5 things your potential PT clients don't care about as much as you think they do
No PT has asked me for this advice, but there’s a decent chance some of you are going to read this and recognise quite a lot of your own Instagram feed. I can say that because, for a long time, it was pretty much my Instagram feed too.
I worked as a PT for years. I tried to market myself as a PT, and I posted the workouts, exercise videos, qualifications, photos of myself training and plenty of the other things I’m about to talk about. Now I work in marketing, and there are things I look back at very differently. Being knowledgeable about fitness and being good at communicating why somebody should work with you are two completely different skills.
I think there’s one question that gets forgotten quite a lot when PTs create content: are you creating content for the person you actually want to coach, or are you creating content that impresses you and other PTs?
That doesn't mean every single thing you post needs to sell a PT package. Sometimes you’ve hit a PB and want to post it, sometimes you look good and want a photo, and sometimes you’ve done something you're proud of and want people to know about it. The problem comes when we assume that because we're posting fitness content on a PT account, we're automatically marketing our services.
So these aren't five things I'm telling you to stop posting. They're five things your potential clients probably don't care about as much as you think they do, and five things worth thinking about when you're trying to market yourself as a PT.
1. How hard you train and how “fit” your life looks
The heavy lifts, brutal sessions, Strava screenshots, PBs, physique updates, meal prep and photos of yourself looking absolutely wrecked after training all have a place on social media. I post training content all the time, and when I was a PT I posted it too. There’s nothing wrong with showing that fitness is a big part of your own life or sharing something you're genuinely proud of.
There is, however, a difference between showing that you are good at training and showing that you are good at helping somebody else train. If your ideal client already trains five times a week and wants somebody to help them push their performance further, your own training might be very relevant to them. If your ideal client hasn't trained properly for three years, is nervous about walking into a gym and doesn't really know where to start, the exact same content can land very differently.
They might look at your session and think it’s impressive, but they could just as easily think, I could never do that, so there’s no way I could train with them. The same applies to your physique. Somebody who already feels uncomfortable with how they look could see a PT who is extremely lean or muscular and assume they’re going to feel completely out of place next to them. They might even worry that someone who looks like that is going to judge them when they struggle, can't complete an exercise or don't make progress as quickly as they'd hoped.
Meanwhile, you could spend most of your working week coaching complete beginners, adapting exercises, meeting people where they are and building their confidence from scratch. The way you train after years of experience might bear very little resemblance to the way you'd train someone walking into the gym for the first time, but your potential client doesn't automatically know that.
Your fitness can show that you practise what you preach, but your wider content needs to show that someone doesn't already have to train like you, eat like you or look like you to be ready to work with you. Otherwise, you can accidentally make people feel like they need to reach a certain level before they're allowed through the door.
Yes I’m super strong but why would that matter?
2. Your qualifications without any context
Qualifications are important, and this is definitely not an argument for being less qualified. The issue is that your potential client probably has no idea what half of the acronyms in your bio mean, and another certificate graphic announcing that you've completed X course may mean far more to the other fitness professionals following you than it does to the person you're hoping will eventually become a client.
The useful part for that person is what the qualification means for them. What have you learnt that makes you better equipped to help them? Has it changed how you programme for a particular goal? Can you now work more effectively with a certain type of client? Has it given you a better understanding of something your clients regularly struggle with?
That is the interesting bit, so talk about it. You don't need to dumb down your expertise, but you do need to translate it. Your client shouldn't need to understand the fitness industry or have the same qualification themselves before they can work out why your knowledge could be useful to them.
A certificate proves you've completed the education. Your marketing needs to explain what you're going to do with it.
3. Your entire life story
Personal content absolutely has a place, particularly in an industry where someone is potentially going to spend several hours a week working directly with you. People want to have some idea who they're signing up to spend that time with, and your personality, interests and experiences can be the reason somebody relates to you rather than another PT offering a fairly similar service.
Someone might choose you because you both play rugby, have similar interests or have dealt with some of the same struggles around training. They might simply like the way you communicate and think they'd get on with you. That connection is valuable, and I wouldn't suggest turning your account into a stream of educational graphics with absolutely no evidence that there's a human being behind them.
There is a point, though, where your potential client stops being the person your content is for and starts becoming an audience for you. If every lesson comes back to your journey, your transformation, your routine, your struggles, your goals and what you've learnt about yourself, the person you're supposedly trying to reach has to keep finding ways to insert themselves into your story. Personal experience can be a great way into a topic, but it shouldn't always be the topic.
Share enough of yourself that people get to know the person they could be working with, while making sure you're showing them that you understand their life too. Their problems, questions and goals deserve at least as much space on your page as yours do.
4. Exercise demonstrations with no reason to care
You know the post: video of an exercise, exercise name on screen, three sets of ten and a caption telling people to save it for later.
The obvious question is: why?
Who is the exercise for? What does it help with? Why might somebody choose it over another option? Is there a particular problem you're using it to solve? Is it a regression for someone who can't currently perform another movement, or a progression for someone who needs more challenge? What have you spotted in your clients that made you start using it?
PTs can watch an exercise demonstration and fill in a lot of those gaps because they already understand training. The average potential client can't, which is why exercise demonstrations are a really good example of content that can look educational without actually teaching very much.
If I can type the name of the exercise into Google and immediately find hundreds of videos showing me how to perform it, simply demonstrating the movement isn't giving me much of the knowledge I've actually followed a PT for. Give me the bit I can't Google so easily.
Explain why you're using it, who you use it with or what you're looking for when you coach it. Tell me about the mistake you regularly see people make, or why you've chosen this variation instead of the one everybody else seems to be doing. That's where your expertise actually becomes useful content, because I'm getting access to the thinking behind the programme rather than another exercise to add to an endless saved folder on Instagram.
5. Everything except the fact that you're actually available to work with
This one is slightly different because we're moving from marketing into actually selling what you do, but I think PTs can be surprisingly bad at telling people that they can, in fact, pay them for personal training.
You can post clips of yourself training clients, client progress, educational content and behind-the-scenes videos from the gym every week, but does somebody landing on your page actually know that you're taking on new clients?
If you have spaces available, tell people. If you're starting a new programme, tell them what it is, who it's for and when it starts. If there are only certain times you're available for 1:1 sessions, that can be useful to know too. Give somebody enough information to understand what you're actually offering and what they need to do next if they're interested.
Price is slightly different, and I don't think every PT necessarily has to publish their prices on Instagram. There can be good reasons for including them and good reasons for discussing them at enquiry stage, particularly if your services or packages vary. People should at least be able to work out what they can buy from you and whether you're currently available to provide it.
Don't assume somebody who has followed you for six months knows. They may know you're a PT, see you working with clients and still have absolutely no idea whether your diary is full, whether you offer online coaching, whether you're taking 1:1 clients or whether the programme you've mentioned a few times is actually open to new people.
And don't rely on them messaging you to find out. Some will, but plenty won't. If someone has to start an enquiry just to discover whether you're even accepting clients, you've created an unnecessary extra step before they've had the chance to decide if they want what you're selling.
You don't want someone to follow you as a fitness account that happens to belong to a PT. If you're using that account to grow your business, every now and again you do actually have to tell them there's something available to buy.
So what should you be posting?
I'm not telling you to stop posting your training, qualifications, life, exercises, food or physique. I'm also definitely not claiming that changing five things on Instagram is suddenly going to fill your diary with clients.
What I am suggesting is that you stop treating the act of posting fitness content as marketing in itself.
Most PTs I've known got into the industry because they genuinely wanted to help people, and those people are probably already giving you most of your best content ideas. Think about the questions clients ask you that seem obvious because you've worked in fitness for years, what they're nervous about before their first session, what keeps getting in their way, what they misunderstand about training and what finally makes something click for them. Those conversations tell you far more about what your potential clients care about than another scroll through what other PTs are posting.
Before you post, come back to the same questions: Who is this for? Why would they care? What does it tell them about how I could help them?
Sometimes you'll realise the answer is that you're posting it because you hit a PB, you look good, it made you laugh or you simply wanted to share it. That's completely fine. Your account doesn't need to become one long marketing exercise.
But when you are trying to market your PT business, talk to the people you actually want to coach. And when you want them to become clients, make sure you've remembered to tell them that they actually can.