Generating leads is all about finding out where your future clients are, and speaking to them about how you can help solve their problems. If you know who the intended audience is for your business and where they are – that is where they ‘hang out’ – you need to consider what they want in their personal trainer. There are countless problems people want or need solving, including how to:

  • lose weight in less time;
  • be injury- and pain-free;
  • quickly gain muscle;
  • become more flexible;
  • gain better energy;
  • become healthier overall;
  • tone up their bottoms, thighs and arms; and
  • look younger or slow down the ageing process.

Each one of the above tends to have a different personalty type. While everybody wants to have high energy, young men already tend to have that by default. Usually they’re more interested in jacking up their athletic performance and packing on muscle mass. However, a 50-year-old male executive may have very little interest in bulking up and may want to work on becoming healthier and losing weight instead.

You aren’t going to want to talk to these two different groups the same way. You probably won’t find them in the same places and they most likely won’t respond to the same kind of lead generation methods. (A lead generation method is the way you get your message out to potential clients, so they can approach you if your services interest them.)

My Top Three Steps for Generating Leads

Crafting a good advertisement basically boils down to three components

1. Getting people to contact you 

Getting people to approach you for your services is the most important part of any ad. If your target audience doesn’t contact you, you probably won’t have any clients. It’s rather like trying to drive across water when there’s no bridge or ferry – it just won’t work. You get people to contact you by supplying your phone number, website and/or email. You don’t need to have all three, and you may not even want to overload people with all that information,but giving them an easy way to get in touch with you is what puts prospects in your database and food on your table.

2. Sell your freebie

You should be giving something away for free as an enticement to your leads. You don’t need them to sign up for personal training today. Even if you just occasionally send them helpful emails for a year or two, it’s about showing them what you have to offer.

The biggest reason you want to get potential clients to opt in to your freebie immediately is because you don’t want to waste anyone’s time. You can give them a taste of what you have to offer and if they’re ultimately not interested, no time has been wasted.

3. Make an offer with a call to action

At least once during your ad, you want to make your offer. This actually works very well as your headline, because it tends to work on getting your intended audience to notice it. If your headline reads: ‘Hey Mummy, lose the bay bump!’ or ‘How to get your pre-baby body back in in less than 12 weeks!’ a new mum is going to be way more likely to notice it and read the ad below it than a middle-aged executive.

First and foremost, you need to target your intended audience and capture their attention by putting a headline and letter up that gets them nodding their heads. Then you mention the benefits you can provide them and get them excited about what you have to offer. After that, you make a call to action. It can be as simple as ‘Call now!’ followed by your number or a call to visit your website.

Treat your advertising space as valuable real estate. Consider what you can do with a real plot of land. You can build one house on it or you can build an entire apartment complex there. Naturally, the apartment complex is going to provide with a lot more income from the same space. So when you write your ads, write for maximum intensity.

Make your message very clear. If a sentence isn’t needed, take it out of there. If you start drifting back into trying to target a variety of client types, stop that. If a section doesn’t seem like it fits with your core niche, cut it out. And if you’re going to be running your ad in multiple places, such as a group of magazines, try testing out slight changes to it.

The original article by Brad Sheppard was featured in Ultra Fit Magazine.