There is one simple fact when creating an Online Personal Trainer business; If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. Having made your marketing framework it's time to set some goals. Many PT businesses have lost both time and money because they didn't understand one important factor,
“All marketing needs a marketing objective”
It would be like getting a new PT client and jumping straight into a workout schedule, without understanding their goals and ability. Setting a marketing goal early will give you actionable targets that are realistic and achievable and give your marketing meaning.
There can be several objectives depending on your PT niche, these could be:
- Build your brand
- Generate leads
- Drive sales
- Lead conversion
- Increase customer loyalty
But wait, don’t jump into your marketing yet. It is important that each objective is a SMART objective. To make this easier to understand, today we're going to take each step of the SMART objective framework and give you a practical explanation of each area, with examples of PT related goals.
Each objective must have a defined and specific outcome. You need to give the objective as much detail as possible to ensure you understand what's expected of you to achieve it.
Let’s use an example of an Online Personal Trainer business. A specific goal would be to get 100 email sign-ups or to get 5 client calls. It could be a percentage or number, it doesn’t matter at this stage.
Once you've defined your specific goal, we're now ready to discuss how we're going to make our goal measurable.
A goal without a defined measurable result will not get you very far. As you know when training your clients, numbers are vital for keeping track of progress and it is no different in marketing. It's impossible to work out the success of a campaign unless it is being measured.
In our online PT business example, we are going to keep with 5 new client calls each month.
It goes without saying that your goals need to be achievable. Giving yourself unattainable targets will destroy your motivation and make marketing an unwanted task on your to-do list. On the flip side you also don’t want to make them so easy that they weren’t worth setting in the first place.
It would be unrealistic, for example, to proclaim that you're going to increase the number of client calls to 100 per month but would not be motivating to aim for 1 client call a month.
Finally, make sure you have the time, resources, and budget needed to reach your goals.
Next, as you're likely than to be managing your PT company yourself it's important to have a real think about the goals you've set. You may want to ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do you have the time to blog, post on social, send emails, and communicate with potential leads?
2. Do you have the money to pay for paid advertising?
3. Are you confident that you can get your whole marketing strategy set up and live to meet your deadline?
Time goals are often more important than the goal itself. Goals are easily forgotten unless you have a timed deadline.
Let’s take a look at our example of getting five new client calls each month for your online fitness business. You may want to ask yourself, historically how long has it taken you to get client calls?
Like the Relevant stage of your SMART objectives, it is important to have an honest conversation with yourself and discuss the reality of how long it will take to achieve your goals early on. Experience tells us that the more you consider your goals, targets, and timeframes the more successful your campaign will be.
Using these SMART objectives will allow you to level up your marketing and allow you to understand and assess whether you've achieved each goal, and in the future will allow you to plan your marketing activities.
As soon as you've established a SMART objective for your Online Personal Training business, you now have to have a way to know when you have reached it. In marketing, this is called a Key Performance Indicator, or KPI.
What does KPI mean? Well, a KPI gives you an indication which tells you how well (or not so well) you're performing against an objective.
The KPIs are what link your marketing activities (blogs, SEO, paid social, PPC, email, social) with your marketing objectives (SMART). They can help you highlight and change any aspects of your marketing, for example any changes in performance, and also help with any other potential opportunities that may arise from looking at your campaign performance.
A marketing KPI can be your marketing return on investment (how much money you've made from your marketing spend), the number of client calls, total engagements on Instagram, or even your email open rate. But to give the example of our SMART objective (5 new client calls a month) your KPI would be the number of calls.
If for example, you received 12 new client calls in a month, we can take a look at our target in our objective which was 5. So yes, we can say that we met our KPI.
However, this in itself is not helpful. Where we get true insight is by asking what led to this success?
If when looking at your results you found out that 60% of calls came via Google Ads it may be a good idea to invest in that platform instead of a platform where your spend more money, but get fewer results. Go through the checklist below which will help when reviewing your campaigns.
- Which social, or paid channel gave you the most leads?
- Once you have defined the channel, or placement did it contain images or video. Was it part of a blog, or was it linked to a live Instagram story
- If you are using Google Analytics, or sign up form - What actions did your potential clients take before requesting a sales call / signing up to your email list.
Understanding what worked well, and not so well will give you the power and energy to decide what resonates with your target audience and business targets, and ensure you feel confident with setting SMART objectives for your future campaigns.
Successful marketing starts with clear, measurable marketing objectives that are linked closely with your business’s goals. Simply put, when you know where you want your Personal Trainer business to go, it is easier to get there.
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