How to get more Pilates clients

Most advice on how to get more Pilates clients jumps straight to posting more on social media. We would start somewhere quieter: knowing exactly who you teach best. It is the first thing on the list in the workbook for Holly Swanson's workshop, The Pilates Career Center, and it shapes everything after it.

Name the client you teach best

Pull up your bookings from last month and circle the two or three people you most enjoyed teaching. What do they share? Runners who keep getting hurt, maybe, or new parents, or people who told you on day one that they hate exercise. Once you can describe that person in a sentence, it gets much easier to work out where more of them spend their time and what to say to them.

Sound like yourself

Next in Holly's workbook comes your personal brand voice and mission. It sounds like marketing jargon and it's actually pretty practical. When your class blurbs, your bio and your hello at the front desk all sound like one person, clients can tell what they're signing up for, and the ones who fit tend to stay.

Make the second class easy to say yes to

Getting someone through the door once is the hard part. Keeping them is mostly attention. Use their name. Ask what brought them in and bring it up again the following week. A short note after a first private session goes a long way. Small stuff, and easy to skip on a busy Saturday.

Who else sees your clients first?

Holly co-founded a practice that combines physical therapy and Pilates, one example of two professions working side by side. For your ideal client the equivalent might be a physical therapist down the street, a run club coach, a prenatal yoga teacher or a gym that doesn't offer Pilates. Two real relationships like that will likely do more than a hundred cold posts.

Be in rooms with other professionals

Plenty of good working relationships start over lunch. At PLTS+ Collective there was a Networking Lunch on Day 1 and a Happy Hour with a Vendor Village that evening, and the panel on Day 2 looked at the Pilates career beyond the studio.

Track where clients come from

Ask every new client how they heard about you and keep a simple tally. After a few months the pattern tells you where to spend your time. Holly's workbook closes on exactly this kind of habit: the numbers to track once you have the job, so you can ask for what you're worth. Our guide on how much Pilates instructors make covers the pay side.

Learn it in a room

The Pilates Career Center was two hours with Holly Swanson at PLTS+ Collective in Austin. It covered your ideal client, your brand voice and mission, finding and negotiating jobs, and the numbers worth tracking, with a Q+A at the end. See the PLTS+ Collective page.