If you’re taking the time to post but need to more social media engagement, this is for you. Wondering how you stop getting a handful of comments on a post and start getting some traction?

After observing hundreds of posts and giving feedback for consulting clients about why what they’re doing isn’t working and how to get better results, I realized the majority of mistakes are just unintentional glitches.

What is this Post About?

So, this post is all about how to make Intentional corrections to what you’re doing. You can boost your social media engagement. And it doesn’t just take throwing money at a post, in fact that easy, sleazy way of boosting a post with money? Will fail you every time while Facebook gets rich on it. There’s only one reason to boost a post, and that’s to test it.

Then if it’s working you go into Business Manager and create a real campaign to get real results. That, is an entire other podcast, actually a master class and you do need to create ads, friends. If you’re serious about using Facebook and growing a business, you’ll need to. But first… what you post has to be worth it. Boost your social media engagement organically before you move on.

Start Here

No matter who you’re targeting, talk to them not at them.

But first…

• Be clear who you’re talking to before you post.
• Do you need more leads, or are you talking to your customers? It’s a different conversation.
• Do you want to reach local business partners?
• Engage that specific target with a question so you can have a conversation.

Okay, now that we’ve handled that, let’s move on.

Ask a question every ideal customer (even a stranger) can answer easily

These become easier to respond to when they become polls. In Instagram or on Facebook you can create a poll. Use stories to do it, or create a meme that does it for you.

1. Have you worked with a personal trainer?

Yes or no

2. Do you workout at home or gym?

Home or Gym

And in those two questions I increased the level of engagement. In the Yes or No “poll” it’s an easy answer. In the home or gym question, someone could have to add an answer they type in.

Be thoughtful about strangers. These are prospects. They haven’t even joined the ranks of your leads yet!

They like to vote but they aren’t going to spend a lot of time doing so until you’re someone they already know and trust. You can try telling them, you’re taking a poll, and you’ll share the results. They’re going to want to benefit from taking the time. People do love to share their opinion, but they have to have some reason for doing it. 

Additional questions to boost your social media engagement

• If you were a gym member before the pandemic, will you return (just gym-goers, please)?
• Are you over 50? Able to do lunges without knee issues?
• What’s the worst symptom of menopause you’ve experienced?
• When it comes to weight training, do you love it or hate it?
• How many times a week do you do interval training?
• What’s your favorite time of day (or your have-to) for exercise?

How to Stir Up Emotion

I’d love to hear your experience. Did you work with a personal trainer? 

• What did you hate about it?
• What did you love about it?
• If you never did, what’s stopping you?

Have you ever worked with an online trainer? Did 2020 make you do it?

Follow up!

If you’re forgetting that social media is a conversation, you could be missing the best way to increase your engagement. As soon as you post, you need to be available to engage. Go in and like and share your post from your business to your personal profile if you are your demographic.

You can’t set it and forget it. If you’ve got posts scheduled, that’s fine, but be aware of them and add comments to them yourself! The more action the more traction. You can start it.

If you have those few customers who follow you whatever you do, and engage with you, use that to your advantage. When they comment, respond back. Use more than 4 words to do it, and end with a follow up question.

Each of those things matters to the algorithm. And be sure you don’t just have your 5 kids like your post… because if they’re boys and you’re targeting women in midlife for instance, you’re going to be shown to more people like those first responders. It’s not going to go very well for you is it? Try tagging a few friends who are in the demographic you want (who are okay with you doing that).

Don’t Make This Mistake

What You Do on Facebook is Not What You Do on Instagram.

Or is it? I’m guessing if you’re simply automatically posting every Insta post to Facebook it’s not working very well. That’s because these are two different platforms. You’re going to say things like “link in bio” in your Instagram, and you’re going to use hashtags, that hurt your reach on Facebook. (Did you know? More than 4 on Facebook, maybe even any at this point, really decrease your reach there?)

There you have it, literally some real questions you can ask, and answer, and follow up on to boost your social media engagement.

Questions about how to boost your social media engagement? I’d love to hear them. But remember this… you should spend a very small amount of time on social media. It is not your content. Your content comes from your website. The social media is giving that wings and wheels so you get that message out and bring them back to your website.

Do What Only You Can Do

You and only you can do live video. But someone else, for a lot less $ than you should be earning per hour should be doing your social media graphics, and quotes from that content. I call that system Social 365 and I’ve taught it at 3 major fitness association conferences (ICAA, SCW, and FitnessFest). Most fitness pros start with social instead of ending there to bring people back to their site. Know your platform.

I’ll link to my book Health & Fitness Professionals Guide to Social Media Marketing (Healthy Learning). Yes, any social media guide can easily be outdated by the time it reaches print. It’s why I wrote this one to be inclusive of the questions you need to ask of all your marketing and of all platforms now and in the future.

(link to prior episode)

Resources:

Flipping 50 Fitness Specialist

Build Your Business MasterMind

If you’re a female fitness business owner, even a solo personal trainer, and I would include, one working for another business, this is for you.

Because 2020 rocked all our worlds, nowhere as great as fitness face-to-face and restaurants, and hotels and airlines… you may have realized you put all your eggs in one basket. Attracting customers was easy because in fact you didn’t have to do it. Someone else fed them to you. If you established a reputation of helping your clients get results, you initiated some attraction. But when that model got taken away, and even now still when a very high percentage of customers are not looking to return to the gym any time soon, you realized, uh-oh.

This Episode is for You

This episode is both a little tough love and a little how to take back power that was yours to have all along.

You have the most power if you can sell. There are superficial titles that may make some of your fitness icons look successful, but news flash… if someone has more than 2 or 3 titles …. They don’t have more revenue. And they definitely don’t have more time and freedom.

So, know what you want. The limelight is okay if that’s what you want. Just realize it may be a swap for the finances and the freedom of time and energy to live your days in charge of your own schedule.

How Female Fitness Business Owners excel at sales

When you feel like you can’t sell or promote your own services or products, you have a belief problem in either your services or yourself. You’ve got to:

• improve your product or service or
• get support to build your confidence

Everyone sells. Everyone. Some do it so easily because they truly believe what they sell helps people.

When I was selling for someone else, selling the services of trainers who worked for me, it was so easy. When I went from taking clients who came to me easily and filled the limited slots I had to selling my products for 100% of my income, it changed everything. It in fact, rattled me a little. You falter, you shrink… temporarily. Or at least I did. Then you either pick up your big girl self and get on with it or you go find another job working for someone else for less than you want, for hours you don’t like, and give up freedom and potential to make whatever you want.

When you work for yourself as a female fitness business owner, you create money today where there was none yesterday. You can decide to create a package and sell it five minutes later.

There’s nothing in the world as powerful as that.

How do you get there?

Flex your muscles. Start doing live social media. You can start with recorded sessions but once you do them and realize video is king, queen, and prince and princess of social you want to do lives. But how, you ask? What are you going to say? (Link to prior live social media episode)

Most women do well when they start storytelling and teaching.

There is a difference however in teaching/preaching and raising/praising.

Teach in a way that is not condescending.

• Don’t tell someone they need discipline.
• Ask them if they’re committed.

• Don’t tell them they need to ditch dieting.
• Ask them if they’re ready for a more reasonable, realistic way.

• Don’t tell someone they owe it to their family to be their best.
• Ask them who else will benefit if they are, or who else suffers if they’re not.

Do you hear the change?

My bet is that when you aren’t selling with confidence, it’s not that you don’t believe in what you’re doing. It’s not that you don’t believe in yourself or your ability to help. More often it’s that the way you’re trying to do it, backfires on YOUR ability to feel integral around it.

It feels wrong but you can’t put your finger on it.

Am I right? I would love to hear your comment on this - below the show notes or a rating and comment in iTunes if you’re on an iPhone.

You’re a Badass Female Fitness Business Marketer Waiting to Hatch 

Look at the scripts or bullet points you prepare for yourself.

Rewrite them in a way that you feel like you are supporting and backing up a customer who has been frustrated and shamed by programs and trainers in the past.

Review the content in the show notes here. My hope is that it will help you start to automatically convert your messages into those that connect you with the right audience. 

More resources: 

Flipping 50 Fitness Specialist

Fitness Marketing Mastery Build Your Business Mastermind

Mentioned in this episode: 

Previous episode on Live Social Media 

Live social media sessions are the best possible use of your marketing time for so many reasons. You can repurpose them

• You connect in real time with those interested in you and your topic
• You learn from the questions and from the topic
• Your platform algorithm will reward you for doing it
• You gain confidence every time you do it

But, if you don’t plan what you’re going to talk about based on your followers, fans, and prospects asking, What’s in it for me? You could be wasting your time.

Social media lives that feel like a blind date may not hold enough attraction to get me there. 

Live Social Media Strategy

Are you asking people to show up for live social media sessions without giving them a reason to show up for lives?

If you’re Jillian Michaels, the president of Lifetime Fitness, or CEO of Club Industry… maybe you’ll get lots of people showing up because you announce you’re going live at a date and time.

But if you haven’t got a lot of followers, established a reason why you, or a topic that is JUICY, or given a call-to-action beyond “this is free, you should come” then you’re making a cardinal mistake.

Sharing that you’re going live with your email list will help, if they’re also on that platform. It will get more of your buyers there and that will help tell the platform to show your content to more people like them. But if your buyers aren’t on that platform – aka – big mistake to try to use Instagram as your number one platform if your current customers aren’t using it as their ideal platform yet.

Be Careful Sending Customers Backward Without a Plan

Why spend time and energy promoting a social media platform? When they’re already your customers? I’d say that’s a silly waste of time when you’d want to be thinking about how you upsell those people and keep them busy doing your program instead of taking them back to a relationship on social. Now if they’re there…. Great. But you want to be giving your paying customers more exclusive material, more step-by-step systems to reach success.

Tell them what’s in it for them. It's all they care about.

• What will you teach?
• What will they learn?
• What will you share?

In fact, when I do monthly webinars for my customers that’s exactly how I lay out the content on the page. My team requests that content, I add it to the form we’ve created and they’ve got the layout and system down. I’ve been doing webinars monthly for 6 years and before that for 2 years I did them weekly… yes, weekly. And I do a separate one for my membership. That’s a crazy amount of practice. And that’s only one arm of my business. When you add the fitness pros master classes I do onto that? I’ve done close to 300 live master classes.

Easy Entry with Live Social Media

You don’t have any barrier with social media like you do with webinars. You don’t need to use zoom or gotowebinar or be comfortable with them. But you do absolutely want to be as organized as if you were doing a masterclass/webinar. This is your first date. A blind date. The question you have to answer is, will there be a second date?

Use a Proven Model

Take a look at any syllabus from a course – university or CEC – it doesn’t matter. Or the “blurb” used to advertise a course at a conference or a program you signed up for.

That detail is important… if it got you to sign up, it’s likely got some good strategy.

It offered and teased some good content.

Now, who knows whether the content was GOOD.

The point is the marketing was good. Good enough to get you to invest time and money and energy in doing it.

Most of the things you and I are going to choose to spend time on we’ll make decisions based on level of importance.

And maybe convenience.

So, if I see you’re live and happen to be following you, I might check it out for a few seconds – yes, a few seconds. (that’s another podcast… about getting on and getting started ASAP – no chit chat)

But if you go to the effort – and you should – of promoting a “live” at a certain day and time, then you want to make sure you’ve thought about that schedule.

Will they stay?

Is this a time when your audience wants to be on social media?

I can tell you the best times for my customers – not you dear business pros – but my customers… and that is late afternoon at best, very early evening for East Coast, or it’s early in the day on the weekends.

Do you know when your customers want to be online, and when they’ll show up? Are you consciously thinking about what’s in it for them?

I hope I’ve given you some things to think about in regard to your live social media strategy.

Spontaneous?

You of course, may just want to do it, jump in and get comfortable. Then get more organized and use what little intel you got from those. But to help calm your own nerves and boost your own confidence… have a list of things you’re going to talk about. Have 3 questions about a topic you’re going to answer. It has to be organized for you… and for them or you’ll never be able to attract customers and build authority in one niche. Remember the key to success is going deep not wide.

Resources:

Building your online marketing strategy master class link

Social Media Marketing for Health & Fitness Professionals

Expert Instagram Support

You know you need an email service, often called a CRM (customer relationship management). You can’t send from your gmail or your yahoo account if you plan to have a fitness business, be a business woman, and scale a business.

This episode is to help you go from “tell me more” to “how do I sign up?”

Before you ever jump in to setting up what’s known as a funnel you need to know your customers inside and out. So, this episode jumps in somewhere in the middle of the story… and I want you to know there’s some homework to do before you get here.

I’ll link to a few prior podcasts and blogs in case you don’t know that customer like you know your best friend.

What You Need to Know to Use Your Email Service Optimally

• Know the end thing you want your leads to do. What will they ultimately buy? Is it one-on-one coaching? Is it a course, is it a year-long program? What transformation do you provide? Some trainers will say weight loss. Some trainers will say athletic performance. Some trainers will say energy and optimally aging. You have to know. You may be working with people on more than that, but you have to narrow it down to something very specific if you want to grow a brand and increase business. This first step is crucial
• Create a freebie. Something that your audience wants so badly they’ll give you access to their inbox and invite you to send them emails. It has to have a specific hook and it has to give them a quick win moving toward the bigger transformation that they get from you.
• Create an opt in form. That’s just the little box where they add their name and email.
• From there you create a series of what is called autoresponders. It’s the first email they get that delivers the yummy recipes you’ve created for them, or the workout video, or pdf.
• Don’t set it and forget it. Watch it. Make sure you’re watching what happens when you email. Do they open it? Do they click on it? How many emails in do they drop off? What could you do instead? Your email service doesn’t do the thinking and adjusting to the analytics. You do.

Why Email Is the Way

Your email service can help you meet more people and care for them easier, effortlessly, and find the best customers while allowing those that aren’t a good match to know it and move on. Ultimately, that’s what you want. There’s an abundant amount of people in the world who need exactly what you have to offer.

 You are the wrong match for some people and jobs, and for others you are absolutely perfect. 

There may be things about your job you love more than others. This email service should be one you love. If you’re reluctant about it, I’m willing to bet, dear trainer or coach, that you’re thinking about it all wrong. You’re getting stuck in the its-new-and-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing… and we can’t be good at something we’ve never done before.

But if you instead think of the emails you’ll write, as if you were having a conversation with a client, your ideal client. And you write to that client.

Then, copywriting becomes FUN.

Copywriting is For Winning Email Service

Want a little info on an upcoming copywriting masterclass? I’ll put some details in this email so you can tell me more about what you want and decide if it’s a good fit for you. I’ll help you write everything from your emails, to your website sales pages, and your product descriptions, to your video scripts. Everything you say, and write is copy. Is yours working and consciously written for a fit or not?

Click for details on the copywriting clinic

Show notes will be at fitnessmarketingmastery-dot-com / email service

Are you a medical fitness professional or want to be? On this episode I catch up with founder of the Medfit Network about the 2020 and what’s a head.

My Guest
Lisa Dougherty founded the MedFit Network in 2013. It is both a free online resource directory and professional membership organization. She established the MedFit Education Foundation, a nonprofit 501©(3) in 2017 to elevate the quality and amount of available education for fitness and allied healthcare professionals.

Beyond COVID we are still facing a chronic disease, obesity, opioid and mental health crisis.

This is an opportunity for the fitness & healthcare professionals to up level their education and services to be the front line of healthcare by aiding in the management and prevention of chronic disease.

This is a time where they can expand their offerings and services to the largest, fastest growing demographic in the US (the world).

Questions we answer in this episode:

• Who joins Medfit?
• What do you see Medfit members doing differently than a year ago when we were normal?
• Do you agree that this may also weed out the weak and leave us with the strong?
• As the founder of Medfit what have you found was the message of members during the pandemic? Were there noticeable waves of response?
• What have we learned about fitness and health habits during the pandemic?
• What have we learned about serving clients?
• What has changed for Medfit and what has stayed the same?
• You’re offering some new ways to connect and interact?
• “The average personal trainer fails within 2 years”

~Lisa Dougherty, Medfit founder

Connect with Medfit:

https://www.medfitclassroom.org/
Social media: https://www.facebook.com/MedFitNetwork

60-day free trial membership https://medfitnetwork.org/promo/ 

Fitnessmarketingmastery-dot-com/medicalfitness

Burnout among personal trainers is up. Are you at risk? This post shares a new study published in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research – ahead of print version.

I’ve written for the fitness industry for over 20 years, published in places like Fitness Management, IDEA Health & Fitness Professionals, and NSCA’s Strength & Conditioning Journal.

While I was still lecturing in Kinesiology at Iowa State University, I often found statistics from the Labor Force demonstrating very high job satisfaction among fitness professionals. I have to include that this was at a time that more fitness jobs were still part time. Fewer individuals were actually training at even the 32 hours lumped into full time work. Many included were fitness instructors teaching a few hours a week, and personal trainers included in those statistics were self-declared fitness professionals.

Full Time?

Today, or pre-pandemic, more trainers are employed full time. Many trainers are at risk for job-related addiction which often goes undetected and because of that is promoted. Consider it yourself, what’s the stereotypical trainer like? Chicken and broccoli? Protein shakes, Lululemons, always exercising and eating perfectly? Never misses a workout, often puts clients ahead of family or friends. Allows clients to dictate work schedule. Sound familiar?

Reasons for Burnout Among Personal Trainers

Work-related stressors for trainers during the pandemic included:

• Less access to clients if they were in an in person only service delivery
• Working 100% on commission for training sessions and or experienced layoffs
• Need to adopt new training services and delivery options for multiple revenue streams without the education, experience, or skills to execute quickly
• Inability or unwillingness to pivot quickly to adapt to the new and unique problems people faced during the pandemic and new need for marketing strategies that reached them

Those stressors likely spilled over burnout among personal trainers personal lives. Financial burden and new home life changes affected all of us as home became work, gym, leisure time, and school for all of us and limited our additional sources of social support.

I’m including results from abstract in the show notes as well as the link to it. My goal is to provide you with options and suggestions for you and for your team that have been proven to support burnout.

Starting Your Own Business? Surround Yourself with Support

In times when you may or may not be able or choose to gather in person, I hope that these will help you. One thing that definitely can, in a time for many they’ve taken a risk and begun their own business is knowing that while many suffered losses during the pandemic, for others in fitness 2020 has seen a huge growth. It’s for those willing to remember that where there is a problem and a solution, there is always a business model.

If instead your burnout comes from work addiction… where you’re a trainer who finds herself (or himself) constantly reading, watching, taking courses, in addition to doing your own fitness workouts, seeking the best nutritional advice, and never breaking for your personal interests beyond your career vocation. What hobbies outside of fitness did you love, what people have you stopped spending time with, what activities do you love and lose track of time doing?

Pre vs Post Covid Results

Seventy-one subjects completed the survey before March 2020; after which, a worldwide pandemic (i.e., COVID-19) occurred possibly affecting employment workloads and work-related stress.

Thus, post hoc analyses were conducted to assess differences in burnout scores pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19.

Within PTs, 33.0% reported personal burnout, 29.6% reported work-related burnout, and 17.4% reported client-related burnout.

Higher levels of burnout, across all scales, were observed in those who were PTs, women, unmarried, living alone, would not choose to be a fitness professional again, and took the survey post-COVID as compared to their respective counterparts.

Findings suggest that fitness professionals are not exempt from the stressors associated with personal and occupational burnout. Strength and conditioning coaches and PTs may reduce the risk of burnout by increasing social support, continuing education, and allowing for personal-care time with the intention of buffering these factors.

Social Support

• Friends outside the fitness community
• Fellow trainers and colleagues within the fitness community
• Mastermind groups – to avoid burnout within personal trainers get support growing your business from people who have done what you want to do or are still doing it is required – no one does it alone

Continuing Education

• Do it to completion – for many fitness pros the shiny object syndrome means purchasing courses they never finish which can actually increase feelings of burnout and overwhelm
• Determine the value of con ed based on: 1) what it will do for your revenue and 2) what you’re most interested in and 3) how will it improve the quality of training you provide to your clients
• Plan your con ed so you’re not forced to take multiple courses at one time, at the end of your recert period when there is pressure

Personal care/Self care

• Do seek leisure time content beyond your work. Look, most trainers have science books on their nightstand. Find books, movies, and rekindle hobbies you’d forgotten. During the pandemic I personally took up reading “fluffy” novels again instead of heavier science-based content. I read Nicholas Sparks and similar books before bed, a complete diversion from the heavy work and political climate we’re in. Right now I’ll take a predictable happy ending any day.
• Schedule your breaks so work tasks aren’t an option. I know a fitness owner who goes to mass at noon most days. Find a way to recharge your batteries before they’re dead. Make (even online) dates with friends to complete tasks. You don’t even have to be working on the same thing but knowing that a friend is also focused on a project and you’re touching base again in an hour, keeps you on track.
• Rethink your workouts. During the pandemic when other areas are cranked up the tough workout you think you need may need to take a backseat to less. Before you hit the wall, consider getting exercise instead of driving yourself to illness. I know a trainer who thinks he’s fit because he runs 10 miles most days. Honestly, he’s sick more than most people I know. That’s not fitness, especially not in this climate.

Modify for the Times

I’m an 8-time Ironman. I’ve been swimming for 30-40 minutes a few times a week and doing a 30-minute weight training session a couple of times a week along with a lot of walking. Train for the energy you need instead of training as if you’re not in a pandemic, don’t have stress. For women especially, less is more if you want to avoid hormonal disruption that actually leads to sleep issues, and weight gain.

Burnout Among Personal Trainers

Burnout among personal trainers is up and job satisfaction is down the greater number of hours you work or perceive you work even if you’re not earning money. This is a pivotal time in history and in fitness. You have a unique and never to be experienced again opportunity because the pandemic has created additional problems that require solutions for those who are willing to go beyond just providing online classes and training via Skype and Zoom. Are you ready to create multiple sources of revenue? Be somewhere else and still be providing value and earning revenue. Click here for details.

Resource:

Snarr, Ronald L.1; Beasley, Vista L.2 Personal, Work-, and Client-Related Burnout Within Strength and Conditioning Coaches and Personal Trainers, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research: January 22, 2021 - Volume Publish Ahead of Print - Issue -

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=burnout%20among%20personal%20trainers