Social media marketing tips for fitness professionals

Social media is an essential tool for fitness professionals looking to grow their fitness businesses. As things stand, social media users already have a massive appetite for all content related to fitness routines and general well-being.

As a business owner, you can’t, therefore, afford to ignore this particular channel when creating your marketing, advertising, and branding strategy. The following is a look at some of the social media marketing tips that you can use to enable you to market your fitness business.

1. Inspire, entertain, and inform

One of the leading reasons why individuals sign up to social media platforms is to get entertained. Other reasons include to be informed about global happenings and to interact with their friends. You have to realize that social media users don’t register to these platforms so that businesses can sell to them.

As such, businesses that are always posting content that has too much “salesy” language will often end-up being bypassed. The key to attracting a sizeable following on social media is to make certain that your content is based around the following three (3) main principles:

I. Inspire: Use social media to share motivation content sourced from other pages or use your pages to showcase the transformation undergone by your members.
II. Inform: Try to educate your audience using valuable details related to nutrition and fitness. You should aim to provide them with advice clearly and concisely so that it becomes easier for them to implement some of these routines at home.
III. Entertain: At times, social media users just want to enjoy themselves. You can provide some entertainment by infusing some of your personality into the content. Aim to distinguish your brand from the serious nature demonstrated by other brands in the fitness industry.

2. Focus on mobile

In your quest to learn how to get popular on social media, you will have no option but to focus on mobile. For many industries today, the main channel of communicating with their target clients is through the use of mobile phones.

According to a recent study commissioned by Smart Insights, tablets and mobile phones were the main devices used by people in the hours outside their normal working days. Business owners need to engage with their target clients during these particular hours. The study also established that a majority of users spent a large chunk of their time on different phone applications.

Your brand needs to be active on Instagram and Facebook. The two social networking platforms have been seen to be the most efficient when it comes to advertising a fitness business. In addition to this, you can also consult with your web developer to ensure that the brand’s website is properly optimized for mobile. You also need to look into how you can integrate a fitness business booking and management system. Integrating this type of system will help you save time by reducing the overall amount of time you spend on repetitive tasks. You also get to boost your revenue stream, enhance customer experience, and communicate much more easily with your audience.

3. Exercise patience and post frequently

A common reason why many fitness business owners don’t succeed in digital marketing is that they lose hope easily. Many business owners start to give up after only having tried marketing their business online for a couple of weeks. The reason for losing hope is because the brand owners expect to start seeing results as soon as they have launched an advertising campaign.

However, what you need to understand is that the process of growing your online presence isn’t a sprint, but is more similar to running a sprint race. What’s even worse is that some brands opt to purchase fake followers on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. Anyone who has ever tried this will tell you that it doesn’t end well for the brand.

Buying fake followers means that in theory, you will have hundreds or even thousands of people viewing your posts; but not all will engage with the posts you make. This is because the audience isn’t organic. Your posts will, therefore, end up with very few clicks and shares. There’s also the possibility that you could get into trouble with the platform administrators
Instagram and Twitter have been actively cracking down on individuals, influencers, and fitness brands that have resorted to purchasing fake followers. So instead of choosing the ‘easier’ route, you should aim to at least post 3-5 times each week on all the platforms your brand has an active presence.

The following is a quick guide on what your brand should post online:
• Post nutrition advice which can be in the form of an image, blog post, or video
• Share an article or newsletter that is relevant to the fitness industry
• Post a workout tutorial that can again be in the form of an image, blog post, or video
• Post two pictures or videos of your weekly classes
• Share your timetable for the week

4. Don’t underestimate the power of an advertisement

Instagram and Facebook Ads are the most recommended marketing and advertising option for small fitness studios looking to advertise via the internet. The two methods are highly recommended because they are affordable compared to other forms of traditional and online advertising.
Also, a large percentage of the population today spends most of their free time on the two platforms. Look at it this way, Instagram has more than 800 million active monthly users, while Facebook has more than 2.2 billion active monthly users. A major benefit of using the two platforms is that you can create custom ads targeted to a specific audience.

If you would like to target different market demographics, you could also choose to run a wider selection of advertisements. Ensure that you have a separate creative copy as well as a copy that is customized to your specific demographics. Doing this provides you with a considerable advantage as opposed to relying on the one-size-fits-all criteria.

Whenever you are creating ads for use on Instagram and Facebook, make sure to keep the following in mind:
• Only use high-quality images and video: Digital marketers have predicted that video content will make up around 80% of all internet traffic by the year 2021. It is, therefore, important that you start looking into how you can implement video advertisements into your online digital marketing strategy.
• A/B Test all your social media Ads: A/B testing should continue until you have fully determined which combination of creative and copy provides the best results. It’s possible to do this using the official Facebook Ad Manager. The manager has also provided users with an easy-to-follow guide on how to go about the testing.
• Create a dedicated landing page: This is probably the most important aspect of running any social media campaign. You need to provide your audience with somewhere to go once they are done clicking through the fitness advert that you have provided. Your landing page should also have a clear CTA (Call to Action) inviting users to sign up for that particular promotion.
• Come up with a promo for your advertisement campaign that provides value: A good example of this could be something like ‘Sign up by 4 pm on Tuesday to get 3 Free Introductory Classes.’
Remember that lead generation is an important factor in achieving success for any business in the fitness industry.

5. Good images and high-quality video is key

Whether you’re creating content for use in paid adverts or to help you generate organic content, you will need to make use of high-quality images and videos. Below is a look at what you have to do:

Images

Make sure that all your images are as visual as possible. Any text used with the image should be kept at a minimum. When it comes to paid adverts, platforms such as Facebook often implement a 20 percent rule. This is because it favors ad images that don’t have a lot of text. The aim here is to ensure that the users have a high-quality experience.

When the ad image has too much text on it, Facebook will typically show the image to as few people as possible. In the long run, this means that your ad will not be as efficient as you would have liked. The Facebook Text Overlay Tool will help you ensure that the text you have used in the ad doesn’t surpass the 20% rule.

Video

All your fitness videos have to be short and straight to the point. Research from Facebook suggests that when it comes to paid advertising, forty-seven percent of the true value of a Facebook Ad is seen in the first three seconds of a video. The same research goes ahead to note that 74% of its value is seen in the first ten seconds.

When it comes to the audio aspect, you are encouraged to assume that many users (85% to be precise) will opt to watch the video with no sound. What this means is that your fitness brand has to look for ways to help it pass its message along without necessarily having to use audio. You can think about using captions in the place of audio.

6. Build online fitness communities

When it comes to social media marketing, your fitness business should aim to create a fitness community. It’s possible to achieve this by implementing two simple, but highly efficient strategies:

I. Create Groups: Facebook comes in handy for fitness businesses looking to create closed groups for their gym or studio members. You can then proceed to create a page where members can interact with one another and get to build relationships that extend beyond the gym.
II. Using a Hashtag: Hashtags are quite effective when used on Instagram. You can come up with a hashtag that is specific to your fitness gym or studio and which will assist you to spread the word about your fitness routines and brand. Often, people share social media pictures of them attending a specific gym in a bid to show off to their followers and friends on these platforms.

Hashtags assist in increasing the visibility of your content. Any person interested in that particular topic will be able to view it with ease. The most popular types of hashtags used by fitness businesses are the brand-specific hashtags, trending hashtags, and content hashtags.

Once you’ve got all the client enquires coming through, you’ll want to make sure you have a good fitness management software. That’s where Gymcatch can help you, get in contact with us today.