Rest assured; I’m going to give you 6 more ways to increase your sales this season. But I’m going to do it a little backhandedly. That is, I’m going to share why your marketing ISN’T bringing you more sales.

These are six reasons why too many fitness pros are striking out when it comes to social media, or any marketing for that reason, and what to do about it.

1. Fail to serve your customers

Posting generic information that another fitness professional can post, you need to ask why. There are currently about 375,000 trainers in the US alone. Yet, keep in mind no one is restricted to training with a trainer “locally” anymore. I’ve worked with clients in Italy, Trinidad, UK, Australia as well as all over the US recently.

Personal training is expected to grow by 39%. That is, the number of trainers, not necessarily the number of clients. Now, what’s happened during the pandemic? Big chains, medium and small ones are losing 2 to 5 trainers at a time right now because there are not enough clients to go around. There aren’t enough members coming back in. That doesn’t mean they’ll all be successful with online businesses.

Either way, be the unique one serving the niche you serve better than anyone. Get press, get partners, get wise on social media strategies and then use them, every time.

2. Fail to identify how prospects are thinking or feeling before you create content

Posts about random health habits for the holidays are generic commodities. What deeper layer can you provide that shows understanding of exactly what emotions your customer has during the holidays?

Are the emotions excitement and desire to toss abandon to usual health habits to have pleasure? Is it fear of gaining weight and losing control? Is it a depressing time due to emotions of holidays past or losses? You can’t know how to help them if you don’t focus on what they feel and think at this moment. You also can’t do a post so inclusive that you target someone who is depressed and someone who loves the holidays in the same piece of content. You’re doing it again – trying to serve everyone all the time. That level of marketing forgets what really works, targeting one individual.

3. Not tracking results

You have to know what works and toss the rest. What are the results of your digital ads? How many visits to a landing page and from unique visitors, how many sales? You have to track your conversion rates. On social, how many website clicks result from your posts? How much engagement matters too, but if you’re not moving them off social to your email list, what’s the point? Email is where you nurture and sell. Those are the people interested in real help and support.

4. Not making it a part of a whole relationship with you (bring them back for next week’s episode/blog/live or send them to the episode prior.
5. Too long on your introduction & explanation

Get to the answer within seconds. Whatever your title or image promises to deliver. Do it. No long bumper or talk about the show or anything but the thing you promised in the title that was so juicy it got them there. If you’re on a live and you wait “until a few more join”? and I got there on time? You’re wasting my time. So, start when you said you’d start.

YOU should join early if you want to wait a few minutes to dive into material, but it is maddening for busy people or just prompt people when you ignore them in favor of the latecomers, or when you don’t just give me the info you promised before some long prelude.

6. Thinking they need to know who you are or how you’re qualified first

It’s easy to think they need to know who you are and launch into years of experience or degrees. They don’t. And for that reason, they’ll choose a stranger who has simply been a fitness enthusiast for years, happens to have had good luck and next to no training if they get a quicker answer than listening to a dissertation about your background.

There’s a place for it but don’t lead with it.

There they are - a backhanded way of finding 6 ways to increase your fitness sales this season. I’ll link to previous episodes where I’ve shared others.

Do you make any of these mistakes? Choose just one and change it first before you try the overwhelming task of changing them all. If you’ve felt like you just can’t understand why what you’re doing doesn’t work, these may give you the ability to see it.

Other Episodes You May Like:

What to Say to Close the Fitness Sale

10 Social Media Tips that Work for Fitness & Health Professionals

We all have to deal with strong emotions and yet if you’re an entrepreneur you also have to figure out doing business anyway.

If you’re running a business, no wait really, if you are the business, then inevitably you’re going to run into moments when life happens. You will have to both run your business and deal with the unpleasant reality that our loved ones are born, get married, break bones, have accidents, die, and you have emotions around all of it.

You’ll move, have arguments, and break up. You’ll miss planes and get stranded. You’ll encounter technology not working. You’ll lose people and you’ll need to train others. You’ll get sick or have car trouble. You will have an old dog that needs care.

All of those things will show you the leaks in your business. At least they did for me.

Doing Business Anyway

You’ll have to make hard choices and sometimes through all of that, you can’t control your emotions.

Recently, I went through a tough time. I’m talking about it here because of the opportunity it’s provided me to see what needs to happen next for me.

I also realized that much of what I default to doing to myself is not moving my business forward as much as it is a distraction and a comfort to leftover feelings of fear that may not be justified in the moment.

Strong Emotions and Doing Business Anyway

One of the last trips to see my mom, and it wasn’t pleasant. She’d struggled after her fall and surgery. She felt less stable. She was resisting moving to assisted living.

This is all the emotions and decisions that any adult child goes through really. It’s not a surprise. But you definitely get it when it’s you. I was locked and loaded with a hot spot so I could work while I sat with her. And then that never happened. There’s just way too much to do. And she and I spent time quality time going through memories and journals. And that time was absolutely precious.

But other moments of that trip were horrendous. There was a quarantine from covid the first day I was there. I got food poisoning and so for the last two days I was there I couldn’t see her. I then had a flight cancelled and was stranded for two days in Des Moines, Iowa, still recovering from the food poisoning.

That was just the beginning of a downward spiral of my mom’s health.

Fear

I had fears at the beginning. I definitely did, and for good reason, really. I got down to very little in my bank account. My house was for sale but there were no buyers and it was -20 too near Christmas for anyone to really want to buy. It was then that I learned the habits I’ve kept for longer than they serve me.

I roll up my sleeves. I go to work. I make things, I’ll say that too.

Like you maybe, which is why I say this, I tend to create things. The reality is that I’ve become the most successful by slowing down creating and amplifying the marketing. I have award-winning content and programs that get rave reviews. So, what I really need is not another program, but more people in my programs.

But we default to the old patterns… at least until we break them.

Greif

Most recently this has been what I’m dealing with. My mother passed and for the last couple months it’s been down hill and we knew it was on an accelerated path. I found myself not wanting to take care of other people, just wanting to be taken care of.

When you feel like this you only have so much bandwidth to function. You’re not likely to be able to take care of everyone else in the way that you usually do. Juggling things that normally are nothing are much harder.

So, if you keep having the same expectations of yourself, but aren’t able to have the same work habits as you usually do, it creates some friction.

All of that leads to fatigue and it can get hard to take care of yourself. This one must be the hardest of all to handle. It’s unpredictable. It’s not a fever, a cold, or the stomach flu. It’s not a fight that you’ll be mad about and then make up from.

Holidays

You also have to think about the holidays. I say that now because it’s fresh on my mind that these will be the first holidays without my mom and it’s a fresh wound anyway. It’s not the first holiday I haven’t been able to be with her. We all experienced that during COVID. And I’d had others where that was true too. But I’ll be alone this Christmas and at Thanksgiving without that phone call to make where we pass it around the room.

What do you do during the holidays? How do you automate during the holidays? How do you promote? It’s time to think about not just making things happen or attaching your “success” to how much money you’re bringing in, but to how you’re doing it. Are you bringing it in in a way that is sustainable, and you love? Or are you building a business you don’t love and want to keep doing?

It’s so important to consider your answer to that. Sooner rather than later.

Had I not had time to pause I may not have realized how much I’ve carried over habits I began when business was very different to now when I can build a sustainable business and do it with more thought.

What’s the Bottomline?

The biggest take-aways from this episode are that business will have ups and downs. Those are more predictable usually, though I think we can agree the pandemic threw everyone for a loop.

But more importantly, life will have ups and downs. The way I describe ideal workout planning for women in midlife is that it’s a sweet spot of stress. Just enough, not too much not too little. So, if life is full of emotional stressors or financial ones, then the workouts should back off.

It's the Same in Business

The same is true of business. When you’re struggling with a lot of emotional stressors, or you’re trying to hit a big physical activity challenge yourself, it may not be the best time to push any business goals. Your business might plateau or even dip. Sometimes that’s ok.

At least you want it to be ok. You want to know where your space is for your breakeven. Your burn rate. Like every month I know how much my team expenses are going to be. And I know how much equipment and platform expenses will be. I want a profit margin above that.

If I’ve had a healthy couple months with a large profit margin I might expect things to be a little quiet and be fine with that, knowing my average is still up.

Resources:

Masterclass for Fitness & Health Business

Black Friday Specialist Event [add to cart for details]

To fill your health & fitness coaching business, you have to know what to say to close the fitness sale. Or, rather how to open a conversation. 

And it's not what will come out of your mouth first... unless you've rehearsed it after thinking about it.

When you’re:

• On a phone call
• In a consultation
• Doing a presentation (webinar, live talk)

What should your flow be? (on the webinar?  in the consultation call?)

• How long should you allow your calls to be?
• How much time do you spend on each part of your call?
• How do you start?
• How to set your prospect at ease?
• How to take control?
• How do you help someone make a decision?

So that you can:

overcome objections before they come up

and then if they do…

Know what to say when they say:

• I have to think about it
• I have to ask
• I don’t have time
• I don’t know if this will work/for me

So, It’s Your Turn:

What do you say when someone asks, “What do you do?”

So that you are not just a commodity:

• Personal trainer
• Health coach
• Midlife health coach

You don’t improve by telling someone you’re an online personal trainer, or a midlife weight loss coach.

You haven’t mastered this art of engaging prospects if you say you’re just adding adjectives like a midlife or menopause health coach. Even for my Flipping50 Fitness Specialists, I would never want them to answer, I’m a Flipping50 menopause fitness specialist. Not until far into a conversation.

Know why?

Because last year, there were no #midlifehealthcoach uses to speak of, this year there are hundreds calling themselves that. (some of them who go so far to steal client testimonial content and call it their own!)

So what? Did it make someone better, knowledgeable, relatable so they can get the sale because they’ve called themselves that? Or stole a testimonial?

No.

The ability to transform your answers into something powerful that makes a listener say, oh, that’s me! Or oh, that sounds just like my wife!

Or, that sounds just like so many of my clients! (Says my hairstylists/my dermatologist/my dentist)

That is what gets you the next step. The curious other person who isn’t just waiting for the polite conversation to be over.

Where it goes wrong

In too many cases, when you say… oh I’m a personal trainer or a health coach, they just assume that they know you by their own personal experience with a trainer or health coach. There’s no need for more conversation. If you say Medical Exercise Specialist, Pilates instructor, Yoga Teacher, it’s the same. Nothing – not even an identifier of “midlife women” or “menopause” helps you there.

You friend, are burying your opportunity not to tell people you’re award-winning fitness instructor, or international presenter, or certified or master degree holding..  which are all commodities and labels that mean nothing about your ability to relate to your next prospect.

It’s not about you. It’s about them.

You can build credibility without listing your degrees, certifications, and it definitely can’t be done by giving yourself a label.

Resonate with You?

If you want more, meet me for a special masterclass. I’m sharing 3 of the marketing mistakes I see trainers and health coaches unintentionally do every day.

If you work with midlife women – and who doesn’t or won’t – they make up 80% of personal training clients, I’ll also be sharing 3 of the most common mistakes trainers – even experienced ones are making with their clients. (or themselves) ATTEND FOR FREE

What I say. (in episode!)

Can you describe yourself this way? In a way that makes someone say, oh that’s me? Not with a cold blank label that is generic?

You're Invited:

Who doesn’t need and want more revenue generating actions?

Note I said actions and not ideas. My goal is not to give you a list of very good ideas. What I want you to do is treat this like a check list. It may be a reminder for things you have done and have worked but you just stopped doing. The first step is to not assume everyone already knows about you and they’ll come find you when they’re ready. 

Free masterclass with 3 biggest marketing mistakes and 3 training mistakes that miss with midlife women.

1. Host a Free Challenge

            These are hot for good reason. Make it targeted enough it attracts and serves your exact demographic (That isn’t every possible customer in your geographical area. It’s the specific 66-year-old woman concerned about osteoporosis, getting weaker, gaining weight, and not wanting to be frail like her mother). The value is your follow up offer. Make it congruent with the challenge. It’s not just generic “personal training.” A package that feels complete and solves the buyer’s problems is what sells someone.

2. Create a Paid Challenge

            This is my preference. I like someone to be invested. It's already revenue generating from the beginning. The saying goes, when you pay you pay attention. It’s so true. Otherwise, it’s nothing but another email reminder or thing to have to do but nothing at stake so why bother? Someone misses a day and they’re likely to skip out altogether if they didn’t pay. Challenges don’t need to be a big investment though. Host it for $19 or $27 or $49 at most depending on the length of the challenge.

Some challenge hosts will do a free challenge but also include an upsell to a better VIP experience, including maybe hot seats, or handouts, or additional materials or access to live presentations inside a group.

3. Host A Live Event

Make it a presentation that is news and noteworthy.  Holiday weight gain realities vs myths. Where it usually comes from. How to eat more and not gain weight.

4. Host an Online Event

Yourself, invite a panel, invite a guest. But make sure you’re solving a problem. You’re giving a unique and tangible offer. Meaning 3 healthy family-proof recipes they’ll all love, 5 short workouts for holiday health (and sanity).

5. Host a Virtual “Open House”

Just your house! Let them see behind the scenes! Your fans love to know what you do, and what works for you. 

6. Host an “Open House”

            By appointment this year rather than a large social gather. Yes, it's like a sales appointment, but it feels different with this frame. And treat them differently. Give them favors, refreshments, treats that are unique. 

7. Get Booked on a Podcast (or 5)

            Target podcasts that serve your same audience. Someone who does something complimentary, not exactly what you do. Reach out, introduce yourself, make it clear you’ve listened to previous episodes and understand what they want. Provide the 3-5 take-aways for listeners. Let the host know how you add value to listeners, and mention your own email list and social media following. It matters.

            The value of a guest is ...

8. Social Media tour live at two busiest times of the week

            If you own a brick-and-mortar business, I know it’s been tough. Don’t forget ways to help those who’ve fallen off the bandwagon to come back in. Think about their biggest objections. No ignoring that it may be safety, and the mask and vaccine situation. There may not be a lot you can do about that except nurture them. Stay connected. Be a source of healthy immune boosting habits that people can do at home if they’re not back yet.

            But what if it’s something else? What if ...

9. Post a recipe a day during a specific time period

•             December
•             12 Days of Christmas
•             September Tailgating

            That’s not all though. Make an offer each time you post...

10. Create a membership

            ...There are so many ways to use a membership. Maybe it’s a way to add value to current training clients with extras like recipes, meal plans, workouts when they’re not with you, traveling plans that include tubing/bands/body weight only. Maybe there are extra perks inside your membership that feature discounts or a special relationship with select vendors (you have rounded up). It could also be a second or third step after a course or training so that someone who feels they’ve got this, can just stay consistent with support.

11. Create an online course

            You know those questions you’re asked all the time? That’s a course. Are there people who want to go deeper on a topic but you just don’t have the time to do it one-on-one and can’t get a big enough group to participate at the same time? That’s a course. If it solves a problem, answers a question, it’s a course. 

12. Get booked on local Media

            If you’re hosting events, whether presentations and panels or races, or open houses, it could be news. If it has a who, what, when and it’s relevant to the community, it’s news. Here's how...

13. Get affiliate partners

            When it’s time to grow, really scale, you’ll no longer be exchanging time for money. You’ll have programs you’ve proven to achieve good transformations for clients. You’ll know what words you used, the exact emails, and the social media copy that helped bring people to a yes. That’s when it’s time to start recruiting affiliates. Partner with people who need a program like you offer. The ideal candidate is someone who doesn’t do what you do but works with the same audience you do. What you offer has to be in their customers or patients’ best interest.

Does your copy suck?Copywriting course so that you can write copy that works and speaks to your female buyers better. 

14. Use Affiliate partners of your own

            You use products and tools or wear workout gear you love that you know would help your clients be more successful too. Why not set up affiliate relationships so you can earn money promoting them? 

15. I also affiliate for my colleagues

            Much of the time these are people who just as before, serve the same audience that I do. But I also share my list with a friend I trust who does something similar to me, with a unique process different than mine...

16. Host a paid retreat/workshop

            Now is a good time to offer one no matter where you live. Indoors or out. How could you create a fitness “camp” for adults and allow them to flow from yoga to spinning, then weight training to foam rolling. Maybe there’s a place to serve them lunch catered in from a restaurant or food truck. This can be a great revenue generating strategy in itself. But at the event you can also upsell to training or coaching packages. 

17. Offer to do paid workshops/retreats for other businesses

            Who needs you? The answer is more people that you realize. What business needs a moral boost for employees right now? What business would welcome a stress reduction yoga session or joy-enhancing practice of meditation for its employees? Whether it’s during the stressful holiday season or any other time of year. What businesses did well during the pandemic? Incredibly well or were extraordinarily busy? 

18. Send Another Email (or 4)

            If you nurture your email list and you have a good offer, an email (or series of emails) should always produce sales for you. Be cautious about burning your list out by not only sending sales and promotional emails. Continue to regularly share valuable content (to them) in the same vein they subscribed to your email list in the first place. Then when you do make an offer, some of them will be thinking that this was perfect timing and will be glad to purchase it.

This episode is filled with gold for marketing all year. Treat it as a checklist! Keep it close.

Answer these questions for yourself:

Which of these are most urgent for fast growth? 

Which of these do you want to implement in 2022 but need more thought to do well? 

I know what I'd tell you! (what I'd tell our mastermind members).

Are you starting a new business as personal trainer? You’ll want to listen to this episode. I interview Jen Shaver who is in her second career. We hear here story of starting and growing her personal training business.

My Guest:

Jennifer Shaver from Fit with Shaver. She is a former endurance athlete who spent many years doing countless triathlons, 7 full marathons and 9 half marathons.

Jen didn’t enter the age group world of running until age 33 but, once she started the only thing holding her back was her pain. During her endurance athlete time she was suffering from bulging discs, anemia and extreme joint pain because she didn’t implement several important factors into her training as she was aging. As a child of the 80’s she is a reformed cardio junkie and has changed her ways and her pain.

New Career

Jen is a former middle and high school Spanish teacher who has combined her love of teaching and enthusiasm for fitness together and has taken her talents from the classroom to online to help the busy midlife woman learn to make exercise work for their body, for their hormones and for their schedules. She offers a variety of online, at home strength training classes for the everyday busy woman with no extreme moves.

Jen describes all of her workouts put the fun in functional training and are void of vomit-inducing burpees, crunches, and jumping. Just the functional movements that will lead to a strong healthy life filled with enjoyment and movement. 

She enjoys sharing her knowledge as a triple certified fitness expert to help women experience the mood and energy boosting effects of exercise. Her workouts are designed to make you feel empowered, not defeated. 

Questions we answer in this episode:

1). How did Fit with Shaver come to be?

2.) What exactly do you do at Fit with Shaver?

3.) What is your niche?

4.) What has been the hardest part of starting a new business/career?

5) What have you learned from starting your business to now?

6) What do you think makes you unique?

7) What has been the biggest “aha” about the business of fitness?

8) What do you want for your business in 2022?

Connect:

fitwithshaver.com

She’s Social too!

Instagram: Fit with Shaver

Facebook: Fit with Shaver

Are you starting a new business as a personal trainer or health coach? Start right with this masterclass where I share the 3 biggest mistakes in training women in midlife AND the 3 biggest mistakes marketing to them.

Resources:

Masterclass for Starting or Growing Your Business

Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist

Avoid burnout post pandemic no matter what the reason you have it.

Stop scrambling to compete with someone else.

The best way to beat comparison mode is two things:

• Know your customer better than everyone else

            What are the problems they have and want solved right now?

            What do they know now and what do you want them to know?    

            What do they feel now and what do you want them to feel? (all things you can learn in my Copywriting Course)

            Are you focused on a budget-minded shopper or someone who will spend whatever?

            Does your appearance, brand, and stance attract her or repel?

• Rise above the noise

            Instead of competing and worrying about what someone does, do your thing. No one can compete with you being better and ahead.

Remember why you’re doing what you’re doing and what parts you like and do more of that.

If what you love is teaching fitness, say you love it as much as I love researching science and breaking it down into applicable actions, then figure out a way to do more of it.

You’ve got to do the basics of choosing the right audience, knowing how to reach them, understanding how to create a funnel. But then you can and should do the things that light you up and less of those things that make the light go out.

Keep it simple instead of buying all the things you very likely don’t need.

You don’t need a YouTube channel and a podcast, and a blog all at once. Two things inform how you create valuable content. (By the way content that you share via email – if you’re still focused on social media first, you’ve got it backwards. Content starts at your website. Then you share it with your social media posts. You always, always, want to bring people to your website.)

Resources Mentioned:

Copywriting course