How Digital Marketing And Social Media Marketing Are Related

Trafficful Marketing

Let’s begin with digital marketing. Digital marketing and social media marketing are closely related as social media is one of the channels used in digital marketing. Digital marketing refers to any marketing activity that is done through digital channels, such as email marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Secondly, social media marketing is a specific type of digital marketing that focuses on using social media platforms namely Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, to promote your fitness program, transformation services, or fitness brand. It involves creating and sharing content, engaging with followers, and running targeted advertising campaigns on social media platforms.

Therefore, as a personal trainer, social media can be a valuable tool for promoting your services, building your brand, and staying connected with your clients and prospects. The aim is to can build your brand and grow your client base. Stay active on social media by:

Posting regularly. Consistent posting is key to staying active on social media. Plan out a content calendar and schedule posts in advance to ensure that you are posting regularly.
Collaborating with other trainers or fitness influencers. Collaborating with other trainers or fitness influencers can help you reach a new audience and provide valuable content for your followers.
Offer exclusive content. Try providing workout plans or nutrition tips, to your followers to encourage them to follow you and engage with your posts.

Social media marketing is an important part of digital marketing because it allows fitness businesses to reach a large audience, engage with clients and prospects, and build brand awareness. Social media platforms can provide your fitness businesses with the opportunity to create and share relevant and valuable content with your audience and to build a relationship with your followers.

Conclusion

In summary, social media marketing is a subset of digital marketing that focuses on using social media channels to promote your fitness classes, products or services. While digital marketing encompasses a more expansive range of marketing activities that are done through digital channels. There you have it, that’s how digital marketing and social media marketing are related.

Are you ready to launch your social media fitness profile? Check out my blog about Launching Your Personal Trainer Social Media Profile.

4 Steps to Writing a Sound Fitness Business Marketing Plan

Trafficful Marketing

Here are four steps for writing a sound fitness business marketing plan for your fitness team or personal trainer business. I’ve created many marketing and business plans throughout my past years of studies. The subject of marketing or a business plan can get complicated and extensive very fast yet, I will try to simplify my explanation as much as possible. Today I’m going to go through the first couple of stages in developing a sound marketing plan for your fitness brand. The first couple of steps will provide you with a situation analysis of the fitness industry and what you should take into consideration, these steps can sound very dry, but please bear with me. It’s important because it gives you a holistic view of what’s happening in the market. Let’s get started.

SWOT Analysis

You ought to know what sources of information will help you to identify and understand important developments affecting your goods and services, customers and competition. So what does that mean? That’s things like SWOT analysis, which is your strengths, weakness, opportunities and strengths. So it’s like a square and there are four blocks and you have the strength on the top left side and then on the right side, you have your weaknesses. Then you have your opportunities left and threats right bottom of the square. The strengths and weaknesses are based on your company which is your internal organisation. An example of strengths would be your capabilities or your unique selling advantage and weakness the disadvantages within your company. That’s where the strength and weaknesses originate from.

Then you are looking at the outside environment or what’s happening around you. And these are where you get your opportunities and threat from the Pestle analysis. A Pestel analysis is covering topics in the area of political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental. Technological includes social media and changing dynamics like Facebook now being meta. How does that influence your social media marketing strategy? Legal would be like, GDPR and data privacy. Another topic that would be a mix of legal and technical aspects, Apple introduced the option for users to just answer unsubscribe from your email list, so that’s a threat of losing subscribers which you have no control over.

So those are the most essential parts of the current situation analysis. That’s your SWOT, where you’re getting your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strengths and weaknesses, that’s your internal organisation and opportunities and threats, you’re getting that from the Pestel analysis.

Industry Analysis

Analyse the industry and your niche for your fitness business marketing plan. You know who your consumers are, and the competitiveness of the industry, and investigate the trends and substitutes. What are the demands, needs, and perceptions because these change over time. Maybe when you first started as a personal trainer, maybe five years ago or so. If you’re just starting during the Pandemic, you can assume that if you launched in October, the perception that it’s still pretty much about the same. But if you started pre-pandemic, I would say that you need to verify whether customer needs and perceptions are still the same. Maybe there are different product demands.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll see that I post once a week about different trends taking place. Therefore, I can confirm there are changes in consumer demands. Fitness consumers are more focused on yoga, mental health, stress relief activities, and the flexibility to work out from home as well as from the gym. Consequently, spending on exercise equipment and gadgets continues to increase. Those are just some of changing consumer behaviour in the fitness market. These are things that you need to think about and how you can manage your customer relationships with these changing demands and needs within your current client base and new client base.

If your fitness business marketing plan covers more than one country, so an online scope of clients, how will you uncover and monitor regional and international issues that can help or hurt your marketing efforts? This is probably a little bit more challenging because, at least to my knowledge, I don’t know of any one particular source where you can go and all these changing factors are presented to you. You can sign up for Google Alerts, for everything that has to do with fitness trends or fitness statistics. It’s pretty helpful to save research time, you will get an email from Google in your inbox. This can be useful to cover topics for a pestle analysis and industry analysis. But other than that, you need to actively search for the information. if you are also providing service to the European Union, you need to comply with GDPR standards.

Monitor external forces that can influence your marketing. What insights into marketing, successes, and failures from other organisations can help you to anticipate or understand changes in the internal and external environment? What successes have they experienced or what learnings have they uncovered? A lot of best practices and learning from other personal trainers way before the pandemic might not be relevant now in the time that we’re living in. Take best practices and learnings from other personal trainers in terms of the big picture. That way you’re less likely to use approaches or strategies that are no longer applicable.

We’re entering a post-pandemic phase, where things are moving along, but it’s still hanging around. I think the big picture aspect of providing personal training services, is that people want results. They want to get their transformation results efficiently, not too expensive, and they want to feel like they’re getting good value for their money. Do the former creatively and uniquely, then you have a unique selling advantage.

Segmentation

Additionally, you want to determine a segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy. In other words, it means that you need to niche down. Because, you don’t have all the resources like people, money, and time to serve every single customer. It is nearly impossible to serve all customers exactly the way they want to be served. There’s weight loss, toning, weight gain, strength training, physiotherapy, and so much more. Even a well-established personal trainer doesn’t have all the resources to meet such a demand without sacrificing quality.

Decide which segments, based on characteristics, behaviour, and needs are the ones you can accommodate to your absolute greatest ability. What do you already have experience with? If you looked at my previous blog post, I’ve talked about this quite a few times, how to select a niche. So have a listen at those audio and then you can continue here on developing your marketing plan.

Once you’ve selected a niche or a couple of niches, you need to decide how are you going to approach them with your offer in terms of your marketing plan. How are you going to reach these different niches in this through different marketing tools? Hence, you’ll need a social media marketing strategy, even offline, or you can create a multi-channel approach towards attracting these niches. You must think about that because you can say, “I want to go after that niche”, but how do you plan on reaching them? You need to have a plan for how you intend to communicate with your niche. Meaning that you understand where they hang out and have ideas on building awareness through respective communication channels. Otherwise, it’s wishful thinking without having the means to execute.

Market Positioning

How do you want to position your fitness brand in the market? Do you want to be completely different from other brands or are you going to create a brand similar to other existing fitness brands? Do you want to be a market follower or an industry leader? Will you follow the status quo, by not standing out and doing things the same way as other personal trainers or fitness teams? Do you want to be a market leader and change the game in the industry, causing other personal trainers and fitness teams to rethink how they have been doing things? To challenge existing perceptions and beliefs. How can you offer a better service, more convenience, more economical, and more effective transformation fitness journey?

Conclusion

I tried not to go too much in detail. Those are the main fitness business marketing plan checklist topics I touched on here. And I still need to see how what’s the best format to present such information to you, because I know it can be a lot. I have just presented four stages. And that’s an analysis of the current situation, researching and analysing the market and your customers. You’re determining your segmentation, so how you are going to reach your segments and how you want to position yourself in the minds of these segments and establish your brand voice. Setting your objective where you want to be in the market. Whether you want to be a market leader, or penetrate the market by gaining more market shares? Or you want to deliver new products and be innovative.

Follow me on instagram for more marketing tips for personal trainers.

How To Find Your Ideal Customer: Tools You Can Use To Help Your Fitness Team Move Forward!

Trafficful Marketing

Let’s talk about finding your ideal customer! Your customer segment is your niche, your ideal customer. And you’re looking for them and they are looking for you. Finding your ideal customer is a challenge we all can identify with when starting a new business and developing a fitness program.

How do you find your customer? It’s a big question and not an easy one to answer, nor does it consist of a straightforward or linear process. However, what I can tell you is there’re tools you can use to help guide you along the way. I’m going to present some of those tools to you. I was introduced to the Empathy Map, Value Proposition Canvas and The Business Model Canvas in 2014, in the Netherlands as part of my specialisation course where we used the three tools extensively to help Dutch startups to validate their business model assumptions. In this blog post, I’m only going to talk about how to use two of those tools and lead magnets to identify your ideal customer.

I believe that my ideal customer is searching for me and I’m searching for them. It’s kind of like dating. How do you know that you found the right person? Yeah, that’s the client I want, this person is committed. Things won’t always be perfect, but I see that this person can follow my instructions, they’re willing to learn, and they’re willing to listen. I can definitely work with that, all the light goes ding… ding… yep. This person is coachable. That’s kind of the situation as a personal trainer in terms of finding a client.

Lead Magnets

I believe lead magnets (a.k.a freebies) provide an added value in helping to find your ideal customer. Another thing that we want to bear in mind is that a prospect should be able to experience your service with little to no risk. Because, yes, you want to make your offer attractive, and you want to introduce prospects to what you are offering. Therefore, it’s great to have free PDFs with some workout guides. Maybe a nice little meal plan or a free workout that you’ve recorded on Zoom or a live workout that you provide. As an introduction, so that the prospect can discover you, what you stand for as a personal trainer, that you can help them achieve this and that.

Then they can decide more accurately decide. You can see yourself working with that prospect and they can see themself training with you as it was such a pleasant experience. Present a picture to the prospect of what it would be like if they decided to sign up for your fitness program That’s called future pacing.

The prospect can see themself doing regular workouts that you provide. They can see themself getting along with you and vice versa. You have to engage with this person regularly, you need to build up the trust and understanding.

Freebies are not the only thing that helps you to find your ideal customer. Also, you want to be careful about people that don’t commit anything only wasting your time and energy. They go from one freebie to the next. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as there’s an intention, that when they find a person or a service that suits what they’re looking for, they’ll commit. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time because there’s, there’s no intention to commit to anything even if the fit is right.

If you can identify a prospect’s intention by asking questions relating to motives and goals, you can better navigate where or how you should invest your energy.

Value Proposition Canvas

Another way you can create communication and identify your ideal customer is the value proposition canvas. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this tool before. The value proposition canvas is very well used in the startup world, with which I have experience. I specialise in developing and innovating business models.

With the value proposition canvas, you can look at your ideal customer and list the different jobs they aim to get done. If you haven’t identified your niche yet, you can experiment with the value proposition canvas to test your numerous hypotheses with surveys. Each customer has a job that they want to solve or that they want to get done. As a personal trainer, you’re selling a transformation solution.

Customers who are in need of a personal trainer come with a transformation job needs that are measurable and concise, which is great for judging the level of transformation. Examples include but or are not limited to “lower cholesterol”, “increase endurance”, “drop a dress size”, “gain 5kg” and so forth.

Then there’s the gains section within the value proposition canvas. What does the prospect hope to gain, “to look good” would be one, to “feel good” would be another one, and also “overall better health”. Gains can also mean a “greater sense of well being”, “more energy to run around with their kids”, or “to look smashing on their wedding day”. You can also interpret gain as the end result.

Then there are pains and frustration. What are the obstacles that tend to hinder a customer from achieving those results? Whether the issue is finding time to exercise, financing the sessions, or having the right mindset. I think the customer’s mindset is one of the greatest challenges that personal trainers face. Getting people in a state of mind where they can change their unhealthy behaviours and habits. Behavioural changes to the point where it’s easier for the prospect to follow through on what they agreed to do on a consistent basis.

How these three elements of the customer segment match together with your fitness program is called the value proposition. Within the fitness program you’re selling, there are “gain creators”, which is about how well you can keep creating those gains for that particular customer. Gain creators are where it’s worthwhile to know your customers and be able to interact with them. Take notes during those interactions, to pinpoint what gains your prospect is seeking, so you can develop a fitness program that matches those desires.

How can you help this prospect achieve their job in a much shorter time, while it still being a sustainable method? You’re decreasing the time it takes to get results, or you’re increasing the type of results in the same time frame. That’s where you start to innovate, you step outside of the box and change the game. You’re on the next level.

After gain creators come “pain relievers”. Mindset is one of the greatest challenges to changing habits. As such, you create a service that helps prospects with their mindset. Maybe in the form of a newsletter that goes out weekly or monthly. Aimed to help change behaviour and increase motivation.

So the customer is looking for your pain relievers for their problems, as they search for a personal trainer. You, as the personal trainer is on the lookout for those pain points because you know that you have the perfect solution for those pain points.

Lastly, you have the actual fitness program, your skills and experience as a personal trainer, which leads to the actual training and courses and the services that come with it. Let’s say your fitness program is aimed at improving athletes’ endurance. A prospect comes to the conclusion that you have a skill that they haven’t seen from any other personal trainer which and therefore decides to signup with you. There’s a ding… ding… in the prospect’s mind, match found.

Empathy Map

Another way to facilitate that is with keywords. Keywords are also a great way for you to identify your customers. Let’s take a deep dive into understanding the customer with the empathy map. The empathy map allows you to go deeper into the customer segments with questions such as, “what does the customer say and do?”, “what does the customer think and feel?”, “what does the customer hear?”, “what does the customer see?”. The customer’s pains and overall goal are also topics within the empathy map. Once you’ve answered those questions accurately, you can extract the keywords you should be using in your social media content strategy.

Consistently apply that approach for 30 days and measure the response compared to the month before. As I previously mentioned, this is not a straightforward process, and it’s mostly about trial and error. The key takeaway here is, to document what’s working and what doesn’t work.

Conclusion

I’ve presented three great tools that you can use for matchmaking with your ideal customer. To conclude, it’s good to have lead magnets but be careful not to attract customers that are looking to try everything yet commit to nothing. Get deep and identify some key attributes, characteristics, demographics, lifestyle, values, and beliefs of your ideal customer.

Speak their languages when you create content for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and others. That’s part of the matchmaking process.

Check out my Podcast on Anchor for more niche topics to help you find your ideal customer.

Nine Social Media Organic Reach Ideas For Personal Trainers

Trafficful Marketing

Define Organic Reach

Maybe you are new to the field of personal training, you’re just starting out? As a result, you need to dive deep into these marketing terms, since you’re not that familiar. Well, if that’s the case, let me tell you what’s organic marketing, organic reach organic traffic. Organic traffic is the number of people that you’re able to reach with your content posts, without paying money to a social media platform to distribute your content to a specified group of users. Essentially, there’re no paid ads involved. When you post your content on social media, it shows up in your newsfeeds or story.

When you post on Facebook, your friends see your posts, they’ll like, comment or share your post. These are all kinds of organic traffic. Then you have paid traffic as well. Paid traffic is when you pay to promote content that you publish to a specific audience. You could be targeting people with a specific interest, or users who follow certain influencers. In this blog post, I’m only going to be focusing on organic traffic.

Make Friends

I recently read a book called “Traffic Secrets” by Russell Brand Brunson, and I really love the way he talks about social media and networking on social media. In this book, Russel Brunson says that “the goal of social media and social networking is to invite people back to your home.” From there, you introduce them into your offering.

What does that mean exactly? It’s kind of like if you would go to a party, and there are a lot of people there, and instead of genuinely trying to get to know the people at the party, you start trying to sell to them right away. Everyone would probably try to avoid you because they want to relax, have fun, talk casually, and socialise. That’s an example of what not to do. I really like the concept of looking at social media from that perspective, it’s about inviting people back to your profile. Being cool, fun, social and at some point, you’re going to introduce them to your offering, you are going to tell them about your services and why your product is better than other fitness programs out there. You are going to go there at some point in time. But in the beginning, it’s really about establishing yourself as the cool new kid on the block. It’s about building relationships and making friends.

You can also think about it like this. When you’re the new kid in school, you don’t start the first day of school trying to sell something to fellow students, who don’t even know you. You just transferred there from another school or something similar. The first thing they will ask you is, who are you. They don’t know if they like you, and they most certainly don’t trust you. Those are the three things that you need to establish when building a relationship with someone for the first time. Eventually, you will have the opportunity to tell them about your offering. So that’s the first and most important idea that I want to present to you.

Follow the 80/20 Rule

Don’t only promote your products and services. Try to implement the 80/20 rule. You want to post 80% content that’s adding value to your audience. Value that your audience can access, get better results, or acquire knowledgeable insights. You can offer your audience a free item, such as a weight-loss guide, or an eating out guide. The remainder 20%, do promote your offer. Create a strong call-to-action then share with your audience why they need your fitness program and how they can get it today with your strong call to action. Say something like, “My new fitness program will help you lose 10 pounds in 6 weeks without giving up your favourite food”.

It Takes Two

Engage with individuals on social media. I’m talking about likes, comments, and replies, shares, save their post and tell the person that you saved their post. You’re engaging with people interacting with your posts, and you’re interacting with other users posts, but you’re also very focused on engagement in terms of your one on one interactions via direct messaging. Remember, you want other users to come back to your “home”, which is your social media profile, and engage back with you.

The Hangout Spot

Say your target audience or your niche is on Instagram three hours to five hours a day. They’re checking what’s going on every hour, every 30 minutes or so that’s a lot there’s spending on Instagram. So that’s where they’re hanging out. Compared to, if they’re only on Facebook, like once a day, they’re just checking their messages maybe twice a day. This means they’re not really hanging out there. It’s not that they don’t go to this platform, they do. It’s just not where they go regularly and stay there for a long time. So that’s what hanging out refers to here. Therefore, find out where your audience is hanging out. Then decide, whether you will go with Facebook or Instagram. You could also do both, and see which one works better for you.

Potential Partnerships On Instagram

What I really like about Instagram is that I’m not only able to engage with my ideal customer and my niche, but I also have the opportunity to develop a relationship with other businesses within the industry, which could lead to partnerships. Partnerships are an important aspect of developing your business and your fitness program since you cannot do everything on your own. So this is what I truly love about Instagram. Instagram is also very visual orientated, that’s another important thing you need to consider. Whereas with Facebook, you can get away with a lot more content that’s based on text. On Instagram, it’s really about visuals, bright images, videos, and audio.

Facebook Community

With Facebook, you can create groups. With Facebook, it’s easy to create a community and be part of a community. You can also join groups created by Facebook users as long as the group is related to your niche and post content in those groups. When you post content in groups created by other users, you want to make friends first. Start by introducing yourself, establish the know, like, and trust as previously discussed. Get to know and understand the audience within the group. As you engage within the group, you are building this “know, like and trust”. Have an interesting profile picture, they’ll be more likely to click on your profile picture, which will take them to your profile. They’ll see your profile details and posts. These are ways that you can, engage on social media.

Building a community on Facebook and engagement. If you have your own group, you need to know that it’s a lot of time investment on your part. You need to regularly invite users to the group, at least ten new users a day. Regularly post in your group, at least two posts a day. In the beginning, your audience might not be that interactive in the group, not that engaged. So you are the one driving everything in your group. Unless you outsource it to a virtual assistant, you’re the one that’s posting content consistently every single day. You do that for the whole week, for the entire month, then for an entire year. Eventually, you’ll have built quite a large following. I’m not gonna downplay this, having a group takes work. So if you want to do that as a way for you to generate traffic to your profile and website, go for it knowing what you’re getting yourself into and mentally prepare yourself for the work that’s it going to require. The easier way around that is to just join other people’s groups and add value to that group.

Build Authority

At a certain point, start to build authority within the Facebook groups that you’ve joined. So with all the content that you’re posting, you want to set yourself as the authority figure for a particular topic. In the beginning, you might feel like you don’t really know what you’re talking about as a new personal trainer. It’s okay. You will get there soon enough, as you learn, as you practice, as you get more clients, you will become more of an expert.

How do you build authority you ask? You can achieve that by having interviews with people who are knowledgeable about the topic. That’s one way you can do it. You can share some of your favourite breakfast ideas for getting the morning started on a healthy note. Alternatively, share testimonials on your newsfeed. Maybe even record a Q&A where you’re answering questions related to your fitness program. You can do a live video and answer questions spontaneously, that’s a great way to build authority. You can also share industry news, what are industry trends and statistics.

Strong Headline

Ask questions to get engagement and have a clear call to action when you’re posting your content. What do you want people to do? Do you want them to visit your website? Do you want them to sign up for your next fitness program or your next Bootcamp?

You want to have a strong headline. Make sure your headline speaks directly to your niche. Your audience is searching for a particular result or guide on how to get something done. You want to make sure that you include keywords in your headline so that they are more likely to come across your post, YouTube video, or blog article. Instagram enables an SEO feature, so that users can search for a specific word, and they will find everything related to that keyword. Users can search for “personal trainers” and find tags and accounts relating to personal trainers. So definitely incorporate keywords into your content post.

Branding

You’re building your presence and your brand image relates to everything you post. As you’re posting content on social media, your brand is not only the colours you use. Yes, colours are important in developing a theme, but your brand is also who’s your niche. It’s also the voice that you use, what’s the voice of your brand? Is it optimistic? Strong? Feminine? Is it inspiration or a “can-do attitude”. So all these tangible, intangible feelings that you give to your audience. This impacts the way your brand is perceived within the mind of your customers. You want to be strategic and be aware of what you’re doing and the brand voice you’re developing as you post content daily.

In Conclusion

We’re all human beings, and such there is a factor of human error to take into consideration, so don’t be too stuffy. Keep your posts short and sweet. The attention time limit on Instagram stories is 15 seconds. If you want your video post to show up on your newsfeed, max 59 seconds. For Facebook, you can go a full 60 seconds.

So those are the topics that I wanted to talk to you about when it comes to organic reach. One last note if you would like to venture into doing ads at a future point in time. Test your content organically first. Gauge the response towards your content as you’re testing and keep your budget low because you’re still figuring out what works.

Launching Your Personal Trainer Social Media Profile

Trafficful Marketing

Six things to consider when launching your personal trainer social media profile, based on my experience. All stemmed from trial and error. I launched my business marketing for personal trainers last year, it was 2020, around the ending of the year, and I needed to build up my social media account. I created an Instagram account. I’m already on Instagram, with my private profile, but I also wanted to create a business account for the marketing for personal trainers profile. I will go through a few things that you want to consider. Information that I took into consideration when I created my business account for personal trainers.

Niche Down

Firstly, you need to have a niche. You need to know who is your audience because this influences everything. It influences how you go about your branding, the type of content you create, and your offer. If you don’t have this, it’s like, blah, blah, and more blah. It’s like taking paint and throwing it on a canvas. And there’re multiple colours, and everything is just a mess. That would be what you’re doing if you don’t have a niche. Therefore, pick a niche. That’s the primary thing.

Strong Call-To-Action

You also want to think about where you want your customers or the people who visit your page to go? Where should they go when they go to your Instagram profile? Is it just that they go to your profile? Or do you have a link for them to visit? Do you have a link to one of your special classes that visitors or prospects can try out for free? Do you have a free consultation where they can get feedback from you on what they could improve, and from there on, go on to make them an offer. You want to have a follow-up page so that prospects can reach out to you to connect, ask any questions, and get further information.

Have something that you’re selling or ofter a freebee as a lead magnet. An offer, that is readily available to promote on your Instagram or Facebook profile. I’m more into Instagram. My audience, who are personal trainers, are hanging out on Instagram. Instagram is the place to be because it’s video. Personal trainers can upload their workouts on there. It’s very engaging and interactive. You always want to ask yourself, “where is my audience hanging out?”. Once you know the answer to that question, you know which platform you should be using.

See for yourself in my content posts that I also do promotional posts. I don’t only post value content for my audience, which is great and everything. But, you also want to put your offer out there. See how my offering has developed from the very beginning until the present. Try and see if you can recognise the voice that I’m using. What kind of message am I sending to my audience? That’s my brand voice.

Multiple Instagram Accounts

Next, you want to consider what type of account you want. You can do a creators account, a professional account, business accounts, and these different accounts have different features. So the business account gives you insights on who liked your post, saw your stories, saved your post, and so forth. Please remember that some of these insight features depend on the country that you’re living in and, your country’s respective data privacy policies. Different countries will have varying visibility options. With the business account, you can see insights about how many likes you received and if anyone did an action after seeing your posts.

I use a business account, it works very well for me. I like it like that. I would recommend it as well. But you know what works best for you, and you can try it out. I’ve tried the content creator and then I was like “okay, this is not necessarily what I’m looking for, back to the business account.” So you can experiment with that as well.

Manage Instagram Accounts

Another important thing is linking your business account to your personal account. There are ways you can set this up in Instagram so that you can go back and forth between your personal account and your business account. Why this is so important is that you want to be active on both profiles. In my situation, I’m active on both profiles, on my private profile and the business profile. I want to be able to engage with comments and likes. And, you know, it shouldn’t be like, “oh, I have to log out of my private profile. and then I need to login to my business account, and what’s the password again?”. Then you’ll find likes, or comments from three hours ago, five hours ago, or even worse, one day ago.

If you know how the Instagram algorithm works. You know it’s essential to respond to comments within two hours. Hence, this is vital for your engagement rating. Especially when you get a direct message from a prospect, sent hours ago, and see that the next day. I can tell you, that’s not great. So you want to make it so that you can go back and forth between accounts. You add an account and use the same password or a different one. I highly recommend that you do this step to make sure that your engagement is live and active. Here’s a link that explains how you can manage multiple Instagram accounts.

Branding is Gold

Additionally, you want to think about branding. Guys, branding, branding, branding, branding, I can’t stop saying that enough. Branding is imperative. People underestimate the power of branding. Branding is a feeling that you give to customers. Branding is the colours they see in your posts, the way you speak, what you stand for as a personal trainer, your values, your mission statement, and so much more. If you don’t do branding, then this also makes it very challenging for you to stand out amongst the sea of other personal trainers.

There’re so many personal trainers around the world. Now, with the digital capabilities, which have been pushed into high gear since COVID. The pandemic has made it easy for prospects to get online services and do their workouts from home. So branding is super important. Branding is not only aesthetics. Aesthetics are colours and the visual aspect of your profile. Go to my Instagram profile trafficful_marketing, and you’ll better understand what I mean.

Scroll down to the beginning of how I started. You can see that my branding was a little bit not so great, right? It was a little bit messy. I was still experimenting with colours, experimenting with different types of content. You can see that I had some memes in there, and the memes weren’t necessarily working for me. So I cut that out. As you go further up, you can see how I continued to develop a brand that speaks to my audience.

Large Content

Moreover, you want to consider having a large piece of content that you can break down into smaller topics and a list of topics that can add value to your niche. Again, this is why choosing a niche is super important. I cannot stress this point enough. If you don’t have a niche, you don’t know where you’re going. You don’t have a map, you don’t have a destination. You’re just wandering around in the desert, with no plan.

A large piece of content could be anything, a book or even a blog post. Maybe you’ve written a book in the past. Maybe you’ve created a workout guide for your fitness program, and this document is free and available. And then you write some promotional content from that material for what you’re selling. Then you’re posting that once a week. You can also generate a list of topics for your niche. Your lists of topics are always evolving. Consequently, you always want to be creating large pieces of content and breaking it down into smaller actionable posts for your social media profile.

Social Media Calendar

Use a social media calendar, this is where having a large piece of content for your promotional post, and for your list of topics comes in handy. You want to plan that in a social media calendar. Yeah. You can use Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and have an entire month in one sheet. All the days of the month, you don’t need to put Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so forth. You can simply put the month and 1,2,3,4,5, until 31. Then you’re filling in the posts for each day.

On Monday, you do a motivation post, next day statistics, and then on Wednesday, I do a promo material. On Thursday, I do an informative marketing and business model topics. Then on Friday, I will do quotes. Or I will do a funny animal post because I love dogs. I love all animals. But I specifically love dogs. And I know my niche. They are also dog lovers. I rotate between my posts. You need to develop your format as well with the information that you know about your niche. So your niche is your guidance and helps you decide on the best way to go about this. So these are my six things to consider when launching your social media profile.

Conclusion

Many of the examples that I’ve given here tend to apply to Instagram because that’s the platform of choice for me. In the beginning, I didn’t go only to Instagram. I started a Facebook group and Facebook Page as well while posting on Instagram. And I saw, I got better results in terms of engagement, not only engagement from my target audience, but also engagement with people from my industries and other personal trainers. Organisations that are training personal trainers, or other fitness instructors, so I thought there was a lot more value in it for me, in terms of engagement and interaction on both sides of the aspect.

I absolutely recommend you try both in the beginning. Then focus on what works for you, which brings you the results that want. Again, check out my Instagram business profile, and you can see what I’m talking about in terms of these topics. Or contact me if you have any further questions.