Depending on the book you read or the ‘guru’ that you follow, there’s a ton of different options available when it comes to trying to find new PT clients.

Forming strategic alliances with local business owners, adverts in the local press, referrals, leaflet drops, door hangers, sponsoring certain events or local teams or google adwords.

I reckon I spent around £7,000 in the first 6 months of being a PT on all of the above and I  had anywhere near the return on investment that I’ve had since trying Facebook ads.

The problem with facebook ads though is that you can lose a load of money really quickly with these as well unless you know what you’re doing. I ended up hiring a specific facebook mentor to teach me everything I needed to know.

You see there is a specific process to follow with FB ads – the ad image has to be right and within the FB guidelines (otherwise they will reject the ad). Just this one thing alone took me weeks to master as it’s particularly tricky in the fitness and weight loss industry as you cannot show things like Before and After images (even if they can be proven to be true).

Then there’s the ad headline. Short, punchy and eye catching. Then the ad copy – what do you write? If the ad is in the newsfeed ad then you can write longer copy than if it appears on the right hand side.

The best thing about FB ads though is the targeting feature. Once you identify who your ideal client is, you can use the facebook targeting feature to only show your ad to those that most closely fit that description. This leads to much better enquiries, a higher Click Through Rate (CTR), and subsequently cheaper costs per click.

For example, with us we identified that our ideal clients were women between the ages of 25 and 45 that lived within the town of Northampton. We then put this into the FB targeting tool and it showed us that the potential reach based on that demographic was 66,000.

Our click through rate was between 4% and 7% (which is good) and so we were paying less than $0.10 per click . The more relevant your ad is and the higher your click through rate, the less you will pay per click.

Here’s an example below of a campaign that we have running at the moment which has a click through rate of over 4%. The cost per click on this one is $0.20, so still great value.

So, we worked out that we had to spend between $3 and $5 to actually gain a new client. Worst case scenario they would sign up for our 3 month group training programme at £79 per month.  So £237 (worst case scenario) on a $5 ad spend. Pretty good ROI.

You can then take FB ads to a whole new level when you start using ‘dark’ posts and promote them through the news feed by utilising the power editor feature. Honestly, until I hired a facebook ad mentor I had no idea half this stuff existed!

So, facebook ads rock. They really do……..but (there’s always a but) only if you know what you’re doing. In the early days I was spending over $1.50 per click which is 15 times more expensive than what I now spend.

If you want more info on the latest FB ads strategies. Exactly what’s working  right now and the sort of images that FB are accepting, get in touch.

Ricky