture the imagination (and training dollars) of the masses, it is critical to breathe life into client success stories.
So what makes some testimonials tedious and others terrific? Follow these four steps to avoid the mistakes of time-wasting customer snooze stories. Bring your facility’s testimonials back from the brink—and attract new-member dollars to your door.
Promoting Your In-Home Training Business
In this five-article series, we have covered the nuts and bolts of creating an in-home personal training business from scratch. First, it was critical to do all the background work to determine whether starting a business in your area was feasible and could support you full-time. Second, you created a business identity by looking at your core values, needs, vision, purpose and mission. Third, you outlined your financial needs and ideal work schedule and set 1-, 3- and 6-month goals.