At the beginning of the business section we mentioned the burning question of how to get clients. Marketing yourself is vital to increase your training hours and drum up new business, but it's not always easy. Having good qualifications, insurance and a solid training background is a fantastic start to positively promoting yourself (as well as being a member of the NRPT of course!), BUT further marketing can sometimes cost money as well as time, so you will need to look at your budget as well as what you want to achieve.
Rather than being something to fear, marketing is something to embrace as it can make the difference between success & failure. In reality marketing is a term used to describe what we all do on a daily basis, ie communicate.
Whether you are looking to develop your business as an individual personal trainer or launching a company, it is necessary to communicate the right message to the right people, at the right time. Don't forget that first impressions count; people want to know they are buying a quality service, get this wrong and you don't get a second chance, get it right & your business will flourish.
Development of a web site (depending on sophistication), can cost quite a few hundred (if not a few thousand!!) pounds, and then you need to have good search engine placement so people can actually find the web site (otherwise they have to know your web name (url), which may not always be obvious). Compare that to the cost of placing an ad in your local newsagents' window, which will be just a few pounds per month. A case of "you get what you pay for." Remember that your NRPT membership fee (amongst other things) provides you with your own web page on the site.
There are plenty of things you can do in addition to this which cover many other options in between? You will almost certainly want to appeal to your local catchment area, potential clients living or working within a certain radius of your location or in the places that you are prepared to travel to in order to train them, and you will want to maximise your exposure there. Have a look at the planning section to give you some ideas of how best to approach this and some of the other questions you might want to think about.
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