What to Avoid for Your Gym Business’s Social Media Marketing

In the last few weeks, we’ve shared some great social media marketing tips on this blog.

Those of you who’ve taken these tips and run with them… bravo!

But now that you’re taking action, it’s important to review the major mistakes many fitness businesses make with social media marketing so that you DON’T fall into the same trap.

Ok, let’s dive in.

1. Focusing on quantity of followers, not the quality.

I know it looks cool when you have a lot of followers. It feeds your ego. X number of people are “following” you. You feel (and look to others) like you’re important. You’re a big deal.

Well, guess what. That doesn’t matter, nor does it pay your bills.

And just because you’ve inflated your followers with ad dollars to get likes, or added a dozen hashtags on every post to “game” the system into getting more likes or followers, doesn’t mean you’ve added any revenue or profit to your bottom line.

Unless you plan to quit the fitness industry and compete with the celebrities for social media sponsorship dollars… then just let go of chasing that popularity contest.

The ONLY people you should care about getting in front of or engaging are your clients, your partners, and potential prospects for your business.

And that’s not thousands of people.

That’s maybe a few hundred who live locally.

QUALITY of your list is way more important than SIZE of your list.

That truth runs through all marketing media whether we’re discussing email marketing, direct mail, print advertising, or in this case… social media followers.

So check your ego at the door, stay focused on your marketing and sales goals, and more importantly… narrowly target real prospects for your business (not just anyone who can like or follow you).

2. Not posting good content regularly.

Creating good quality content takes time.

And more importantly, it involves good strategy and planning ahead.

Which are two things that most people are unwilling to take the time to do: PLAN and WORK.

But if you want to be successful, sorry to break the news, but you must do both.

Anyone can recycle lame posts about health and fitness facts that can be pulled from Google.

Don’t do that.

Invest a little bit of time in planning ahead, create good quality content, and keep it rolling on a steady basis.

How often?

Post a good blog post and send an email once a week.

Put up a good Facebook post each day.

Instagram can be done once a day too (if your market is engaged here).

If you want to do more with Twitter or other platforms, that’s your call.

But at minimum commit to the above and you’ll thank us later.

3. Having no brand personality.

Ok, the number one rule of marketing is don’t be lame.

That doesn’t mean you have to become an outrageous personality or turn into a fictional movie character either though.

Just be you.

And have fun.

Share yourself in your marketing.

Share your community having fun in your marketing with you too.

Make it personable.

Don’t stiffen up and act like a cold-hearted corporate entity. You’re not.

You’re a small business and therefore RELATIONSHIPS are everything to your growth and success.

4. Not converting followers into paying clients.

Ok, if you’re doing the above consistently, then you’ve laid down a solid foundation.

You’ve got a following, they’re engaged, and they look forward to reading and watching your posts.

You brighten their day.

Don’t be afraid to take the next step.

Make great offers to move your social media followers down the next stage of the Fitness Marketing Lifecycle path.

Offer them to download something.

Attend a workshop.

Purchase a low-priced product or service.

Request a consultation.

Anything that takes them one step further to doing business with you.

When you do this right, your audience will not only appreciate it, they’ll look forward to it!

Have some fun with this too.

Coming up with specific and creative offers is one of the BEST uses of your time for growing your business.

5. Trying to do it all manually.

If you’re taking action, and publishing good content regularly… then before you know it you’re going to feel like the one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.

You can’t possibly be on your phone all day posting, commenting, messaging, tweeting, texting, and more… while you’re still running and trying to grow your business… and eat, sleep, and have a life too.

You need to leverage some technology automation.

Review your plan, create your content, and set it up to roll for a week or two while you focus on other areas of growing the business.

6. Focusing on too many channels.

Better to be great at publishing on one or two channels, rather than failing at them all.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google +, Snapchat, Pinterest, what else?

At some point, it really IS too much to tackle it all and not worth your time.

You could literally spend your entire day on social media (and it’s all too easy to get sucked in!) and not have anything to show for it.

You’ve got to decide what platform makes the most sense for your market, commit to creating a plan for content, and roll with it.

Facebook is a given in almost every market. With 1.44+ billion users and growing, they are the big dawg in the house.

The others… you decide if they work for your market and are worth your time or not.

Summary

Social media has forever changed the way we communicate.

And it’s also created a TON of opportunity for you to market your business, for little to no cost, and drive some serious results quickly.

Just don’t fall into the trap of making these mistakes.