Yes, we’re fitness branding specialists but that doesn’t mean things stop at a lush logo or some social media templates. We want to help you use the assets we design to their fullest.
So let’s dive in…
What is a 'social media strategy'?
The ‘official’ definition:
A social media strategy is a plan that outlines how a business or individual intends to use social media platforms to achieve specific goals and objectives.
The purpose of a social media strategy is to guide and optimise the use of social media platforms to build brand awareness, drive engagement, increase website traffic, generate leads, and ultimately achieve desired business outcomes.
Our definition:
Your social media plan to dominate the likes of Instagram and Facebook, deliver kick-ass content to your audience and generate more QUALIFIED leads than you could possibly dream of.
Now that we’ve cleared that up… how do you go about creating a social media strategy, let alone streamlining it?
Allow us to explain the core elements that you need to have covered…
1. Set Goals
As a coach, you know how important goal setting is for your own training, your business and your clients. Without solid goals, you have nothing to measure success with.
Don’t know where to start with setting goals for your social media strategy? Try these out for size:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Generate more traffic to your website
- Increase community engagement
- Generate leads
You can have one of these goals, all of them or have your own. The main point here is having clear social media marketing goals to give you something to aim for. It’ll also allow you to track analyse and optimise your strategy month by month.
Now that you’ve got your goals and objectives sorted, let’s move onto the next step in outlining and streamlining your strategy:…
2. Understand your Audience Inside Out
Knowing your tribe like the back of your hand allows you to tailor your content, messaging, and any other strategies you want to implement to resonate with your target audience.
And why is that important, we hear you cry?
Because if you’re not aiming your content at your ideal client, then what the F*CK are you doing? Don’t just hit and hope with your socials, it’s not about the likes and kudos these days. It’s about adding something useful, something valuable to your audience, and if that means only a handful of people see or even like your content, if they are YOUR people then that’s absolutely acceptable.
Wait, no, that’s absolutely incredible.
So know them, understand them, BE them. That way, your social content will naturally ooze out of you without you having to stress about it.
Want to learn how to build trust with your audience? We’ve got you covered with our ‘9 Strategies to Build Brand Trust and Loyalty’ blog.
A small bonus tip:
Apply this same nitty gritty detail of learning your audience to learning all you can about your competitors. Not to mimic or copy them but to understand what else your audience might be seeing and consuming.
Understanding this is vital to making sure you’re offering unique.
3. Know Your Channels
Now this expands nicely from point 1 and it might seem pretty obvious right? But no, it’s not that simple.
For your social media strategy to be most effective, make sure you understand the social channels you’re using. Don’t just jump on the TikTok bandwagon for the sake of it. If your ideal client isn’t there, then why are you?
Is your client a busy professional? Then they’re most likely over on LinkedIn – so you should be too. Once you’ve established where the heck your ideal client is then double down on the platforms that are useful to them.
- Know the best times to post (HubSpot have got some great data on that topic)
- Know the best resolutions to upload (both video and photo) – Influencer Marketing Hub have a great cheatsheet here >
- Know the best way to optimise your copy for maximum reach*
*so make sure you’re using the characters available to their full potential and make sure you’re using the right number of hashtags
Are you using all of the tools available to you from that channel too? So for example, Instagram gives you the option to add alt text to your images – use it. They also offer you the option to add topics to your reels – use them.
Do your research on your social media channels, audit your own profiles on those channels and make sure you’re doing everything possible to keep your profile in the good books of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube or whatever other channel you use!
4. Become a Content Calendar King or Queen
The best social media strategies are planned out. Now that can be in a notebook, on a Trello board (IYKYK) or in a spreadsheet, whatever makes most sense to you.
Plan out any significant dates, like National Fitness Day (is that one real? If not, then it should be), and start writing your copy or gathering images, videos or carousels for your posts at least one month in advance.
Now we know that a lot of you might say ‘But I haven’t got time to do that’. And we get it, we’ve been in the same boat.
You’ve got to set it as a priority, for at least one month.
Block out some time in your schedule to plan the following month. Just one month. Once you’ve got one scheduled out, you can do blocks of time on the month after that in between training, work and in between clients – making it far more manageable and maintainable.
So let’s talk about some useful tools…
- Hubspot – these guys offer a free, downloadable social media content planner. Easy to manage through Google Sheets or Excel and easy to customise to your own system.
- Meta Business Suite – another freebie. You can schedule all of your content across Instagram and Facebook on this platform. It’s easy to manage, to keep drafts and ideas, and you have the beauty of being able to post everything you need, directly to your accounts straight from this platform.
5. Categorise Your Content
Yep, we all love a label right? So label up your types of content. Trust us, it’ll make it easier to come up with content ideas if you’ve got a category name to put them under.
Here are some of our trade secrets, we use the following content types for our own social media, steal them or just use them for some #inspo of your own:
1. Service Promo
For us, we’ll talk about a specific service we offer, whether that’s our Asset Academy or some of the creative work we’re working on as part of our Studio Unlimited offering.
For you, that could be your 12-week transformation plan or your other online coaching plans.
2. Culture/Team
For us, we’ll post about things that we’ve been up to as a team. We run specific content days at GraphFit with the legendary Passion Productions (handily, they are our neighbours!). We use these days to gather service-specific content plus some behind-the-scenes stuff that we know you guys like!
Did you catch our latest reel?
For you, this could be snippets of you relaxing around your busy schedule, or doing your hobbies outside of your coaching business. It could also be content showing your audience how you go about delivering your service, how you plan your programs or some content around your weekly check-ins.
3. Social Proof
The psychological phenomenon where people look to the actions and behaviors of others to determine their own choices and actions. By strategically providing social proof on your social media platforms, you can build credibility, trust, and engagement with your audience.
So we’re talking…
- Testimonials
- Reviews
- User-generated content
- Influencer collaborations
These are all examples of effective means of showcasing social proof. When your potential client sees others positively engaging with your brand and service, they are more likely to experience FOMO and therefore want to jump on your coaching bandwagon!
Well, that’s the plan anyway.
4. Value Post
Take this blog for example. We have a ‘launch strategy’ that goes with every new blog we produce. Part of that strategy is to create a carousel of the blog for the likes of the Instagram audience that might not want to sit and read our TedTalk (we appreciate every single person that does though…).
In essence, a value post is offering trade secrets. It’s showcasing to your audience that you know exactly what you’re preaching about. That way, they know that they can feel confident coming to you.
So for you and your coaching business, this could be breaking down the science behind a good squat, it could be tips on how to meal plan, top tips for dealing with clients that want to leave or it could be as simple as how to use lifting straps effectively for a deadlift… seriously, can someone tell me?
You can be specific or fairly loose in the topic here. Just offer your knowledge and experience out, for free.
6. Track and Analyse for Optimal Results
Circling back to our first point about setting goals, you can now make sure you track and analyse their performance.
Let’s say one of your goals was to increase community engagement. If you’ve created the right type of content for that goal, on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis you can analyse each type of post you’ve created and see how it’s performed.
Using that data you can decide whether you want to double-down on it or not. Just remember, content WILL fail. Failure is fine – as long as you learn from it.
Key takeaways
- Set measurable goals, track them, analyse them and optimise your content to suit
- Understand your audience and keep tabs on your competitors to ensure your content is as valuable as possible
- Fail to plan, prepare to fail – or however the saying goes… the main point is to have a plan to follow and execute
- You can’t streamline your social media strategy without a social media strategy in the first place
what's next?
You’ve got a couple of options.
- Read up on our 9 strategies to build brand trust >
- Take a look at our Asset Academy where you can sign up for unlimited access to over 400 assets (and growing) that can help you with everything from brand consistency to the ultimate fitness coach lead magnet.
keep up to date
Thanks for reading our blog, we hope it’s offered some help in your own fitness website build. If you’ve got any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them on here or drop us an email on [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
We’ve got more blogs for you here > Make sure you check back regularly to keep up to date with all things fitness branding.
