Building Your Fitness Business’ Social Media Muscle

Simply setting up social media pages for your fitness business just doesn’t cut it anymore. For your social media channels to be a powerful marketing tool—and convert leads into members—you need a strong social strategy.

“The key to converting cold leads into paying members is to promote great content that shows them that you can help them, as opposed to just promoting your program or memberships to them all the time,” says Scott Rawcliffe, social media marketing consultant. “If you can show them you're different than the other gyms and chains, and that you can actually help them reach their goals, then you become the only choice.”

3 Levels of the Social Media Funnel

Before we get into creating great content, let’s start with the basics—the three levels of the social media funnel.

1. Audience. “This includes not only all your fans and followers, [but also] people who have consumed your content either via your website or your social channels,” Rawcliffe says. “With the use of retargeting pixels and custom audiences in Facebook it makes it very easy to do know this.”
2. Engagement. “This is all the content you create that is shared on your different social profiles, as well as the replies to your followers. But there is a difference between just creating content and creating content that your fans and followers actually engage with. Facebook Live is a great engagement tool that most businesses are not utilizing to its fullest.”
3. Conversions. “This is where you turn fans/followers into paying clients. Unfortunately, most fitness businesses spend the majority of their time and money on this part of the funnel while neglecting the top of this funnel. Focusing on only the bottom of your funnel is what typically can cause conversion rates to be lower and cost per client acquisition to be higher than it could be.”

Creating an Evergreen Social Media Marketing Plan

While Rawcliffe cautions that setting up a successful evergreen social media marketing plan takes time, he supplied a couple steps to get you on your way.

First, make a list of all your offers/promotions and all the content that you can use via your social platforms. Once you have that information in front of you, you can begin to map out what you’ll promote each week, making sure you’re balancing your “gives” with your “asks.”