Convert your fitness audience on Instagram to paying members in 5 steps
This article aims to give a few tips to fitness instructors to grow their audience on Instagram and convince their audience to buy their services. Are you a fitness instructor who has done this successfully? Comment below to tell us how.
1. Engage naturally with your audience
This sounds obvious but it’s not for many people in the fitness scene. Unlike a company selling products or services, as a trainer, you’re selling yourself first, then your service: the people will follow you and interact with you only if your content is valuable, don’t try to sell directly a fitness product for referral money, coaching or your content at first — instead, give value to your audience! Here are a few tips:
• Create story regularly, a natural one: you can show some exercises or promote the progress of one your students. Or just make a funny one! Let your audience see into a bit of your life, however, prioritize fitness content.
• Post on Instagram regularly, 2–3 times a week is a good balance. Take your time to make sure you are consistent in terms of content and colors you use on your feed. If you’re not an expert, you can also use templates from Canva.
• Ask question! A community starts with interactions with your audience: asking questions on stories and captions is great. For example: “What fitness tips do you want me to talk about next week?”
2. Use Hashtags in your posts
To gain an audience, especially if yours is small at first, you need to reach more people and hashtags are great for that purpose. I recommend you to check out Fitness Hashtags. They give you regularly new and fresh hashtags to reach your audience. And don’t forget: be coherent with your content, don’t put #yogis on a bodybuilder post.
3. Move from a personal account to business account
This one is crucial: you cannot make money from Instagram having a personal account. In order to convert your audience to pay for your products or services, you need to convince them to click on your link and make them quit the Instagram app. Having a business account means being able to add a link to your profile. When your followers click on it, you can then sell your service on these webpages. You can also access insights about your account, your audience, and its demographics. This insight is useful in that you can orient your content to match their needs.
How to do it? Here is a tutorial from Instagram
4. Create a multiple link page.
This is a must, and many yoga and fitness instructors are using it: LinkTree. It permits you to create a weblink for free that’s the link to multiple URLs. This is quite useful as Instagram currently only grants access to one URL.
Here are some ideas:
• A link to your contact page
• A link to your youtube channel (if any)
• A link to your blog (if any)
• A link to your email address
• A link for donation (if you’re hosting donation-based Livestream classes)
• A link to a membership page
5. Set up a member-only webpage
Selling is good but things can change from one month to another, so the advantage of having a membership is huge. Having a monthly (or weekly) recurring revenue is far better: it gives you a clear forecast of your revenue, plus, as many said subscribers are your true fans. Unless your subscribers unsubscribe to your service because they don’t find value anymore, you have a true base here. Collecting recurring payments on the web can be quite challenging. Luckily, at Sways we are making it easier: we create a custom page for you, with your style, your content, and your pricing. Plus, we set up a members-only page so your clients need to pay a monthly fee to access to your content.
Sounds interesting to you? Get started for free.
To recap, Instagram is challenging — many fitness influencers are present and well-established on this social media platform, however, poor content is also largely present. Each person is unique. By being yourself and not selling-out on Instagram you are already differentiating! Be yourself, attract an audience, give value to your followers, convert them to fan and the results will come!
