If you're a nutrition coach that wants more clients today… listen up because I'm going to show you exactly what to post on social media and turn likes into money.
It's no secret that to succeed as a nutrition coach you're going to have to be active on social media. Unless you're purposely trying to be bad at this stuff (and in that case what you would do is only post pictures of your dog every six months, never show your face at all, and allude to some big news coming that never actually comes).
You know that's not the way.
There's a better way to do this.
Getting Active On Social
Being active on social media is how nutrition coaches get new clients. Talk about what we do and reach new people. If you're anything like most nutrition coaches, you just want to coach people and help them with nutrition, not spend all day on social media. The good news is you can actually spend less time on social media and still get some pretty good results by doing a few of the simple things.
I'm going to lay them out here—and if you're not having success with social media, it's probably because you haven't been shown the right way. A method that will help you get results and actually have fun interacting on social media.
The power of online coaching is all about reaching new people on the internet. That's how you scale your coaching business and that's where all the money is.
Attracting people that you don't know, and quite frankly that you would never meet without the internet, but this takes strategy and the right approach to work, which is why I'm going to explain to you what exactly to post on social media to get new clients.
Every single time you post it’s possible to get a new client—plus like a true scientist—I'm also going to show you a way to assess if it's working.
Let's start with what to post.
The Awareness Ladder
Learning more about the awareness ladder, since 99% of nutrition certifications teach you nothing about what to post or how to get clients I'm going to break that down for you today. Before I show you what to post, we need to remember who we're posting for.
It's not for us or for fellow coaches, it's to gain the attention of new potential clients and motivate them to take action, but also to reassure our current clients and followers that they're in the right place, so we need to think about them. They are our market.
One of the best ways to do this is to get a clearer picture of where your market is in the buying process. This is a concept called the Awareness Ladder, popularized by Eugene Schwartz.
Each step of the ladder outlines the client at a different part of their journey, right from the beginning, where they don't even know that they have a problem worth fixing. To the top of the ladder where they're fully convinced they're ready to jump on board.
People need to hear different stories and see different pieces of content to move up this ladder, and since they may need to see 8 to 12 pieces of content on average before they decide if they'll hire you.
You need to cover all aspects of this process often.
Unaware and Somewhat Aware Audience
They're not aware of the problem, we're not on the ladder yet, this is pre-rung. At this point people are cold. They either don't know us at all, or they know us personally but they don't know they have a problem yet. Now a few things to point out—if you just approach someone and say "I have the perfect solution for you" and they don't even know they have a problem yet, it's not gonna work, but you can start to present them with things, get them raising their hands, and they'll come to you.
At this stage, you can describe this person and what they're like, but strangely enough, they don't even know they have a problem yet and everyone you have worked with or will work with starts here. They aren't looking for a solution because they don't even know they have a problem and the best thing you can do is just to present it to them.
If they're a busy mom that constantly feels like they have no energy, you talk about that, or someone that would love to get off their endless list of meds and have their doctors say, "I don't know what you're doing but keep doing it," you present them with that. When you present this, they start connecting the dots and building awareness around this problem. At this point, we want to create content that talks about the problem.
Most importantly what would life look like if they had a solution to this problem?
Solution Aware
Once you do this, they move up a rung and now we're at the next stage, "Solution Aware". Solutions exist at this point. People are aware of the problem they face but they're not sure of the solution, since there are many possible solutions. Just stop and think for a second about all the diets out there and the different nutritional approaches.
We want to start talking about the solutions and ideally, we get really specific about the solution and talk about a specific way that would solve their problem. The key word here is specific because it makes all the difference.
The more specific you can be with the solution, the more likely it is that someone will envision themselves getting that result. You can start comparing your solution to others, giving them a chance to judge what's out there, and maybe even start to throw rocks at the stuff that they know they don't like. For example, like the "I do not want to do keto again" but when you say "I help busy moms lose the last 10 pounds in 10 weeks without having to do keto again," they start to listen.
But to move them up further they need to know why your solution will work for them, so let's dig into the next step: Your Solution or Product Aware
Your Solution and Product Aware
At this stage, people are aware of your specific solutions, they understand that they have a problem, and maybe they've tried other stuff before and now they're actively weighing their options. It's time to make sure that you stand out and take away any fear that they may have, so you need to hammer down on the benefits of your coaching and make it crystal clear what's in it for them, so you show them how it worked for others and make sure that they see real-life people that are working with you that were just like them that have completely transformed.
This brings us to our last stage: Aware but not convinced.
Aware, but not convinced
At this point, people are aware of your solution but they're still not convinced it's right for them. The best thing you can do is show them the impact that your coaching will have on their lives. Don't present any more benefits to show them how their lives will be different if they go down this path. This is purely big picture thinking and it really is powerful.
People will become convinced when they can clearly see how your coaching will transform their lives and what they'll be able to achieve. Once they get a specific result because truth be told people don't want a result, they want the thing that comes from a result, and once you tap into that, it's magic.
You see, people don't want to just lose 20 pounds, they want to lose 20 pounds so they can get off all their meds and impress their doctor—that's what you need to show them, and what will convince them to take this next step with you.
Now is also a great time to use your social media to get in front of any objections they may have, especially around the price of your coaching and if the investment is worth it or if it'll even work for them, and that's the awareness ladder.
Coach For Hire
Now that you know what moves people up the ladder, let's talk about what content you need to create to make it happen, and here's where you can steal my social media strategy for nutrition coaches.
Let's move people up the ladder, shall we? First by talking about pain points. Most coaches are stuck in the educator mindset, meaning they want to teach. As you learned, our potential clients don't even know they have a problem—so they don't want to learn about it. But if you can create content that'll help them identify how they feel. Potential clients will start to think about it.
Honestly, when you can carefully articulate someone's pain, they automatically assume you have the solution without talking about it.
Here's the solution, once you've identified the problem, you can start to talk about how to fix it. This works great in a post where there's a clear line down the middle—like here's what you think you need but here's what you actually need, or this is weight loss but also weight loss.
People like this line because they can clearly identify a difference: the difference that they want, and a difference that they need. Then you can talk about what makes your approach unique, and why it's superior to what else is out there.
Once we've done enough of this, we start to introduce some social proof. Here's the deal—no one wants to be the first person that does anything, it's important to show potential clients that they won't be alone by posting testimonial content.
One of the strongest things you can do is to put a specific face to a result so people know that it's real. Obviously use visuals like before and afters, but also quotes from clients that tell the story of transformation—like where they were before, what happened, and what life is like now. This is powerful stuff and helps move people up the awareness ladder. Making you an in-demand coach that delivers results.
We wrap it all up for clients in something that we like to call "the coach for hire post." A coach for hire post makes it super clear to the client what you do and what's in it for them. Present it to them—here's how it looks if you want to… (and this is where we insert a measurable result like losing 20 pounds within the next blank).
It's important to put a time frame in so they can envision themselves getting results in a certain amount of time.
Then here's what I need you to do, and this is where we insert a call to action, that tells them what the next step is, what's in it for them, and why they should do this now, and here's what the next step is.
This works really well and I'm looking for a post for example "I'm looking for three new dads that want to avoid the dad bod and gain 10 pounds of muscle in the next eight weeks!
I rarely ever have space open up, so if this sounds like you apply through the link in my bio and act fast!" And there it is folks, a social media strategy that moves people up the awareness ladder.
Now before we move on, a few notes about this process.
Posting this kind of stuff does not need to be in sequential order. You can post about these things completely out of order, you can do a testimonial post and then you go back to a problem, but you want to make sure you cover all of your bases.
Ideally, you touch on one point individually each at a time. This helps keep people engaged and maintains their attention. How often should you post about this stuff? For most coaches, touching on this stuff throughout the course of the week is effective. What this looks like is four to five posts over the course of the week, touching on all your points. If you want more clients, this strategy is magic. It's worked for me with my Dr. Marc Method clients so I'm sure it'll work for you too.
We want to assess if anything you post is working particularly better than the others, so like a true scientist let's assess what's working.
People need to be led. They rarely do anything unless they've been told to do it, and not just that, told specifically what to do. When we create content and don't tell them what to do, we're acting just flat out lazy and we lose an opportunity to build authority. Anytime we post social media content we want to lead people using calls to action or CTAs. The CTA can vary depending on the style of the post.
If it's educational, that person will want to use, or remember. Maybe you tell them to save it. If it's a hard offer to get people to sign up for your coaching, you probably want to tell people to apply, mainly through the link in your bio (where it's important to have an application form for your coaching services).
Couple of rules of thumb with CTAs: you can use multiple calls to action in the caption using a strategy I like to call a "CTA sandwich" which looks something like this.
At the beginning, you do a soft call to action, maybe telling people to double-tap to like something. Then the meat of the sandwich is you elaborating on the post. Finally, once you've made your case, you add out a hard call to action—just telling people to apply to the link in your bio.
But in the actual visual of the post, I would only ever use one call to action, and we usually put this in the bottom right corner. We only want to use one call to action so we can tell people specifically what to do. Now since you are using calls to action, we want to assess and measure what's working. Now that you are using calls to action, let's put a strategy in place to assess what's working and see if people are doing what's asked of them. Here's how to do that:
Step one: Make sure that your Instagram profile is set to business accounts so you can access the insights.
Step two: On a weekly basis assess your posts and see how they're performing.
And this is what we're measuring, the best outcome for a single post is a website click. This means someone went from the post, to your profile, and clicked on the link in your bio. This is followed by reach, then saves, then shares. If you're posting content that has a hard call to action telling people you know to sign up for my coaching, here's how to do it. Go through the link in my bio. You want to measure if that link is working and if people are clicking on in your bio. Website clicks are the gold-standard metric. Website clicks are the most important and most valuable because they are most likely to lead to sales. If you write another softer call to action instead, which in some cases actually is better for the post, like save or share, then you want to assess if people are doing that. It gives you an idea of what is working and what you need to do more of, or simply recreate. Just like your clients, collect data and double down on that.
That's it folks, the social media strategy that lands me two to three paying nutrition clients every week! As great as all those tips are, if you're really serious about starting a nutrition coaching business, the next thing I'll have you do is check out this video I've linked below. Now that you have a bunch of new paying clients coming in, learn how to keep them organized here.
How To Do Nutrition Check-Ins
Resources to help you manage all your clients, along with saving you time and hit 6-figures per year.
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