Diversifying your content strategy is crucial for online personal trainers looking to captivate their audience.

In this article, we will examine the benefits of including some of the more ‘fun’ types of content in your mix – polls, quizzes, and competitions – and give some tips on getting started.

The Benefits of Running Polls, Quizzes, and Competitions for Personal Trainers

It may seem frivolous on the surface, but there are many potential benefits to using this kind of fun, interactive content:

1. It Stimulates Engagement: These interactive elements create a compelling call to action, fostering engagement fundamental for ongoing content marketing success among online personal trainers. Encouraging followers to participate actively enhances the sense of community and connection.

1. Extends Your Reach: Beyond their seemingly lighthearted nature, fun content pieces like polls, quizzes, and competitions prove to be highly shareable. This shareability factor provides online personal trainers access to a broader audience, significantly increasing the visibility of their services.

1. Enhances Your Brand: Thoughtfully crafted polls, quizzes, and competitions that resonate with the core values of a personal trainer contribute significantly to the overall enhancement of their brand. Aligning these interactive elements with the unique brand persona helps establish a distinctive online presence.

1. Keeps Content Fresh: Injecting fun content into the overall content strategy ensures a fresh and varied approach. In online personal training, where continuous content planning can be challenging, these engaging elements provide a welcome source of inspiration.

1. Generates Valuable UGC: Competitions, in particular, act as catalysts for user-generated content (UGC). This UGC becomes a valuable resource for online personal trainers, offering reusable materials with the necessary user permissions and adding authenticity and diversity to their content.

1. Build your Contact Database:  Interactive content is a strategic opportunity to collect valuable data. For instance, using quizzes or polls as gateways for newsletter sign-ups enhances the personal trainer's contact database, providing a direct line of communication with their audience.

1. Insight Into Your Target Audience: Polls are efficient tools for quickly gathering data on followers' opinions and preferences. Meanwhile, if strategically implemented, longer surveys provide in-depth insights into the diverse preferences and behaviors of the target audience.

1. Prompts Useful Feedback: Content that actively provokes engagement generates many comments, answers, and discussions. Within this engagement, online personal trainers may discover valuable feedback that can be applied to refine and improve their business strategies.

1. Build your Community: Encouraging participation in polls, quizzes, and competitions, along with sharing results, fosters a deeper sense of belonging and community. This engagement goes beyond the conventional client-trainer relationship, creating a supportive network.

1. Ongoing Partnerships: Competitions offer unique collaboration opportunities with other businesses and influencers. Online personal trainers can strategically align themselves with complementary entities, providing mutually beneficial outcomes and broadening their professional network.

Polls

People love being asked for their opinions on things. Running polls by asking a question and giving a few multiple-choice answers (or yes/no, true/false options) is a quick and easy way of engaging your followers. Still, it can also give you valuable insight into their preferences. Polls are easy to set up and can be used for getting feedback, finding helpful information, or just for fun. Here are a few ideas:

• Which is the best workout track?

• What is your favorite time of day to exercise?

• Which of these countries would you most like to visit?

• What would you most rather eat?

There’s plenty of inspiration online; here are some ideas compiled by Studio Socials and Ivory Mix.

Quizzes

Again, quizzes are a tried and tested way of engaging people, and if you stick to relevant subjects, they can help foster positive associations with your brand, too. Asking your followers to share their results will also help build your community and widen your reach.

Depending on your fitness niche, you could run quizzes on things like diet and nutrition, different types of training, general fitness knowledge, how the body works, and so on. See these articles by WebMD and ProProfs for loads of ideas for quizzes specifically about fitness, health and exercise.

Competitions

Competitions are a great way of extending your reach and generating new leads. Depending on the nature of the competition, they can also provide valuable user-generated content and insight into your followers. Before deciding what kind of competition to run, consider what your target audience might be interested in and what outcomes would be the most useful to you.

When running competitions, it’s essential to follow proper procedures; each social network platform has its guidelines. You’ll need to plan carefully so that everything is covered, for example, what is the prize? How long will the competition run for? Will it be a regular thing? What is your objective, and how will you evaluate it? Use the handy checklist at the bottom of this Hootsuite article.

Here are some ideas for competitions:

• Photo caption

• Video Challenge

• Make a recommendation (e.g., healthy recipes, workout tracks, books, podcasts)

• Share something funny or meaningful (e.g., a meme or New Year's Resolution)

Incorporating these engaging elements into your content mix can be transformative. Online personal trainers must experiment with different approaches, analyze the results, and continuously refine their strategy. Adaptability and innovation are the keys to keeping the audience motivated, connected, and actively involved in the fitness journey.