Who are you as a brand? How will your personality attract new clients?
As an online fitness coach, you may think that once you’ve created engaging content, you’ll automatically start attracting more clients. However, it’s important to remember that your clients will not just be buying into your product, but into you, as a brand. To do this, you will need to create a strong personal brand.
Personal Brand? What's that?
Personal branding involves developing a recognizable impression around who you are and what you do. This impression streamlines your image and gives you the opportunity to communicate with potential clients in a way that is exclusive to you.
In turn, this exclusiveness draws people in to learn more about your products and services. Because your personal brand is unique to you, you automatically create a personal experience that your clients can associate with you when compared to other trainers.
Creating a personal brand that your audience can easily relate to, like this one, will help attract new clients.
A good personal brand will set you apart from the competition, and engage potential clients to explore your services. It's very important to control your personal brand instead of allowing others to control it for you – if you don’t establish your brand the way you want to, you never know what perception others might create about you.
So How Can I Build a Great Personal Brand?
There are a number of techniques you can use to build a great personal brand. Just follow the steps below and you'll be on your way!
1. Find Your Own Identifier
What sets you apart from other trainers? What is the one thing that you know you’re exceptionally good at or positioned to offer?
Think about all the skills you’ve worked on throughout your career and how they distinguish you from the competition. Or, perhaps you've had an experience that will help others relate more closely to you? These are the areas that you should focus on when building your personal brand.
Personal trainer, Jessie Pavelka, uses "The Pavelka Way" as the unique philosophy which identifies his brand.
2. Nurture Your Brand Persona
Who are you, really? Create a persona that centres around you and your unique strengths. Answering some of the questions below can help when crafting your brand persona:
- What’s your personality like? Do you tell great stories and are super funny? Or are you serious and sarcastic?
- What’s your story? How can others relate to your story?
- Why would people be naturally attracted to your brand?
- What emotional appeal do you have?
- When it comes to your brand, how do you want people to see you?
Once you know your persona, all of your content, whether it be written articles, videos, podcasts, etc. can be used to emphasize these traits.
3. Create Your Platform
If you haven’t already created a website to market yourself, now is the time! A great way to build your personal brand is using a website that contains your name or some derivative. This way, users can easily associate your platform with you.
This is an example of a trainer who has built a platform surrounding his personal brand, using his real name as his domain name. Videos are a great way to introduce your brand to potential clients.
This is not saying that using a brand name for your business is a bad idea, but marketing something like, "Your Better Body Fitness" is so generic and less memorable than simply branding your business with your own name.
4. Strengthen Your Assets
Once you’ve identified your unique identifying characteristics, don't stop strengthening them. The more of an expert you are, the more clients will trust that you know what you’re doing, and the more enthusiastic they will be to come on board.
Karina Inkster has done a great job of identifying herself as the go-to vegan fitness coach. The content she creates strengthens veganism as her unique identifier
Find ways to add value to your audience by creating or reposting content that’s in line with your brand. Learn and share to deepen your relationship with your followers.
5. Share Your Secrets
Speaking of sharing, becoming an expert is one thing, but it’s pretty useless if you keep all that knowledge to yourself. Use what you’ve learned to share your knowledge with your audience.
There are plenty of fun ways you can do this: via social media, podcasts and videos, or by creating an exciting blog with engaging content. Use your platform to show off what you know and gain traction from your audience.
Maintaining a blog is a great way to keep clients engaged and share your knowledge in the area.
6. Stay True To Yourself
It’s really important when building your personal brand that you stay true to yourself. No one likes a fake. Every trainer is different and everyone has a different style.
Stay true to yourself and your own story, and clients will automatically be drawn to your authenticity
Be confident in your own style and what sets you apart from the others, rather than trying to do what every other trainer is doing. This is how you differentiate yourself from the crowd.
7. Set Your Goals
Having a clear idea of your goals (both personal and professional) will help you identify what to spend your time on and what new projects to take on board. Use your personal values as a guide to help you align your activities with your persona and your skill set.
For example, you may set a goal of writing for certain magazines or websites that will help establish your personal brand. Maybe you'll aim to appear on local television, in a newspaper, or on a certain podcast. There are endless ways to increase your personal brand exposure. Set your goals to direct your efforts.
You're All Set!
A great personal brand takes some time and effort to create, but in the end it’s definitely worth it. Done right, your personal brand will result in clients being attracted to your authenticity and interested in your expertise.
