Creating Content for Coaches Who Struggle with Social Media with Chris Liddle

You're listening to the PT Profit Podcast. My name is Chris and today I will be your guest host and we will be talking about creating content for coaches who struggle with social media. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services, and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast.

My name is Chris Little and today I will be covering content creation. Now, I'm going to be going over this in the same kind of format so that I might go over with this in a skills lab call or an accountability call or any of the learning material that I might contribute for BE Simpson Fitness. So if at any point in this episode you feel inspired to dive deeper into building your business online through how you market yourself, through how you position yourself, and how you build your offer, I invite you to reach out to Beverly at BeeSimpson Fitness and ask about what kind of opportunities there are to work with us. So as we are diving through this content, I want to basically overcome the challenges that coaches may be facing when they're already juggling multiple responsibilities. Maybe they don't have all the time in the world. Maybe they are working multiple jobs or they don't always have a good wi fi connection. We want to empower and allow you to make as much progress as possible so that you can achie the career that you certified yourself and spend lots of money on education to achieve. Now, if you're noticing some noise in the background, I'm actually on a walking treadmill wearing a weighted vest. This is something that is actually a game changer for people who are working with a lot of people online. So if you ever want to learn a little bit more about that, you can feel free to connect with me Hristian Little on social media. But to get us back on task here to talk about the topic that that you came to learn about, the first thing that I want to discuss is the appeal of looking good online. So maximizing impact with minimal effort, not half half effort, full effort. Still trying to connect and create impactful online presence without being so time consuming and daunting and intimidating and feeling like it's something that you have to put off and put off and put off. So what I would like to remind you that you can always do in your content is focus on sharing achievements of your clients. Share the testimonials, share the little wins that they've had or the insights or the profound moments where they understood the value of macronutrients, micronutrients, the little insights that they've had in your coaching moments to reflect your expertise and their success. These elements act as social proof enhancing your online image with content that resonates with your audience. Because when your audience see your clients winning in a way it makes it a lot easier for them to picture themselves working with you. Because I feel like intuitively a lot of people in your audience probably wouldn't mind the idea of winning as well. So leverage these moments of success or clarity in your coaching practice as content. These are digital assets that amplify your appeal with little time investment. Because when you think about it, these are things that you are already doing. If you already have one or two clients, maybe 20 clients depending on where you're at in your business, Perhaps you have 80 clients, then it should be that much easier. These are things that you could be pulling from your check in forms. These are things that you could write down in a notebook while you're on the training floor or maybe while you're on a zoom call. However, it is that you correspond with your clients you in ways that suit your personality and your brand. So a few well chosen posts that highlight your unique value can do more for your image than frequent, less meaningful quotes and updates and whatnot. Because like if we are looking to social media, we're not looking for more noise. We are looking for something that stands out and sets you apart, that connects you. Because you're being unique, you're being passionate and you are talking about how you help people. So daily reminders that I think are important that spark conversation are that even with limited time or limited technology or limited access to Internet, you can stay top of mind with your audience by linking your content to everyday triggers relevant to your coaching niche. Using scheduling tools to prepare posts that coincide with common routines or seasonal events your audience experiences. This strategy ensures your content is timely and relevant, triggering reminders to your people at regularly scheduled times of your services just when your audience might need them most. So planning and scheduling posts during your WI fi access time or your downtime, your admin time, maybe the evening when you're just winding down or early early morning before you start your day and you're having your coffee, they're this keeps you active on social media while engaging your potential clients without making you feel like you're trapped like you're running out of time, that you can't do things at certain times of day. So to reiterate kind of what we went through here, not only do you want to kind of remind your audience that you exist and that you're here to help them, but also just because you're reminding them and 9am your local time doesn't mean that you have to be typing out that post at 9:00am your local time. You could have typed that post out the previous Sunday, used the the onboard scheduling options through Meta Business Suite, or through a third party platform of your choosing. Personally, I tend to keep as much of my scheduled posts within the platform as possible because it's just one less thing to go wrong. So with most people for Instagram, you can actually, if you're if your account, especially if your account is a business account, you can actually go into the settings as you're creating your post and schedule it for a later day and time. So you can schedule it for a time of day when your audience is typically the most active. And for most people it's between 9am and 6pm their local time. But you're going to be able to see when your audience is actually the most active by looking at your account analytics. Because perhaps, maybe if you have a very diverse audience from a lot of different time zones, that time spread might be a lot more wide. Maybe it's 6am to 11pm or something like that, but you kind of want to have it so that the first few people that see it, they're seeing it at a time when, if they liked it, a lot of other people could also see it as well. So you don't want to aim the timing of your posts for the outliers, for the people who are up at 2am you kind of want to aim it for the people who are up at common times, who are scrolling, maybe at lunchtime or maybe they're prepping their breakfast at times that you would most likely get the visibility, knowing that you'll probably get some trickle down visibility in the days that follow after. Now, when it comes to creating content for social media, you kind of want to hit people where they care. So you, you have to care about your content to begin with so that they can understand that it's coming from a specific place and not just creating things, just to create things. So if you create content that's just trending because every else is doing it, that doesn't necessarily help you stand out. If you create content that addresses specific problems for Specific people and you pair that with a trend. That would be a way to kind of utilize two strategies at once. Getting very specific with your messaging while also leveraging a song that's popular or leveraging a style of content creation that's popular, whether that be just a style of filming or a style of storytelling, narrating over exercises that you're doing to talk about the reason that you choose them or what it can be helpful for, etc. You want to have your content being charged with a higher shareability factor so that when people see it, they can intuitively think to themselves, like this, this is actually pretty good. Like this. This is better than what I've seen before. If they're just seeing things that look like everybody else, there's no reason to share it because they think they're probably going to see it again 10 seconds later. If you have a new way to explain something, or a new way to display a concept or an experience or an outcome or an achievement, and you found a way to make it stand out, then you will stand out. There's probably a lot of people who train their parents and some accounts find a way to portray that in a way that is more emotionally charged because they're training their parents out of love. Other people. It's like, well, their parents go to the gym and their parents follow a program. And this program is pretty good. And their parents have always worked out. So it's like there's no emotional resonance to that. And so it can kind of make it seem less connected. I'll give you an example of what I mean here, just to explain myself better. My dad has followed a strength training program since 2020. He's been following it for about four years. If I just share that my dad does a strength training program, well, so do a lot of other people's dads. Now, my dad's also got a bit of a quirky personality. So if I share the notes that he gives me, having done the strength training program, that adds a little bit more personality to it. And it takes me very little time to create that. So essentially, with the training platform that I use, when he is recording his reps and his sets and the weight that he uses, he can also record notes. And a lot of the time when my dad does his workouts as a 70 year old, he goes on the computer and he types out what he's going to do after the workout. So he'll be like, well, my joints are feeling a lot better. I feel like I can move around a lot more and I'm going to go outside and chop down some trees. It's going to be a lot of heavy work, but I'm glad that I'm feeling good, moving and these are the kinds of notes that he'll leave with his program. He's the only person that I work with that leaves notes that are almost in this like storytelling, neat little update of the day manner, but it personifies experience of training for people like him where it doesn't feel like you have to be David Goggins to follow a strength program and more so it's something that empowers people and I'm able to market that without specifically talking about training, but more so talking about my dad's experience through introducing physical fitness to his already fairly active lifestyle in a way that allows him to do more things as a senior citizen. Now with this if you work with a multitude of clients and they each have their different insights or achievements or just aha moments, you can screenshot these things in your phone as a means to create testimonial content, to create sort of behind the scenes content, to sort of save you time and make it easier to sort of like share the client experience with your audience without feeling like you have to create a Christopher Nolan movie every time you're going to put content out there. Now the other aspect is seeing is sharing the visibility effect of strategic posting. So make your coaching methods and success stories visible to encourage others to share and engage. So for this I would a go with that time of day that the post gets published. I'm not too stringent on that, but again, you just don't want to be posting at like obscure times of day if your target audience is sleeping. But also understanding that you can have a terrible Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from being on a phone perspective. But that doesn't mean that your social media needs to suffer on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. If you have found that historically your weeks are very heavy front loaded at the front half of the week, but they're lighter as you get to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or perhaps Sunday is like a meal prep day for you, I would look at proactively scheduling in at least one post a day, one post per day for those other days. And that ensures that you are at the very least consistent. And it also ensures that people are going to see you and they can expect to see you in a way that could help you build your community. Now we want to share things that are genuinely helpful for people. Sometimes I'll think of my own content and I'll be like Is this about me or is this about my audience? Is this just me saying, like, this is what I did today, or this is what I think is awesome, or this is what I accomplished? Or am I making my client kind of the hero of the story? Or am I personifying fitness for people who aren't as intense about fitness as me? Because here we are, I'm walking on a treadmill with a £20 weighted vest as I talk about fitness content creation on a podcast. I am not your average person. What a lot of people that are creating content for the general population are needing to do is to be able to speak to the average person. Or perhaps you are someone who, who works with women who were pregnant in the last couple years, helping them develop their core strength. So then instead of thinking from your point of view of someone who has studied exercise science and nutrition and maybe dabbled in psychology, or maybe they're a mindset nerd, instead of thinking from that point of view, you kind of want to be thinking of what is the point of you, of the person that you're looking to help? How many times have you explained to someone the value of protein in a way that made sense for them, in a way that made them feel like, okay, so if I just change one meal a day, that can have measurable progress for me on a week to week basis, I don't have to reinvent my whole life, but I could just do something such as increase my portion of chicken or add in some cottage cheese to my recipe, or perhaps just have a protein shake before the end of the day to increase my daily protein by 30 grams. There's a lot of different ways that we can achieve these goals, and it's just a matter of kind of getting into the mindset of the people that you're speaking to and actually finding ways to share tangible takeaways that allow them something that they can implement, something where they're like, okay, now that I've read this, I can actually go do this. Or this has me thinking, this is something that's really valuable because as you are creating these aha moments, these takeaways, not only does that present you as a helpful authority in their life and a go to person for this kind of content, but it also helps you to sort of be someone who can kind of be a viral sensation within that other person's community. When I talk about viral sensation, I'm not necessarily talking about someone who has a million followers, because the truth is, when it comes to word of mouth marketing, a lot of that doesn't necessarily happen in the online space. Some of it is that you've created content on your Instagram, on your social media for so long that was so helpful that you are somebody's go to person. They've never liked a single one of your posts, but you've helped them so much that they talk to you. They talk about you, I should say, at their family gathering or when they're at a party where somebody says, well, wow, you look so good. And it's like, yeah, I follow hristianlittle on Instagram. He told me about how I can wear a weighted vest and walk on a treadmill to increase my energy balance and help me stay on track with my fitness and nutrition. And it has changed my life. These are the things that you can do to make an impact on other people and to help to market yourself. Now I want you to pay attention to something that I just said there because I am also a busy coach that doesn't always have time to make content. But in this podcast so far I have talked about a tangible action that people can take in their lifestyle when one of their limiting factors is time or their limiting factor is just the creativity to stay on track with things, to stay on track with their goals. So what I could have done is I could have recorded this whole podcast sitting down in a chair and just chilling. And then I would be like, I don't have time to be active today because I am on coaching calls or I'm recording podcasts or I'm creating content. But the truth is with one little intervention, one little hack as it were. And I don't really like the word hack, so don't, don't quote me on giving you all kinds of hacks. But through one little change, I can completely change somebody's life if they choose to take this one intervention where they set up their environment to be more active on a day to day basis. And so now the person who feels like they're stuck at a desk or they work 13 hours a day has one key strategy that they can do to be more active. You don't need to make glamorous content on that. That could be simply recording some B roll of you walking at your treadmill explaining why you do that. You can learn more about the concept of high flux energy, basically like a high flux lifestyle through following my friends Dean Guido and Jeb Stuart Johnston and Dr. Mike T. Nelson, who are actually going to be releasing a book about the high flux approach. So that is an example of marketing without marketing of Creating content without really thinking too much about it, without having to set up too much. And again, I remind you, not only can you schedule your posts, but you can also capture your posts in bulk. So if I am coaching five people in a day, I might capture a nugget from each one of them, whether it be writing down something that they said in my notes app, or recording some of their exercises during the session, or asking for permission to record a coaching call to pull some of the excerpts that were really valuable with like an online coach client, or at the end of a call asking for a testimonial if that client has been working with me for an extended period of time, perhaps using my client check in forms as basically like incubators for good ideas for marketing. If, if the form asks them what was your win of the week and they had a really good win, there's your content. You can always find unique ways to display this stuff, whether you're using Canva, etc. But you can also keep it super simple. One of the probably most accessible, most actionable pieces of advice that I've given to an accelerator as of late was that I show them that you don't actually have to take your text based posts into an external app. You can actually go as though you are going to create a story in Instagram and then you can just type it out and make sure that it would fit into a square, save it on your phone, go to post, add it in there, and then ba boom, you have a text based graphic. You can have a background that you like to use and that just allows you to keep it to one app. Something else worth noting is I saw in a recent update, I believe it was from one of the social media gurus where they talked about how Instagram will be making changes where carousel posts will show up in the same area of your feed as a reel would. So it'd be Instagram reel, Instagram reel, Instagram reel, carousel post. So if you are someone who likes to talk about nuanced pieces that require multiple panels in the a post to explain, then you can utilize carousels. So whether you like to do spoken content or whether you like to do written content, there's a place for you to stay consistent with your social media. One of the next things that I wanted to talk about is talking about stories that travel, but with minimal impact. So stories and having them travel, it's like creating a story that is interesting enough that somebody else might be inclined to retell it. The funny example that I have for you is sometimes within my immediate family, I will tell a story to my dad that's so good, but that by the time I get to meet my brother for a visit, he'll have already heard the story from my dad. And based on my ability to tell that story and make the funny parts funny and the lessons moving, I will either hear a mistranslation from my brother or basically a direct kind of reiteration of what I told my dad. So we are using the same concept as we are going creating social media for our target audience. So you want to speak to the language of your audience. You're not necessarily going to use the big complicated words that you may have learned as you are getting like a doctorate in nutrition or as you're getting a bachelor degree or as you're getting your fifth certification in two years. You're going to use language and examples that people feel that they can relate to so it doesn't have to be lengthy or time consuming. You're using storytelling techniques to craft short, impactful narratives that can be prepared in advance and scheduled for posting. Now these stories can serve as powerful testimonials of your coaching impact, engaging your audience with minimal effort on your part. Or it can be ways that people can reach their goals faster for you to get them started on their journey in such a way that intrigues them to what else do you have to offer? So for some people it can be a matter of maybe you help people with their diastasis and you have some really good exercises that they could start with to begin to see progress. And if they wanted to go even further with their fitness journey, that's when they would reach out to you. All of this to say that I think sometimes when we are setting out to create social media, we often get too stuck in the weeds of comparing to our competitors. Looking at the rate or style that other people are using to create their content, what I tend to do is I think about the people who I enjoy working with. My target audience. I think about if I was them, what advice would I really want to hear? Sometimes I about talk talk to these clients and I ask them what was the advice that they found to be most helpful in the last three months. And a lot of them are pretty good at telling me. And that's when I'll get out the notebook and I'll start writing these things down. I make a regular effort of gathering testimonials from everybody that I work with, whether it's video testimonials, written testimonials, Google testimonials or even just things that they say off the cuff where I just ask them after. Afterwards I'm like, that was amazing. Are you okay if I use that in my marketing? And just asking these questions can help you market yourself and help you market your business. So if you have made it to the end of this episode and you are still struggling to create content, what I recommend you doing is joining our free Facebook group. The link will be in the show Notes. Also, if you want to help this podcast reach more people, we would really appreciate it if you went to Apple Podcasts. Go find the pt profit podcast rate it 5 stars leave a review Tag us on Social Media Tag Beverly at Besoms and Fitness. If you want to find me you can find me at ChristianLittle. That's L I D D L E for the last name and thank you for listening. We're keeping this short and sweet. We'll catch you on the next episode.

Thank you for listening to the PT Profit Podcast. If you like this episode, chances are your friends will too. So it would be a huge service to us if you would please leave us a review and share with your friends on your social media channels. When you leave us a review, be sure to take a screenshot of it and email that screenshot to my team atinfo simpson fitness.com and we'll send you a very special Instagram podcast that will show you how to create compelling content so that your ideal clients come to you and you go from wanting clients to a wait list of clients ready for your services. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.