Social Media Strategy for Nutrition Coaches (And Personal Trainers)

...Using Social Media To Grow Your Business

Written by: Dr. Marc Morris CSCS

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. 

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. 

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 

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.

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.