Paid Advertising on Facebook for Personal Trainers – Where to start

Don't miss our essential tips on where to start with pay per click advertising for your personal training business on Facebook

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March 24, 2026

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If you run an exercise class of some kind, either as a personal trainer, fitness coach, yoga instructor or something else, chances are you’ve thought of using Facebook to promote your services. You should at least have your own business page-you may have even tried paying to promote yourself on that platform but been a little disappointed with the results. Facebook makes it dead easy for businesses of all types to spend money promoting themselves, but in order to make these tools really work for you it takes a little more consideration than clicking ‘boost post’.

Paid Advertising on Facebook for Personal Trainers

Facebook is a bit like training. For many people it seems simple in principle; turn up, go through the motions without any real plan, then finally after a few days without seeing any results they throw in the towel. Either that, or they end up pumping valuable time and effort into the wrong area. Just like when you hit the gym, a knowledge of the kit and what exactly you want to do with it is essential to get decent results. In this case, the kit you need to know about is Facebook Advert Manager and your page Insights. You’ll find the Advert Manager in Facebook’s menu alongside shortcuts to your pages, groups and other sections. The ‘Insights’ tab lives in the shortcuts at the top when you’re viewing your page.

Before you start - Insights and Adverts Manager

If you’re new to Insights and Adverts Manager let’s take a very quickly look at them and outline what they’re about. They can look a bit intimidating at first but don’t let that put you off, they’re both incredibly useful for getting the most out of your personal training or fitness business. Insights contains a whole load of data about your page traffic and how your posts perform. This can teach you many useful things such as which posts your visitors respond best to and when your audience is active on Facebook. In turn, this can inform your advertising strategy help you get better results out of your advertising budget. Adverts manager is basically your control panel for your advertising campaigns on Facebook. Never boost a post with the boost post button, always work through Adverts Manager. The interface can be a little daunting at first but it really is worth the effort to get stuck into it. You’ll get all kinds of advanced targeting options, essential for local businesses like personal training, as well as detailed information on how people are responding to your adverts. You can do interesting experiments like running two different adverts simultaneously, perhaps with different wording or a different image, to collect data on which gets the best response. Based on that you can not only create more engaging ads in future but also think a little about how your most engaging content could be used on your other channels too.

Where to start with your paid Facebook campaign

The first thing you’ll want to do is work out the goals of your campaign. In the initial stages of getting your business set up on Facebook you might want to gather a few likes for your page. If you’ve got a blog or website for your personal training business, you might want to send people there. Perhaps you have a special offer to promote, or you’d like to capture email addresses to begin building a database. Whatever the case, make sure you have a clear idea of your objective before you spend anything. You should also ensure you know who exactly it is you’re trying to reach. Good targeting is vital if you want your advertising to be effective. You’ll want to pay particular attention to the geographic area your adverts hit for a personal training business; think about how far you or your customers would be willing to travel, and be realistic. Remember there’s no point targeting thousands of people if only a couple of hundred stand a chance of becoming customers. It’s always better to target a smaller number of people with accuracy than a huge mixed bag.

A note about Likes

A lot of personal trainers, yoga instructors and other fitness professionals get hung up over likes and want to immediately spend their budget gathering them. Having a lot of Likes doesn’t mean you’ll get a lot of business, or that many people will see the things you post. Try not to worry too much about Likes, they will come with time. Yes, a page with a couple of hundred likes does look a little better to a potential customer than one with only ten, but investing in getting thousands is a waste of time and effort. Do it cheaply by asking friends and family to like your page first. If you really want to start your campaign with some follower building, make sure that your page has everything on it needed to convert your new Likes into customers; great original content, all of your business details filled in accurately and professional header and profile art. If you don’t have these things in place but are desperate to get some more likes, get them sorted first or you’ll be throwing your money away.

How personal trainers can get more from Facebook Advertising

As a personal trainer one of the best things you can offer your customers is your expert knowledge. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that by giving away tips and advice you’re doing yourself out of a job. Most visitors expect a great amount of content for free before they’ll convert, this is your chance to show people you’re the expert that can transform their business. You should aim to populate your Facebook page with great content. Share content from your favourite trainers and blogs and post your own videos, pictures, stories and testimonials. You can post quick tips, a recipes, a video explaining an exercise, a workout programme or a full on eBook. If you are going to the effort of making this content, make sure people see it. Organic traffic will be low to start with but our old friend Insights will still be able to give you an indication of which bits are working the best. Those pieces of content are the things you should use for your Facebook advertising campaign.

Special offers

If you’re just getting started, something that can work really well is promoting an offer. A small discount on a class, a free consultation or something along those lines. Maybe you have some regular time slots that aren’t as popular that you can sell for less? Spending £40 on an offer is worth it it 2 people sign up and each pays for a £40 training session. You won’t have to continue this spending strategy forever, but it’s great way to build traction early on. Try offering this in exchange for capturing email addresses, one of Facebook’s advertising objectives available in the Adverts Manager. This way when you next want to run a similar offer you won’t have to pay Facebook for it, you can email it directly to people who you know are already interested in what you’ve got to offer. These are just a few tips to get personal trainers and other fitness professionals started in the world of Facebook advertising. If you’re not sure about anything don’t hesitate to give us a call for some help. We’ve worked with a load of different trainers and gyms and are fitness fanatics ourselves so you’ll be in safe hands. Remember that paying someone to do the job properly is always going to generate better results than randomly boosting posts and expecting results. We’re here to help. If you're interested in finding out more about our fitness marketing services click here.

Alex Hedges

As the CEO of FitPixels, I've had the privilege of guiding our agency to success for over a decade. With a passion for marketing innovation and a keen understanding of a variety of sectors including; telecoms, B2B, service based businesses and manufacturing, I've led our Manchester-based team to become a trusted partner for businesses looking for transformative strategies.