The other day I was completely floored when a lifer of mine emailed me, letting me know that she hadn’t seen anything about my upcoming bootcamp and wanted to know when it started. This is someone who I have been friends with for years and has done several programs of mine. I was shocked, because I couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen anything I’ve posted on Instagram and Facebook. Here I was in my own little world, worried about annoying my Instagram followers, when real life friends of mine weren’t even seeing my posts.
It drove home this one very important point: you truly CANNOT promote too much! The algorithms across social media platforms are always changing and can’t be completely predicted. In addition, no one is going to toot your own horn for you. If you truly have a great program, product or service to offer, then you are going to have to be the one to get it out there to the masses. No one is checking your page every day to see what you are posting. It is no longer sufficient enough to post things once or twice and call it a day.
Instead, you need to prioritize the following:
Individual Outreach
Send out personal messages to friends and acquaintances about your upcoming programs. Do not assume they already know about those programs. Let them know you are thinking about them and that your upcoming program would be a perfect fit! Most people are so thankful that you thought of them and are more than willing to consider your program. At the very worst, they say no. You have very little to lose!
Live Video
Live video continues to do well in the algorithms, so it is important to spend some time there sharing valuable content and ending with a call to action!
Email Newsletters
The key to email newsletters is frequency and recency. You need to be sending your emails regularly and multiple times per week for them to be seen in people’s inboxes. As you send more regularly, you will see more click throughs and an improved open rate.
Valuable Free Resources
For fitness professionals this is particularly important as we are living in a freemium economy. There is so much out there for free these days that your free offers have to have significant value in order to entice people to sign up. This is truly a place where the more value you provide for free, the more likely you are to draw in the right type of leads. I recommend you create your freemiums in a way that shares the why and the what, and leave your paid products and programs to share the how. This will let readers know why and what they need, and then give you an open door to provide that for them.
Focusing on these strategies in 2017 will increase interest around your products and services in a way that just can’t be done with a Facebook post here and there. People are not seeing your stuff as often as you feel like they might be, so don’t worry about being annoying or obnoxious. Post often and invest your time in individual outreach, live video, email newsletters and creating valuable free resources.