Determining Your Personal Trainer Niche is Crucial For Your Businesss
The fitness industry is large and getting bigger every day. While that is a good thing for personal trainers, it also means you can get lost in the crowd. Establishing a precise personal trainer niche has many advantages for the online trainer. This blog will teach you what a niche is, how it will help you and how to create one.
Starting your online personal training business blog series
- How To Start Your Online Personal Training Business #1
- Personal Training Business Setup – First Steps #2
- Online Personal Trainer Management Tools – #3
- How To Make Your Personal Trainer Website #4
- How To Find Your Personals Trainer Niche #5 – Current blog
- Making Your Unique Selling Proposition for Fitness #6
- Online Personal Training Prices: How to Set Them #7
- How to Make Your Online Personal training package prices #8
- Making Personal Training Templates #9
- The Personal Training Business Opening #10 – End of Series
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What is a Niche?
A niche is small area of expertise in a larger market. It is typically a subset of a larger industry. It can also relate to a small group of customers looking for a small group of products.
In the personal training world, examples of small areas of expertise might be:
- A trainer that specializes in functional training.
- A bootcamp trainer.
- A yoga or spin class expert.
It may also relate to trainers working in life coaching, life events and similar such as:
- Pregnancy fitness.
- Wedding fitness.
- Health and Wellness.
But wait! Why would anyone want to narrow down their potential customers?
Online training is different than working one on one in a gym. In a gym you have to to be a jack of all trades. Knowing how to train for bodybuilding, weight loss, toning etc. is perfect since you never know what type of client will be walking through the door.
But online personal training is totally different. Read on to see why.
How Does the Online Personal Trainer Niche Help You?
- Targeted Advertising – Advertising to every type of client is too costly and too broad. Specific target clients makes your marketing money more cost effective.
- You become a Specialist – It will be easier to gain clients that are looking for your specific expertise. Not only that, but they feel they get better value because they are getting an expert for what they want.
- Less Competition – By becoming an expert in one personal trainer niche you are no longer competing against every single trainer in the online world. And that is a good thing.
- Fewer Fitness Templates – A specific niche only requires a few types of workout templates. This saves you time and work.
How to Pick Your Personal Trainer Niche
As mentioned before, The niche in personal training is your area of expertise. It might be bodybuilding, toning, working with seniors, working with certain types of equipment, body weight training, suspension training, Pilates, yoga, and more. Often, many areas will overlap.
So how do you find your niche? It’s not as hard as it sounds. The easiest way is to start off by writing down the questions below and answering them. And once you see the answers, they should direct you to the right area. But if you are still not sure, it will become clearer in the last step where you pick your three types of clients.
HOT TIP: When choosing your niche, consider one that has clients that are easy to work with. You can always add more areas as you gain experience. Typically, weight loss and high level athletics can be difficult.
- What types of clients are your favorites?
- What types training do you have the most experience with?
- Are there specific types of equipment you like to have your clients train with?
- What types of clients have worked well for you?
- Who do you want to work with
- What type personal training do you want to provide?
- What do your prospective clients need?
- Can your skill set provide for your prospective clients needs?
- What’s your personal trainer story and can it work with the answers you have provided?
- Is it a niche that is not overcrowded in the online personal trainer world?
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Narrowing Down Your Personal Training Niche
Every niche has many different groups of people with different needs and goals. The final step is to create 3 specific ideal client types that fit into your niche.
For example, suppose your niche is “people that want training to get healthier”. This group of people are typically in average health but know they don’t do enough to stay healthy and fit. Their goals may be eating better, working out more consistently, improving their muscle tone, feeling better or having more energy. They may also have minor goals to get stronger or trim down a bit.
By the way, if this niche fits into your area, this is a great online personal trainer niche to start with. The clients are usually motivated and already in fairly good health. They just want direction and guidelines.
Once you have your niche determined, research a bit online to make sure it is not excessively overcrowded in the online world.
How To Create An Ideal Client
Here is an example of how to create the ideal client using the sample niche we mentioned above (people that want online personal training to get healthier).
Step 1 – Pick a type of person that could fit in this niche. Let’s say men that are busy. Of course that is way too broad.
Step 2- Narrow it down. Busy middle aged men. Still way too broad.
Step 3 – Continue to Narrow it down more. Busy middle aged men with families with no time to go to a gym. Better. So now you have an ideal client who is a professional middle aged man who has family obligations and needs to workout at home with a goal to become healthier and fit.
Now you are not just another basic online personal trainer. You have become a lifestyle coach specializing in showing busy Dads in their late 30s how to trim down, get healthy and stay fit for life, all in the comfort of their own home.
Finish The Process And Create Two More Ideal Clients
Use the same steps to make two more client profiles. Here are some more examples of clients that could fit into the sample niche.
Young housewives with children who want to get back in shape after pregnancy. Seniors (age 55-70) that are intimidated by gyms but want to improve their mobility and function at home not using equipment. Young adults who travel for business and want to keep in shape using hotel gyms or portable exercise equipment (like elastic tubing or suspension equipment).
Notice these clients all have similar or overlapping goals. And they are all perfect clients for online training.
The Personal Trainer Niche Related to You
The niche you choose to fit into should relate to your strengths and expertise. Examine the types of clients you enjoy working with. Ideally, it should be an area of personal training you enjoy.
Precise client profiles will help place you as a specialist in the field, narrow down your competition and make your job easier.
And finally, it will allow cost effective marketing. If you want more ideas, check out his link for more info on personal training niches.
The next blog in the series will help you market to your niche and is called Making Your Unique Selling Proposition for Fitness.
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