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.