Social media platforms have transformed the way we consume information, interact with our friends and also purchase goods.
There are few industries that are better suited to marketing on social media platforms than the fitness industry. Furthermore, whilst in other marketing facets larger corporates may have more buying power and impact than start ups or one man bands, social media breaks down this barrier and allows individual personal trainers to stand up to the big boys. Here are a few reasons why you should be using social media to attract new clients:
Leverage Contacts
Remember those older than kept on telling you “it’s not what you know, but who you know”? Well guess what, they were right. Social media provides a great way to leverage your contacts and get them to help spread turbocharge your marketing efforts….for free. A successful social campaign is based around engagement, whether that be likes, shares, retweets or pins. Engagement exposes you to a whole new network outside your immediate one and therefore increases your chances of success. Tagging clients in posts (and vice versa) will only help to kickstart this exposure.
Referrals are the strongest form of sales
Clients who are active on social media should be regarded as key influencers for you and critical for growth. Referrals provide the warmest leads possible and the beauty of it is that your clients need not refer you on a one to one basis. A client posting about how great their last session is (and tagging you – see above) is a referral to their whole network. Incentivise them to post before and after pics, or to screenshot their improvement data from an app like Active Toolkit and this recommendation becomes even stronger.
It can be very cheap
Yes you will have to devote your own time to running your social campaign if you don’t want to use an agency, but in terms of the cost of getting in front of people it is seriously cheap. A recent campaign that we ran for less than £60 reached over 35,000 people in 48 hours through Facebook advertising!
People want to look good
You only have to look at the amount of carefully crafted profile pictures and instagram filtered holiday snaps to realise that people want to look good. Guess what, you can help them look better. Social provides the perfect platform to stoke the fire within the vast majority of us that makes us feel we can always be better.
Content can be posted from virtually anywhere
Content is the fuel that drives social campaigns. Are you a fitness clothing brand that needs imagery? You might have to organise for someone to come in to model your clothes. As personal trainers your clients are your models, so make sure they are happy for you to do so and get snapping, tagging and hashtagging!
It is easy to be seasonal
Social media marketing is lightning fast, which is great because as an advertiser you are able to change tact very quickly. The weeks go by so quickly that if you were using more traditional (expensive) marketing methods you would be scrambling to change your ads before you knew it. With social a couple of photos and a change of text on your iphone can change your campaign from targeting New Year Resolutioners to those wanting to get ready for Summer holidays.
