For many online personal trainers, paid marketing is one of the fastest ways to help customers find your fitness business and allow them to get to know your brand and fitness products. Paid marketing enables you to purchase advertising based on keywords, interests, and other demographic information instead of relying solely on other free marketing channels such as social and content marketing. Allowing you to converse with an audience that may not have otherwise known that you existed.
This guide will identify the leading platforms in the paid marketing space and help you understand the campaigns available and how you can target your ideal customers.
Paid advertising is where you spend money on specific platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. What makes it different is that you are paying money to target your primary audience on the platforms. So, for example, if you were to advertise on Facebook, you could target specific job titles, age groups, or even a postcode. Paying each time someone clicks on your adverts or takes a particular action.
Paid advertising can be split into two main areas. First, social media marketing allows you to pay to target customers on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Second, PPC is associated with advertising on search engine results pages (SERPs), allowing you to target potential customers searching for your product or service.
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is so named because you will only be charged when someone clicks on your advert. PPC can be valuable for personal trainers, and a Google Economic Impact report found that for every $1 you spend on Google Ads, see a $2 return on average.
As Facebook has over 1.7 billion monthly users, it’s safe to say your audience is on the platform. Facebook knows a lot about its users, including which brands or products they like, their job title, their qualifications, and what content they engage with most. This is excellent news as it means you can harness all this data when targeting your audience on Facebook to create very effective advertising.
Types of campaign
You can optimize Facebook ads based on your campaign's specific objective. Generally, Facebook gives you three different kinds of objectives.
Raising awareness: This includes campaigns to raise brand and local awareness and maximize reach.
Consideration: These ads drive traffic to your website, boost the engagement of your posts, increase app downloads or video views and help you collect customer data (leads) to use in follow-up campaigns.
Conversion: These ads increase the conversion on your website or have interacted with your fitness business before.
Who can I Target
As you would expect, the targeting in Facebook is powerful. Here are some of the options you have:
- Location
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Connections
- Look-a-like audience
- Remarketing
- Custom email lists
To set up your first campaign, follow our guide to creating a Facebook campaign
Instagram offers various objectives for which you can optimize your campaign. Instagram ads run via the Facebook campaigns manager. Like Facebook, Instagram will show your ad to the people in your target audience who are most likely to take the action you want.
Types of campaign
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Traffic (for clicks to your website, to the app store page of your app, or Messenger)
- App installs
- Engagement (with your posts)
- Video views
- Conversions (on your website or app)
- Lead Generation
Who can I Target
Instagram offers the same targeting options as Facebook. You can combine them to build a specific audience:
LinkedIn is a great place for professional networking and is used by many affluent potential clients.
Getting more online training clients using LinkedIn doesn’t have to be that scary. With the correct structure and plan in place, you can get those new leads for your business.
Types of campaign
Lead Generation: This objective will help you capture leads on LinkedIn, allowing you to use a form directly on LinkedIn to capture your customer information. Your ads will be shown to people most likely to fill out a form.
Website Conversions: You will still be capturing leads, but instead of doing it on LinkedIn, you'll be sending people to convert on your website.
Who can I Target
Reach your ideal audience by using LinkedIn’s powerful targeting tools. With over 20 different audience combinations, you're sure to find your perfect customer.
Demographic: job function, age, company, job title.
Interest: skills and interests, groups.
Lookalike audience: Create a new audience based on your website visitors (remarketing) or customer lists
To create your first LinkedIn campaign, follow our LinkedIn Ads Guide
Google is the most popular search network. They control 69% of the global search engine market. The search network allows us to show the campaign message to potential customers at the right place at the right time. Targeting via keywords will enable us to show text ads to potential customers actively searching for a solution or product.
Types of campaign
The Google Ads platform is so large that they even have two platforms for you to set up your campaign. As a beginner, we recommend setting up a SMART campaign, or for the more advanced user, go ahead and set up a campaign using Google Ads advance campaign creator.
Who can I Target
Keywords: These are the keywords your potential customers will search for in Google Ads. So, for example, you may want your advert to show against the keyword “Personal Trainer Near Me.”
Remarketing: Targeting customers who have interacted with your website is an excellent way of remarketing across the Google ad network.
Bing search has 12.2 billion monthly searches on its network, with nearly 36% of U.S. desktop and 10% of global PC searches happening on Bing.
As Bing powers nearly one out of every three searches in the U.S, skipping Bing Ads means you’re missing out on 59 million searches you can’t reach through Google AdWords.
With Bing Ads, you’ll get not only get a more affordable CPC, but there’s less competition for these keywords.
This means you’ll get a higher ad position and a better click-through rate, so it’s a cost-effective advertising option for anyone with a target audience that fits Bing’s demographic.
Types of campaign
Search ad campaigns: The cornerstone of online advertising, search ads appear on search results pages when potential customers search for your keywords.
Who can I Target
Similar to Google Ads, Keywords: These are the keywords your potential customers will search for in Google Ads. So, for example, you may want your advert to show against the keyword “Personal Trainer Near Me.”
The most important thing to remember is that you should only start paying for advertising once you understand where your ideal client spends their time on the internet. So focus on that channel, and when you get to grips, consider pushing your marketing budget to another paid marketing channel.
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