Social media has become ever more prevalent over the last 20 years. Whether you solely use Facebook or have gone on to the likes of Instagram or the increasingly popular Tiktok, we can all agree that social media plays a big role in our everyday lives and an even bigger one for fitness business marketing.
When used correctly, social media can be one of the most powerful ways to market your business due to having access to an unlimited audience at no extra expense.
Whether you’re creating a community on a Facebook group or want to show more authenticity and creativity over on Instagram or Tiktok, having a social media marketing strategy will help to convey your message and what you offer clearly and successfully, making advertising your business on social media easy, fun and a no brainer!
In this blog post we look at the ways you can create a successful marketing strategy for your fitness business during this social media age.
When planning your social media content, it’s important to consider the 5 pillars of social media marketing:
- Education
- Personal
- Entertain
- Social proof
- Sales
Education
Offering value driven content on any social media channel will set you apart from the rest and your audience will see you as the expert in your field. Customers often purchase and invest in fitness providers since they want to learn more about health and fitness from a professional so that they can apply this to their everyday lives. At the end of the day a fitness professional’s main job is to teach, so if you’re able to give your audience a taste for what you could possibly teach them, it will keep them coming back for more!
Personal
Sharing your personal story on social media is always a great way to connect to your audience and potential new customers. We all love seeing a personal transformation, but what will create that deeper connection is showing your audience that you’re not only human, but have been exactly where they are right now. You understand how they’re feeling and their pain points and struggles which will help them to feel seen and understood by you and in turn build that possible new relationship and trust between you two.
Entertain
One of social media’s main purposes is to entertain us and provide us with that quick dopamine hit. If you’ve been on social media for a while, you’ll notice that your algorithm can quickly change based on what content you’re regularly consuming, so as a fitness professional it’s so important to include an element of entertainment within your social media marketing so that you can keep your audience engaged and increase those touch point chances.
Social proof
Providing your audience and potential new customers with evidence of what you can offer them will make you more credible and be seen as an expert to them. Whether that is testimonials, before and afters or showing behind the scenes elements of a day in your life as a fitness provider, this will help tap into the basic human instinct to follow the actions of others, building trust, credibility and reducing barriers to making that first purchase from you.
Sales
We’ve educated, shared, entertained and provided evidence, now we can’t forget to tell our audience how they can actually purchase from us. It can sometimes feel a bit ‘hard sales’ telling potential customers how they can work with you, but given it takes on average eight touchpoints (this number can vary depending on the industry) before a customer buys from you, it’s important to make this part as easy as possible for them.
Once you’ve mastered your social media marketing pillars it’s time to create a visibility plan. Remember to take into consideration what social media channels your target audience are on, possibly investing in a scheduling software so that you can bulk create and schedule content and being realistic with how much available time you have to invest in your social media marketing.
You can find more information on Gymcatch’s fitness and wellness booking and management software here. Get in contact to book a demo with one of the team or start your free trial.
Jenny works within our customer success team supporting fitness professionals to use Gymcatch to simplify their bookings and payments, enabling them to do more of what they do best; bring exercise to their community! As a qualified personal trainer and yoga instructor who uses Gymcatch herself, Jenny understands what is truly important to fitness professionals when it comes to booking systems and managing their businesses.
