Avoid These Mistakes When Building Your Online Fitness Coaching Business
The booming fitness industry, amplified by the rise of digital platforms, has made it possible for personal trainers and gym owners to scale their services beyond physical boundaries. However, the journey to successful online fitness coaching isn't without its roadblocks. As a health and fitness marketing agency with deep industry knowledge, Sean Garner Consulting brings you insights on how to avoid common pitfalls in your online fitness coaching venture.
Common Mistake in Online Fitness Coaching
A common mistake most fitness professionals make while starting their online fitness coaching business is creating a product before selling it. To many, this approach might seem counterintuitive, but let's delve deeper into why this is often a misguided strategy.
Consider this: you decide to launch your online training business, and you spend countless hours creating an awesome program. You devote time to crafting the best possible workout regimen with intricate progressions and regressions, all accompanied by high-quality videos. Then, you find an app or delivery platform to release these workouts. The next step? Trying to market your business and grow your client base.
Sounds reasonable, right? It's a familiar strategy followed by many in the fitness industry. But is there a better way? Absolutely!
The Three-Step Framework to Success
At Sean Garner Consulting, we champion a three-step framework for our business coaching clients. These steps are:
Build a community
Create an awesome offer
Build the systems that support it and help it scale
Many fitness professionals skip the first step, heading straight into creating their product or service. However, we strongly recommend prioritizing community building. Whether you're starting, relaunching, or considering relaunching your online fitness business, following this three-step framework can lead you to success.
The New Approach: Sell Before You Create
Here's our advice: Don't create any product until you've sold it. It might sound confusing at first, or even exciting to some.
Let's explain what this means. As fitness professionals, we often get caught in the trap of creating perfect workout programs, investing weeks, sometimes even months, before marketing them. This approach not only requires a significant amount of time and effort but can also lead to disappointment if the product doesn't resonate with your target market.
Instead, we encourage fitness professionals to focus on selling their idea first. We’ve seen this approach lead to success firsthand. For example, Project Dad Bod, a successful online fitness program, was sold before it was even created. The creator decided on a minimum number of sales needed to validate the product idea and focused solely on making these sales before diving into product creation. This approach ensured the program was something the target audience actually wanted and was willing to pay for.
Building Your Community
When starting an online fitness business, your first goal should be to build a community. You might have a fantastic program, but if you don't have a community interested in what you offer, you won't make any sales. You should focus on attracting people, understanding their needs, and then creating a program that best serves these needs. This community-centric approach reduces the risk of wasting time and resources on a product that might not resonate with your audience.
Crafting Your Product
Once you've successfully built a community and validated your idea with a minimum number of sales, you can start creating your product. As fitness professionals, we can easily put together effective workout programs, shoot instructional videos, and package everything into a digestible format for our clients. The motivation to deliver high-quality content is even higher when you already have paying clients waiting for your product.
Scaling Your Fitness Business
Once you've built your community and validated your product, the next step is scaling your fitness business. This is where fitness marketing agencies like ours come in. We can provide fitness marketing services to help you scale your business.
With a successful product, you can then use client testimonials, insights, and feedback to improve your product and your marketing. This first-hand information from your target market will help you craft compelling sales copy and refine your product to better serve your clients. By understanding their pain points, goals, and obstacles, you can tailor your fitness business to meet their needs more effectively.
Conclusion
Building a successful online fitness business involves more than just creating a fantastic workout program. It's about understanding your clients, offering solutions to their needs, and continually refining your products and services to serve them better. By following our three-step framework, you can avoid the common mistake of creating before selling and lay the groundwork for a successful online fitness business.
As a fitness marketing company, Sean Garner Consulting is here to help you build and scale your online fitness business. Whether you're just starting or looking to grow your existing online fitness venture, we're here to provide you with the fitness business marketing expertise you need. Don't let common mistakes hinder your success; instead, let us guide you on the path to fitness business growth.
