Finding a Niche

by Machelle Lee
(Santa Cruz CA)

Machelle Lee and Ryan Andrews The Invisible Gym Mobile Fitness Training

Let’s face it, Personal Trainers are “a dime a dozen”. Carving out a specific group of people will make all of your marketing efforts much easier. It will also be easier for you to work with a population of people you feel passionate about. For example, even though child obesity is on the rise and it is a growing area for personal trainers, if you don’t enjoy working with children, don’t market your services towards this group.

As a profession, personal training is no longer unique. To create additional challenges, our certification process is unorganized and unruly. The last thing you want is for someone to confuse the service you provide with the 16-year old “trainer” at the local big box fitness chain. Even when you are comparing yourself to other quality trainers, potential clientele can get confused.

It is really important to find a niche or to specialize in a specific group of people that you feel passionate about. By doing this, you can target all of your marketing towards this group of people. An example of a great niche in the fitness industry is Curves. Curves caters to 40 year old and older de-conditioned women. Curves took the health and fitness industry by storm when they opened up their fitness centers and have become one of the most successful franchises in our industry. Curves has done an incredible job targeting a specific group of women and creating a niche’. Before Curves, no other organizations were targeting their marketing efforts to reaching this group of women. Or, if they were, they weren’t doing nearly as good of a job as Curves.

By answering the questions below, you can really begin to narrow down your focus and discover what your unique skills and preferences are. We’ve talked to many trainers that are fearful that if they pick a niche’ that is too specific then they are closing themselves off to any other type of client. Nonsense! Just because you have a niche’ does not mean you cannot train other clients. Having a niche’ however, makes life easier when it comes to marketing (as you will see later). It will also make your business identity that much clearer to any potential client that is inquiring about your services.


How to Find your Specialty and/or Niche’

Answer the following questions. Your answers will help you find your niche’!

1. Do you have certain personality traits that make you different from other personal trainers?



2. Do you have specific knowledge or education that makes you different or unique from other trainers? What are they? Perhaps you have experience with coaching or counseling, or you have vast experience training tri-athletes? Perhaps you have experience working with people with limited vision or blindness or other disabilities. It is important to spend some time to think about the skill set you bring to our industry and how it might make your services unique.




3. What specific segment of the population do you want to serve? Why? We know that many personal trainers are open and capable of working with anyone who can pay for their services, but do yourself a favor and ask yourself, what types of people do you really enjoy working with? Seniors? Baby Boomers? Stay at home Mom’s? Athletes? Corporate executives? Overweight teens? Post-rehabilitation? Women? Men? Etc.





What is your potential clients income level?





Can your targeted population afford your services?





Where do your potential clients/customers live?



What clubs/organizations do your potential clients/customers belong to?





Do you teach a specific training protocol? For example, if you like to teach power lifting, you can pretty much guarantee that the older senior market is not going to be a population you will want to target.





Who is already working with this target market and will be your competition?





What are your competitors’ strengths?





What are your competitors’ weaknesses? (Hence, what are your opportunities?)





How do you differ from your main competition?





Why should “client A” work with you instead of someone else?





Why should “client A” refer clients to you?

Machelle Lee and Ryan Andrews own and operate The Invisible Gym.
www.the-invisible-gym.com

Our frustration with the lack of resources for the mobile trainer led Ryan and I to start presenting at Health and Fitness conferences and we also created a resource manual called, The Mobile Fitness Guide To Business Success!
http://www.the-invisible-gym.com/mobile-fitness-professionals.html

It is our hope that mobile training become an integral part of the health and fitness industry and we are trying to create a mobile training community!

If you have any questions about mobile training you can contact us at: getfit@theinvisiblegym.com

Keep a pair of sunglasses handy, the future of mobile fitness training looks bright!