Your Gym's Social Media Sucks. Here's How to Fix It

people, gym, content, talk, post, coaching, work, testimonials, images, week, video, social media, owners, influencer, tyler, canva, strategy, money

Tyler 00:01

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's episode of the gym owners podcast. This week, we're going to give you kind of a full on social media content guide for how to figure out how to delegate your social media, how to figure out what the hell, if you're delegating, what should be done. A lot of gym owners out there want to put their hands up and say, I just, I don't like it, I don't want to do it, I don't know anything about it. And it either costs you a bunch of money, or you put somebody who's extremely under qualified in that position to do that work. And no matter what that tool ends up not being used very well on behalf of your gym. So we're gonna give you a guide to help you tighten that up, make sure stuff doesn't fall through the cracks, make sure whoever is doing your social media is doing a great job and you can hold them accountable to results, results, results results across the board. So before we get started, make sure you join the gym owners revolution, it's the Facebook group, link is in our description. Get in there tons of exciting stuff, we blow this up every week, but you do need to be in that Facebook group. Those are the people that are going to get access to all the free stuff that we're going to be doing. If we're going to do anything for free any teaching for free outside of this podcast, that is the place that it is going to happen. If you want your education not to be for free. If you want to be more thorough, if you want us to hold your feet to the fire and make sure we get shit done within your business. Get in the gear Academy, the gear Academy it's like steroids for your gym. That's exactly what we do for people's businesses here. We want to get you in, we want to get you going, we want to give you the foundation to really scale up your gym to grow. It's not just about chasing members, it's about having the systems and processes and all that shit. This sucks stuff that I hate about business talk systems and processes. We just want a foundation set up so that when you turn up the volume on your client base and on your leads, that it's actually worth doing. So Quit Chasing not profitable work, quit doing a ton of work for not a lot of money and quit just sitting there wondering what the hell you're supposed to do this week because you feel like you're stuck on that gym owner treadmill. You're just operating, operating, operating, operating and that's the stuff we don't allow on the gear Academy so if you want to make progress in your business, that is the place to do it. Get into gear Academy. If you have questions about that or you're interested in shoot one of us a message shoot me at Tyler effing stone or John at J banks FL or just the show at the gym owners podcast and Instagram just getting the DMS me the easiest way you can email us at your mom at hacker gym.com That's real, by the way. But just DMS is going to be all the same as well if you got some wordy shit, you want to drop getting the email but let's get started guys. Hi, John, how are you doing today?



John Fairbanks 02:29

I am doing excellent Tyler. I always appreciate the beginning as let's like Tyler's dose, go go go.



Tyler 02:36

Yeah, we had some stuff like our gear Academy call yesterday, I think I had like a 35 minute rant. But it was really really, really useful. And it's we want to build up on a little bit to kind of give you guys an idea what we talked about at the Gear Academy. We want to get into today a little bit. On the social media side of things like this is a question for you to answer as a gym owner like how's your social media getting done. More importantly, who is doing it? Who's making the content for it because posting is very different, like making the post right in the copy is different than the images or videos or photos that are going out as well like those Lin's have kind of been a lot of different pieces that kind of get put together. And I do think that people just kind of throw their hands in the air or at the very least just throw their social media strategy to the wind. And if you don't have a plan for your social media, for what the content is, what you're trying to do, who you're trying to attract, what programs or products you're trying to attract them to, what special offers you're doing. And even the frequency with which you post the timing, if you don't have a plan for any of that you're not your every effort, every penny every bit you put into it is worth 1/100 of what it should be every minute every it's becomes very, very ineffective. And if you're paying money to have it done, and you're doing that without a plan, you're wasting that money. The very least that money could work a lot better for you if you just had a plan. So we want to go over like some of the basics here that we talked about quite a bit. And one of the things covered. First off, I really don't like fully outsourcing your social media. And I think that's the thing that any gym wants folks to talk about. I've seen her mostly talking about that in the past, even though that their product itself is kind of hate just let us do all your marketing stuff and do it all out of house with completely out of house content. But that business model may be different from an ideal philosophy. But I do think it's really important that if someone is making content for your jam, and somebody is representing the voice of your gym, it's got to be from someone within your gym or someone who is accountable to someone within your gym, if you're gonna have an outside firm port great, but now you got to spend the time making sure that they have a fucking clue what's going on in your gym, who the people are, who the smiling faces are, what the goings on are of the gym because otherwise it just ends up being very, very detached from your gym and your



John Fairbanks 04:51

vibe. The top marketers that are out there right now it doesn't matter who you follow. If you start getting into the marketing space, you will realize that the people whose brands are the most successful, the person who is in charge of that brand is the face of their brand like they are the ones that are, are the face, they are in all their chips, whether it's Gary Vee or Grant Cardone, or out or Hermoza, or any of these guys, you start to see and start to pay attention, even people that are just not even in doesn't matter what industry they're in the best marketers in the world talk about never outsourcing your marketing. Yeah, so and it doesn't mean that you have to be someone that's comfortable on camera, because a lot of you aren't and you won't be. And the reality is, that's something you have to work out. It's not something that just all of a sudden is natural to put a fucking camera in front of your face and stare into a black lens and not look and feel like a total asshole the whole time that you're on camera. But you don't do well, that doesn't have to be what you do. You do have to take ownership. And just as you said, Tyler to be able to kind of say, No, this is what I want to do, I have to have a plan. Because we know what it looks like. When you don't have a plan. And your customers and your clients, the people that you want to be attracting, they aren't going to say, Boy, these people really don't have a fucking plan with their marketing strategy. What ends up happening is they just don't buy. Yeah, they're either confused at what you offer, or they look at it and you haven't posted in the last three months. And they don't even know what to fucking buy in a confused mind is one that doesn't buy. So if they don't have the ability to take action, they won't. And that is the market kind of telling you, oh, hey, you don't have a fucking plan. And that's what we really want to be able to dive into where as a gym owner, that is the mandatory piece, you can just be like, Oh, I don't know what, all right,



Tyler 06:52

some guy across town, and they do some graphic design, and they just pop some generic posts in there. And it's tough. So let's get into what we want to call this is gonna be kind of a DIY strategy and in House strategy, not necessarily You, yourself as a gym owner, because you may not be savvy enough, if you are, like, if you are kind of doing it or you're just responsible for it at the moment, then we'll go then you can kind of get this will be pretty useful for but I also want you to know that the tools that we're recommending and stuff, if you're going to hand it off to someone else on your staff to do to at least the end of the content creation side of things, these tools are still what I would recommend, and we'll get into that now. So first off, if you're going to do it yourself, you're gonna have to when your coach is doing, they need to be using Canva, almost nothing else, there's almost no reason Canva is free. Its web based, you can also get an app for it. But I have done graphic design for many brands for a long time. I was never great at it. I'm not like super visually artistic, it doesn't. It's not a thing that I'm great at. But I've been able to be good enough at it to make things work. And I was making things myself very, very manually for a lot of years. And some of them worked in the beginning it was very bad. And you just get better and better and better at it. I was very resistant the last couple years when Canva has come out come out because it's just like this for also there. It just is so much more robust now, and still very intuitive before it was very intuitive. But a lot of the templates and stuff were not very thorough, there were a lot of the most endures all the most basic shit that you saw on every social media account to the point where it's, it's brutal. So Canva go to Canva canva.com give us any money or anything I wish they would. But I wish all y'all would. But I think the thing about Canva is that your starting point levels up immediately, like you're the best one on the ceiling. The best thing you possibly could make, instead of having to do it manually from scratch now, is 100 times higher than it was before. And with no experience of somebody who has no idea how to put words on an image to say or do anything, the basics are checked very, very well. The format's there's so many templates that you can use there now that all you gotta do is update your change their photos out for yours or, or you can see some of their stock images are great. They're all licensed. So if you make it in Canva, with images that you're getting that you're using from Canva, you're fine to use it, it's all clear, so you don't owe them any money. So it's just a great resource for content. If you're going to make really good content. You can make it clean, you can choose a theme you can choose different, it's something that you're gonna have to get in and tinker with, will probably at some point do it for sure to do it for our gear Academy guys where we do like a full kind of walkthrough. I walk everybody through things like how I do the stuff and how to cover a few of these real basics. But in Canva you need to start tinkering with it if you're going to be doing social media or if you have any idea or what's the word any inkling that you're going to be responsible for creating content for social media. That's the platform that I recommend for all of your images for sure. Oh, absolutely, there's just no way around it, you can get in, you can just choose, I want to make a new design, I want that design to be an Instagram post or an Instagram story. Perfect. What I do is go in and I make a post. And then I'll make that post for pick a theme, I like maybe a couple different themes and templates, and then I'll rescan them for this program, this program this message, this message, and then I'll update the images, I've reset all the colors to stuff that fits our theme and our brand. And then I will stamp out 20 images, different ones. So that's weeks worth of content just about that program, then Program B, same thing, just mod change it enough, so it's not boring and repetitive. But all the text images can really be the same, these templates really, really fly. And you can get 5060 images done in an hour too. And you can, that's it's just the easiest way to make stuff look great. But once you've made Instagrams squares, you can just copy them to a new size. And it'll immediately resize everything to the tall Instagram story format, which is great as well, you'll have to do a little bit of dragging around to adjust a little bit, but it spreads the image out and it gets it close. And then in no time, you're set up to post redundantly and still be high quality instead of just reposting your posts onto your stories. So I know that gets a little too much into the X's and O's to be interesting for audio. But this formula of getting in and batching your content like that, and making it about specific things. There's things that your content needs to be about. Right? You got your programs right, so you should make as much shit about every program and every product you have. Is it nutrition coaching? Is it a boxing class? Is it your group classes? Is it personal training? Is it this personal trainer, and this personal trainer, because that's what I would do, I would go we do personal training, then I would also zoom in, I would branch off I do a whole series on personal trainer, a personal trainer B personal trainers, trainers, see, so you can have a lot of content and all looks great, looks professional. But it's specific enough, we need to cover the generalities and need to cover the specifics because the specifics are going to connect to the people much better.



John Fairbanks 12:09

The don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Yeah. So when it comes to a lot of these things that we're going to talk about today, the strategy of Canva is going to get you there anything that we recommend is going to get you there is gonna get you to 80%. And that needs to be as close as you need to get to get started. Because this is where perfectionism of what colors do I use or what perfect, I don't know exactly what to pick, it's like, just fucking pick something, pick something and roll it out. So all of these strategies don't have it don't sit around and come up with a year long plan, when you get a hair up, you're asked to be able to, to execute on this, it's going to be just as Tyler said, it's you pick those services, whatever it is that you're offering. And then this allows you to very quickly use the phrase batching earlier to make sure we're all like 100% and clearer because that's a very, like administrative type, high level word where it's you batch your content, you do all of one thing for the whole, you know, for the whole month or the whole week, because this is one of the things where it's like, oh, well, I'll work on a 15 minutes a day. No, don't do that.



Tyler 13:18

Yeah, just the way I've done that is so inefficient, and the quality sucks, you plug it in and out you barely connect to it. You never get, you don't get to develop anything with that short amount of time. That way you don't get to get that much better, it's tough, you just have to kind of grind it out. Because there's so much to be learned from two hours of troubleshooting, problem solving and trying to make content



John Fairbanks 13:38

and you can look it up but we all like it's fundamental human nature to be where it's, it takes too long to transition from one thing to the next to be any good at having those turnarounds be too quick. So really for a whole month, you really, really can be able to say, Hey, I'm going to do this task for an hour. And you can get a lot of content created. And just as the formula that you gave everybody, Tyler is that it has specific content that's getting created for those specific services that you have. And now you're not stressed out about what I am going to post, what my marketing calendar or strategy or posting strategies are going to look like? Because now you know, you're checking the box, all from just doing something that's again, I just gotta get 80% of the way there.



Tyler 14:28

And we've done this because the social media platforms the content people consume has evolved a lot over the years and a lot as fitness came to the forefront of that truthfully, you know, before kind of the CrossFit boom, there was some body building stuff and some transformation stuff before but it really in that 2015 to 2018 era. So one of these platforms just exploded and the fitness space got all over it right? And so what a lot of businesses were able to do was just ride the brand and ride whatever was going on and all the all they ended up doing was just posting pictures of people working out, especially a coaching product group fitness product. If you're just posting videos or pictures of especially videos, right because Instagram wants you to do real estate it wants to turn this platform as close into Tik Tok as possible. Like all of these platforms, all these social media platforms want to do what all the other platforms do, because they can completely castrate the other one using their user base, right? There's no need for me to consume much content on Tik Tok at this point, because all of its own Instagram and the rules format, okay? Instagram rewards that with engagement. The problem is, you are not an influencer. And you are not trying to become a professional on your Instagram account. Okay, you're not trying to be paid for content creation, you're trying your brick and mortar. And this is the most important thing that people and we'll get into this in detail, probably that will go deep into this concept because it's the thing that people make this mistake all the time. You need to treat your business and your marketing strategy, like a brick and mortar, or like you're a fucking grocery store, like your shoe store, like you're a heating and air conditioning company like your god knows what but your local, there are people within your region that can do business with you, and nobody else can. So does it really do you much good to make a reel that's maybe kind of funny, that gets 100,000 views and five of them are in your area, it does almost nothing for your business. Trying to chase that content. You're just chasing the wrong things.



John Fairbanks 16:32

I think a really good example of this, our friend, remembers Marcus, from the strong fit days with all the means and shifts that he makes. Marcus I messaged him the other day, he started creating a bunch of reels and a bunch of shit. So for you don't know if you're listening most you're not gonna know who Marcus is. Marcus is from Germany. Marcus has started putting out a bunch of content out of his Jim's Instagram account, real account that Tyler is an all German everything he's doing is in German. And I go Marcus, this is so fucking awesome. I cannot understand anything that he's talking about. But it flows well. And it looks good. And so the fact that he's doing it in German tells me that he is talking to people that are in his immediate community. Yes, that's the point I want to make. That's so huge because you can get caught up for our all of our international folks that have other that speak other languages and their people speak other languages, is you trying to imitate fucking other people and speaking English on your shit is probably not going to be helping. You're trying to



Tyler 17:51

be Joe Rogan, you're a Norfolk need for you unless you're trying to get to that size of a platform. But what's the point? If you're a gym do you need 100 million for it doesn't do you any fucking good. So this is a thing we always want to touch on. You're not an influencer. We'll do a whole episode on this. And I think we've touched on this in the past as well. But you're not an influencer. You can be but your business isn't right now. So if you're worried about why your gym isn't profitable, stop acting like a fucking fitness influencer. This is a big problem, your content mirrors the wrong strategy. So it's really, really, really important. And so let's talk about John what the types of content you should write what can what can there be, what categories can it be because this isn't something that we're just going to talk about, you should probably write all this down, whatever your ideas are, what types of a you need ideas when you need when cut when it comes to content creation, you need ideas. So an easy starting point. One of the foundational principles that we work with in the gear Academy is testimonials getting good testimonials using them, turning them into content. Now, level one version of testimonials is simply getting your Google reviews, repurposing that text into you know, streamline it a little bit but repurposing that text and making it into a nice post. It can just be imaged with text, use Canva because there's great templates you go in there and you can search in the project templates, using the size format you want on Instagram. Square, just a regular post or Facebook post or a poster if you want to do that. You can just select the format you wanted and then you just search testimonials or reviews. And you will get 1000s of options. really crisp, clean, highly designed stuff. So you go in and you know you just boom and you drop. I did five. I did this the other day for my wife. I did five or six testimonials in each format and each template about three of them. So there's 1515 to 18 testimonial posts now done. Well we already had the reviews, they were sitting there we had already solicited for that. So we already had that. The content there, the thing we needed to go out and harvest it, just needed to be put together. It was done in 20 That's Dun, dun, you're valuable those are, do you for social, it's, it's an entirely different thing than us singing your own song. It's an entirely different connection to a potential listener, when it's somebody else who speaks like them, looks like them or is using the words that they use or just came from where they're coming from, as opposed to some fitness coach with ABS who lives in the gym, telling them how great they are all the things they can do, it's you need all the you need all of these things that we're about to talk about. So testimonials are perfect. If you're not posting reviews or testimonials regularly, you are fucking up bad, really, really, really bad. Because otherwise you're, you're just you're just telling people that you're awesome. And that gets exhausting. So you're just telling people to come to me like it's, it's terrible, they it's just, it's not the most ideal way to connect to him, you're leaving a lot of good, good interest out there on the table. By not leveraging these testimonials,



John Fairbanks 20:57

or you're doing what we see is most common, if you're not telling anyone that you're awesome.



Tyler 21:03

Yes, that's the other side



John Fairbanks 21:04

There's nobody saying anything about anyone being awesome. And that is what we see the most common is that you're just not doing it. Because whatever, you're gonna have a myriad of excuses. And at the end of the day, that is what's fucking you because you can, there's people out there, we work with plenty of gyms that have 85 100, Google reviews that are just sitting there. And that's very, very valuable. And we talk about that. And we go after some very specific tactics of how we are able to leverage that in the gear Academy. But you're gonna have folks that just they're on Facebook, or they're on Instagram, you want to make sure that you have the ability to cherry pick those best ones, and create that content. Because it's front of mind marketing. That's one of the most important pieces of where it's like, you know, having stuff for your story, to be able to just remind people to be able to see a thing or whatever it is to be able to attract the people that already are having success and have nice things to say. You can find more people just like that.



Tyler 22:05

Yeah. So that's a really big one. I do think testimonials are its foundation, it's the most it's the least utilized thing I'm seeing, at the very least with it with gyms that are not producing a lot of revenue, or the or the money they want. It's the most low hanging fruit, that for sure that combined with this next one here, which is talking about your programs, talk about your products, what are they? What can a person do when they come to you? Right? That's important, like the bare bones, like, here's what we have. And it's not always that stuff's not always going to convert. But people need to just be informed, we want them to make an informed decision. So just know the saying, like, Hey, we got nutrition coaching, it's this and that, here's just why it's good. I've kind of become very, very, very open with putting prices out there. Now. In my opinion, I've come around on that it's still as touchy a little bit with gym owners and stuff. I'm not completely sold on my new concept either. But I don't think it's that big of a deal to put your prices out there. Why keep them so close to your chest? If it's about a specific product, someone knows you're expensive, it's okay. Because the people who can afford it will also know that those people know it is expensive, and that it's in their wheelhouse. I'm not so worried about protecting your pricing to avoid price shopping like we were a long time ago, we talked about that in a previous episode about being able to close sales via text message and stuff like that, that at some point, yeah, just forcing everything to a meetings like this, given the information and save yourself the trouble save yourself a bunch of bad leads to, you know, when trying to put everything on your ability to close a sale on the skill of a salesperson who's most likely just a fitness or anyways,



John Fairbanks 23:40

What's important is that I think of that strike pricing strategy, as well as that it comes down to as a personal trainer most of the time, that's your personal trainer. And as gym owner, you need to make sure that you are talking about fucking personal training. So if he



Tyler 23:56

has its own personal training, and you're not talking about it, the number one thing I hear from group fitness gyms, and what can't sell people are gonna want personal training, you're never posting about it ever to anyone out there. And we talked the last Episode Two episodes ago about developing personal training, the path from which you generate interest is the type of people you get. So if you're only singing the group fitness song, you're gonna get people in and they're gonna feel like you're trying to bait and switch them by trying to nudge them up into a more expensive personal training package. But if you're talking about personal training packages, and someone inquires about it, they know they're not expecting to spend $100 and get a personal trainer for a month they know that so you're having higher level conversations with higher value people about higher value products and if they simply can't afford that product, then you down sell them into the only fucking product they knew existed before you started talking about your personal training anyways, which is your group. So this, this, this process, you've got to talk about the things you're doing and why and when I say talk about him it means make posts about him regularly. Take 10 different approaches to talk Talking about personal training. And you can leverage that we'll get into some better techniques later. But how can you leverage AI for things like, what is the difference? You know, what are the different reasons that people would be considering joining a personal trainer? Give you angels on the messaging, and then you can just okay, and I'll make the content in that title. And I'll answer those questions for them. Personal training, nutrition coaching, transformation packages, strength training, you have a youth program and you're talking about your youth program. Do you have a kids fucking Offseason training thing? Definitely do you have a weightlifting club, then let's talk about it. Let's talk about the things you do. And you can't just talk about all of them in one thing, and that's the thing people go to, this is our gym, we do all of this. And then what happens is, I'm a big, huge, strong, meathead guy. And if I see you're like, hey, we do, you know, we have hit classes, and we have booty bump, and then we have our spin classes in the daytime. And then we then have, you know, our strongman sessions in the evening. I'm going to go well, I feel like they probably suck at at least three of those things. You know what I mean? Like, like, if you have, it's so, so you got to speak to if you're going to try to attract if you have all those things, and there's nothing wrong with having those things. Talk about doing one in detail, when it is to like, when is it? Because if I have a class, if I say I, we have a spin class at 11am, it's a 35 minute 35 minute joint, it's awesome spin class come in and get a good sweat. It's awesome, right? If I don't say the time, if I say we have a spin class people inquire about, we're just wasting our time. If it doesn't fit, if it doesn't literally connect with their schedule. Who cares? You're wasting time, unless you're just trying to really gauge demand. But why bother chasing all those notes that are guaranteed to be nice? Because that doesn't work with our schedule, right? So we always have classes, like if you're selling a group class, when we're talking with a gym owner we work with the other day, who's scheduled, it's a bit because this gym is growing. And they started from with very few members, and they're developing the staff and all this stuff. But now it's at a point where the class schedule kind of actually doesn't align with a vast majority of the working population. We just see it and it's like, okay, well, we've got to this point. But now if we're gonna grow, we do need to start to talk about this right? Do we need to just move the schedule, well, then we're just introducing a new class for no reason for nobody to be there. So let's just talk about our schedule, say, on instead of talking about group classes, group classes at 7am 6am 5am, whenever that is, these are our options, put your schedule out there, let people know that you want to work out this time, we got a bunch of openings at this time. It's a great group level, blah, blah, blah, but talk about those things. We need to cover generals, this is what we do. We're here about fitness, we're welcoming, we're a cool spot. But you also need to have posts that are going to be hyper specific. And that's it's the key people need to talk about everything or they talk about nothing. And talking about everything at once is kind of the same thing as talking about.



John Fairbanks 28:01

Also posting only images of people doing exercises is not executing any of this strategy. No. I think we need to be like I think that needs to be called out specifically. Because we're seeing what is that 2015 2016 social media strategy. Yeah, that's still being executed thinking that you are checking all the boxes. And it's you're not you're you are, it looks and looks like everything else, which makes you very scroll passable. The content you guys that we've been seeing getting created right now that you can use with Canvas, it's stuff that specifically title you do with a MMA gym is very stoppable. It catches your eye, right, and it will catch your attention just enough to get him to stop because that is we get a little bit too far into like marketing, but you want to it's like a pattern interrupt. The pattern that people have is that they scroll and they're hyper scrollers and they're scrolling and they're wasting time and they're letting they're plugging their brain and their shit into the matrix. Right? And that's what they're doing. You have to snap them out of it, and get them to stop and interrupt that normal pattern of consumption to get them to stop and look at your shit. Yeah, that's great just fundamentally, that's what you need to do.



Tyler 29:27

And this can be this can be a thing where, you know, there's furniture example one of the MMA gyms we work with, and it's it's nice having a big group of people in your gym and you want to say hey, look, there's 15 People in this class that are getting after you and talk about what that's great. And one of the gyms that we work with, because the gym owners are busy, and there isn't really a strategy that represents probably 90% of the social media content, which is just a not too great photo of sweaty people. Bill after workout standing there far away. Who knew you didn't know any of them? None of them. Nothing interesting is going on. It's just, it's not necessarily that it's bad. But if it's the only thing it is, and that's where we had kind of started getting involved in layering the strategy. So in the context of what they're doing, it is alright, we're going to make posts very specifically now, and then we'll get into this right here, because this is we're gonna roll into the accountability then thing next, right. So even if you farm this out and have one of your coaches to make content for you, or something like that, know, first off, that if you do not give them the tools and give them some, like absolute criteria that you need them to do on a weekly basis, one just for content creation, content publishing, the purpose of that content was targeted for who it's targeted for the copy all of that stuff, if you don't equip them with those tools ahead of time, equip them with a plan, equip them with the opportunity to be successful. And then define the terms of this being successful, right? If we say this is the goal, we want to generate certain amounts of leads from our social media organically every week, we do want to maybe grow our following, we want to try to get some engagement. But being pointless here, we want to convert conversions matter way more than likes, I don't give a shit about real reviews. None of that stuff matters. If you're gonna hand this over to one of your coaches, then you absolutely need to follow up, you need to hold them accountable to the results of this thing, meaning if I'm not having a hard time selling personal training at all, right, then I need to be okay, perfect. This is the program we're trying to grow. So you say, Listen, coach, instead of just giving them the keys, you're giving them the login and password and then putting your hands up and then wondering why it doesn't work. You need to give them a plan of execution. So we want to grow personal training, we need to post about personal training, we need to post about trainer A, post about trainer B, maybe some of our package offerings, maybe let them know that hey, nutrition coaching is important as well as personal training. Or, you know, what about it? What if it is about injury prevention? What if it is about starting people off slow, whatever that is, come up with a whole strategy and make a bunch of content about it doesn't have to be videos, you don't got to be geniuses, you don't got to come out and make some Tarantino shit, you can just make something personal training, personal training, look, smile and face, we can do this for you. It can be funny, it can be serious, it can be results based testimonials. For the personal training clients, you've got gay equity, now, you've equipped that coach with something that they can use for the next six, eight weeks. Okay, and then we're gonna say we're gonna check in every couple of weeks ago, you know, we haven't gotten any inquiries about that, what do you think we should do? You have to fire them over it or anything. But if you're not talking to them about the stuff that they're doing, that's not working and trying to make it better than what in the hell are you doing? Okay, so when we go forward from here, so that's the kind of the accountability side, whoever you plug into it. And if it's you, you need to debrief at the end of every week, you go, what did I do? I didn't, if you if you're making content consistently, and if your coaches are, too, if they're making the stuff if they're publishing things for you. If you can't care at all, you're gonna look at it a week later, two weeks later and go, you should kind of cringe at it. I've talked about this before, if you're not, if you don't look at shit you made six months ago and go man, that sucks, then you didn't get any better. Okay, so you should know, at the end of a couple of weeks, you should know like, you know, I would have done this differently. Now, in hindsight, you should have a better idea. You know, that's, that's so that you always need to be debriefing, you need to check back in with your coaches about this. But let's start making things now as we push forward for every product that you have. Okay, so we're going to batch out, we're going to spread out with what we do here, for example, I'll run you through the example for hub city. We made a bunch of stuff for a kickboxing program. Okay. We made daily schedule posts, just to go up on the story. So that once a day, the first thing that people see is what classes are going on, at what time this day, that's great for our existing members. It's something I can repeat with different colors or just throw different images on for the next foreseeable future. Anyways, which is great, but it just sits there as a reminder then to somebody who's seen our stuff 100 times and has not taken action. It always connects the dot. Now from them the thing they want to do to their schedule, okay, we always want to be trying to connect just one dot and that's a good thing about the schedule posts posted just yesterday schedule. Some of those I don't want to do just do jiu jitsu but like I just I can't make this time well then that's IT problem solved. Okay, but for someone who is about to and then knows at that moment, like actually this is right at minus at the time that I would come in. Oh, now that dots connected that person is now right on the verge of joining so that's the point so I made a whole bunch of those very that's the easiest shot in the world. Different colors and boom we're set for months months on that different color, different background image, same font same to everything you're just gonna see that every morning on our story that's a piece of cake kickboxing stuff we do all those we did them in the story and on the post jujitsu do them in the story in the post MMA in the stories in the post 1020 Each very simple, but does zoom in And, okay, we want to get more females in our programs because in a small town, you're in an MMA gym, you have just a lot of dudes. Right? So how do we make this more approachable to women? Well, we can talk directly about, hey, this is great for women, that's great. You want to do that as well. He can literally say, this is why this isn't just for big tough dudes, you know, like, women love this. It's great. It's great for self defense, it's approachable. We're not awful to deal with, like, whatever, you can say that, but that becomes really right on the nose. So you can't do that all the time. Or it's weird, right? If all you're saying is like kit, ladies, come on in, and we're cool for ladies to bring on the ladies. It's Ladies Night, ladies late. It's a bit too on those who become pushy, or just it's disingenuous. I don't know, you got to tread lightly when you're just chasing a very specific demographic, and you're just using words all the time. So one of the things you do is just when we're using stock images, just make sure that if it's if we have 10 pictures of people for jiu jitsu promotion stock images for can at least half of them be a woman doing something. I think that's reasonable, right? So then at least because a woman is not going to see a man like me strangling somebody on a poster and go, Oh, I can relate to that. I want to join the freakiest ones, but but I think I think that that's a formula that you got to make sure like, especially when comes to your advertising representation does matter. Right. So there's a fine line, you don't have to make every single image have someone of every race, religion, color, sex, creed, and hybrid version of whatever it is going on anymore. All you have to do is just make sure that like, hey, like we don't have any like, legitimate like nice professionals. Why are we only attracting dirtbags? Well, let's maybe fix our tone on some things, right? Let's figure this out. How can we be more attractive? Maybe we're not. It's not that we're failing to attract them at all. Maybe some of our stuff is repelling them, some of our content is pushing them away, objectively looking it over at the end of the week, right? So we do that with every program. Same thing with our kickboxing class. Okay. Is there content for women? Because right now women represent Sue, a smaller percentage of this gym are great if our growth model is to work. Why are we leaving 50% of this demographic out? You know what I mean? It's not a yeah, this is the thing that should be inclusive, it's beneficial to women, why are we not doing this, this is our job is to do this. So. So we do that across the board for everything. Then we drop well, we also sell supplements, perfect. Let's drop that in there. Once a week, right to the store, we don't have to do much. Just to let people know we do it. What about our apparel store? Sell apparel Perfect. Well, let me just make one post about that a week, or maybe just one or two designs that we have out there. Just put one out there once a week. But now, the things I just listed for you, I didn't have to, we didn't have to make any video, we have to hire professionals to come and do photography. But that's so much content, that's probably enough for two posts a day for months, truthfully, just things that I listed for you right now, and not even kind of the youth program. Okay, and it's super, super easy to do. So then, when you have all these boxes checked, and it's been batched and put together. Now if you want to fuck around a little bit, bit, get creative or just talk about yourself a little bit. Now you can do it and it fits in. It's amidst all this other stuff that looks very professional. It's good messaging, and it connects to clients. If you're only talking about yourself or sitting, nobody cares about you. And you're not checking all these other boxes, then you're just repulsive to people usually. So



John Fairbanks 38:27

that and they and they make that clear by not buying that's it, you don't get leads, right? Like it's it's they are the ones that are making that very clear to you that you are not getting the leads. And here's the one thing about Tyler, when we are working with folks, it's that they don't know their numbers. So you don't know what your numbers are. And you're also not debriefing and reviewing the strategy that you are, you may or may not be using at the moment. Yeah, posting without a strategy is still a strategy. It's bad isn't fun, it's just a bad one. And you're doing it and there's a lot of folks that either like not doing it and this is also a maybe get to us to another part of this conversation, which is we've been talking a lot about video, I mean of images that you can just create and very easily at a Canva but I know a lot of gym owners that have spent just bucket loads of cash when it comes to videographers and like really professional looking shit to where they almost have like no marketing at all because they're waiting for it to be perfect, right? They're waiting for whatever the fuck that they've been making. And, it just is not going to be enough. Like it's just I'm telling you right now, it's not enough shit like you know, and people aren't gonna have any



Tyler 39:50

like how many professional quality videos you would need to make how much money it would take for that to end up being the Senate this year, not a pure content creation business. You're just not and if you're A globally scalable digital product and you're in the wrong fucking listen to the wrong fucking podcast to like, you know what I mean? Like it just, like, if you look at a lot of things that like these people that sell these, you know, athletes sell online programming and they have videographers just around them all the time making super high quality shit all the time. That's great. Their model is not your model. And a lot of them you'll hear even worse, you'll hear them say things like, Well, yeah, that they don't even need their gym. Really, the gym doesn't represent a fucking very high percentage of their income and they know it and the gym might even be operating at a loss. Because like these people just need a place to be. And that the only way that Jim makes money is from the online sales and shows like this. So stop emulating those things you're going to, you'll sink your ship if you do it now. Video The thing about video again, it's so expensive, you're gonna pay a professional to do it and let's go into this videography and photography. paying a professional to do it is very expensive. Now there's a time and a place. One of the things that we had that I had seen. I think Stuart Brower had talked about this recently . I was on his WTF gym talk Facebook page, the direct competitor of ours, but it's usually he's good, he's got good shit. I don't. I've never been one to disparage a good idea because I didn't have a habit. And this was the thing he had talked about, which is a strategy for getting content. Instead of taking just pictures of people exercising which is not going to connect to someone who's not already in your gym who doesn't know that person or know that exercise. And if that exercise is something that looks hard, or complicated or that the average Joe doesn't understand like snatches and god knows what else that's not gonna attract people that's going to turn them away then it's too hard for me it's just crazy. But what if there's a person actively coaching because what is your product if you're selling group fitness or personal training, it's coaching. Coaching coaching coaching was the last time we showed a picture of you or one of your coaches coaching a person Okay? So let's do what Broward said. This thing is like you just have your coaches photograph for each other. Um, do it once a once every other week or something like that. Just say, hey, here, take my phone just during this session, just get you know 3050 photos of me coaching this person, you know, get a different perspective. Pro tip, tip guys, stop taking all your photos and videos from your height looking through your camera, your eyes, it's very compelling. It doesn't look like anything, change the perspective, change the angle, get very low film away from the ground. If you're just especially we're just doing photos, try something a little bit different than just standing there dead on because me I noticed this stuff being a tall guy is that if I take my photos and stuff, it all looks fine when I'm taking the picture because it's the world I'm used to. And then when I come down and I sit down look at it. I was like Jesus, this looks weird. It looks like a fuck it. We're like dealing with a bird's eye view or like a Shrek view, you know. And so. So it's really important though that like so but letting your coach having our coaches photograph each other, okay, just this one's one does, you're scratching each other's backs, basically, like, I'm gonna get pictures of you coaching and get pictures of me coaching, let's send them off to the social media guy or whoever's managing it. And then they can have something to do to talk about me and my coaching or just our personal training or what our philosophy is, or we can talk very specifically about this exercise and what we do to help people do it safely. Those things that don't on their own are not interesting. But that thing done them it's the whole other plan. And so this whole other package now it's like pretty, it's good, it's solid. Videographers the same thing video is expensive. And video editing is really expensive. And usually if you have people DIY it, it ends up being bad too. It just ends up not being great either. Your phones can do great stuff, but the end of this is going to be super slick. So for video, I know I don't worry about it that much. I see video gets so oversaturated now that I don't know how you plan on it and by the way this will change. But I don't know how you plan or how I would plan on making a video that's going to stop someone from scrolling. What are you going to do in your gym? It's gonna mean that the gym fails, maybe we'll do some stuff so I think video is fine to do just know that it's very likely not worth paying a lot of money for for sure. Now, on the other side of things I think events are great. I think we talked about this in Gear Academy as well. If you're having events, parties , barbecues, if you're going to have a photographer round that might be the time to do it. Right? Because what you want, whether it's in the gym before class after class with your personal trainers, you don't need to see people exercising. They know you're at the gym , they know what's going on there but can you show someone having a good time? Can you show them a smiling Can you show someone looking like a human show something that will get some sort of emotion it either better look real cool or better get some sort of emotional reaction out of some of the kind of look at person smiling or that looks boy that looks intense but you gotta see something of the person not the exercise stop showing exercises because nobody cares. That, I think, is a hedgehog.



John Fairbanks 44:51

Well I'm just on the video part it's Ed tourney, who's out of prestige labs he talked about this and I think this goes also to the heart of how expensive good video can be. And so his thing was, hey, stick with, make sure if you're going to spend that kind of money, that you create content that can be used across multiple uses. So for him, it was like, You're gonna throw those member type events. So for one of them, hire somebody to come and do the video, maybe you can finally pull the trigger and have somebody come and they're going to make a good video and will understand all the different places that that video can go. So not only can it be a commercial for the gym, obviously, and now a different way of looking at it where people are having a good time. And it's not just people doing sled drags or snatches or cleans or whatever else it is that they do. But you can have a different style of video that gets made. But he also talked about turning that around and using it to hire people. And I thought that that was a very much talk about a way to have something not look like everything else, is being able to then take video of your community and people having a good time and getting a feeling for like, this is what we're all about. That's very easy to now all of a sudden be like, Hey, if you want to be a part of a team that looks like this, and deals with people like this, and a community like this, now you can take that video and really use it all use it in multiple areas, that would be the only way that I would ever do it just because of the cost effectiveness. It's just not there, you have to be able to say no, I'm here, Mark this to be able to be here, here and there.



Tyler 46:37

And to expand on that point, everything we've talked about today from this DIY, social media plan is kind of geared towards organic, organically generation, right? posting content for free, putting it out there for free, trying to target the right people with just the messaging and who it goes to out, you know, just generally speaking, who the images with the images are what we're talking about, that's how we target the people, that is part of a free, you're not paid, you're not running to them, this is your organic strategy. But no. If I make posts this week, I can't repost them next week, because that's gonna be weird, right? I just can't. No matter how good it is, it would be weird. If I just reused the same image about the same class a bunch of times, it's just get strange. So I wouldn't recommend doing that. But if you're gonna run paid ads, you need content, the worst thing you can do is have a great organic system going and then make a bunch of new content for your paid ads. And then because of it, you fall behind on your organic ads. And then when you run out of creative and content for your paid ads, you have neither. Now there's kind of like a reboot time and a lot of work to be done. And, and so no, this is the best of your content that you make with this now can always be done. Because it's going to be high quality, you cannot if you're just if you're checking your social media box by just posting a video of people exercising once a day and saying hey, and even if you're making an ask about if that's what it is, you can't use that content when you're gonna go run ads next month, or the month after that, because that content relatively sucks. It's okay to check the box. And you can do that once a day, you just better have a lot of other shit going on that as well. Okay, so now that that content is not reusable, at least half of the content we talked about today is able to be repurposed. And that's the point is that everything that you do can be repurposed and isn't a hit to be reusing it. So that alone is super important. One other side of this I want to touch on really quickly is getting a deal. You got members that around somebody wants to throw you a good guy deal. Like I'll come and I'll be the photographer and stuff, photographs. Maybe I'm okay with videos, we tell you a story. Okay, we worked with a gym owner. And it's not by no fault of their own, because the stuff is really expensive. One of their members came to them and said, Hey, I'd like to film some video testimonies will do like super high end like whole production, fucking cameras, lighting mics, the whole fucking thing crew. And they brought in and they did like five video testimonials from five clients. It's great stuff, really great stuff. It took about 14 months. And we saw one of them. But now the problem is you got to see one of them and do him for 14 months. You didn't get that content. Why did it take that long? Because he wasn't paid to do it. It was just doing filling it in on his free time was an idea he kind of had and he just kind of let it happen. Okay, but that is really tough because what that also does, is that hamstrings you from going out like redoing it. Right? Because you could kind of get those testimonials if you just set up a lapel mic and your iPhone and just had that person talk. You could probably get pretty close right to some good enough. It'd be good enough if you're going to do video testimony, but you're not going to go get those people to sit back down now and do another video interview. You're not going to by the way, not only am I. I haven't seen this gym. I haven't seen those other videos either. It's now been two years. So there's no way you're never gonna see it. So you ask your client, your clients had to do that you got no value out of it, essentially you got one video. And you kind of had to pause on developing anything in that realm further for the foreseeable future. Even worse, what if you then go and you'll hire another videographer and another guy who's a good guy, Delia, you're like undercutting him paying somebody else was like, I need this done. So this is why that good guy deals with the brother in law dealing with all that stuff. It's never what it's never really what it's, what it's cut out to be or what it's claimed to be at the beginning. So that's kind of all we got for today on this DIY strategy. Listen, you need to be accountable to this process. So write down all your products. What are they what's anything that we could talk about our schedule our classes, our coaches, our community members, stuff, events we have going on fucking whatever promotions reasons, you should join the gym, our location, our community spotlight, this spotlight that testimonials, make a shitload of every one of those things, okay, at the very least, you need to say I want this done 10 of these, this returns this. And if you're not doing them yourself, you need to find that out. But that list needs to exist. If that list doesn't exist, you're gonna hire a coach. And you know how coaches are when coaches get told, Hey, you're gonna do social media, what they're gonna do as little as fucking possible, they're gonna take out their phone once a day, while people are exercising, they'll do some cute pretend influencer bullshit, and it's gonna suck, they're gonna lay eggs. That's fine, too, because their instincts are that they've always followed influencers, they think it's easy, I got stuff, I take my shirt off on Instagram, I get tons of followers. Okay, so they're just gonna kind of do that formula, it's your job to say, this is what I want. And these are the outcomes that I hope to generate from it. And after the end of week one, all they've done is post videos of people exercising and nothing else and created nothing about any of the things you really do or are trying to accomplish. You say, I asked you to do this other thing, we need to get back to that we need to be doing this thing. Because look, zero leads were generated from you this week, I got nobody that said that responded to any of these calls. But there wasn't any call to action. So I wouldn't even fucking know. So you didn't even give yourself a chance to succeed. This is the definition of success in this relationship. I need you to make this successful. The next week, it's a code, they'll do half of it to see if they can get away with doing just half and then they'll gradually skeleton so that next week, you gotta say, No, I need all of this. We got one lead, that's great. Let's lean into this more, you got to say that we know how coaches are when you give them real work, okay, they're gonna be like this. If you're doing it yourself, then it's on you, then you need to debrief yourself every week. And you just need to start checking all these boxes, okay, you need to execute your plan. And you need to say, when the plan doesn't work, why didn't it work? Why do I think it didn't work objectively, even if you thought the shit you made was good, go on the assumption that it sucks, and you suck. Okay, and look it over and be like, alright, I would have maybe done that a little differently now, then do it differently next week. Okay, but that is the process, come up with a plan, define all the things you can do batch, batch the content. So it's an efficient use of your time, because eventually, if you can get the content creation, side and batching now to be very efficient, you can start to hire out the copywriting and posting and publishing. You can have some of that done for maybe 2030 bucks a week, if you find the right vas. Okay, so now all of a sudden, you're able to offload this time completely, because hey, all we're doing is creating the content. And we're just giving them a big folder, a bundle and a schedule. And they just run and grab one out of each category and run with it. This reason? Why is this?



John Fairbanks 53:39

The order of that is really, really important. You're exactly right, Tyler. But the reason why all those things you said that you have to do first you need to do first, yes, before you outsource this to somebody else. Because those people will need direction, they will need to be told what to do. Otherwise, they will just do whatever it is that they see everyone else do. And you might as well, you're now wasting money. So you have to be very clear and say this is what I want to accomplish. This is exactly what I want. The less money that you spend on someone the more direction and handholding they need. So if you don't want to be in charge of all the shit and be very, very like you are the person that's just not literally doing it. You pay those people less money, the more money you spend on it, folks can still be able to get it done. But you still have to be able to say this is what I want to have happen. Because the biggest mistake that we've ever seen whenever we've helped with social media for gyms, and especially when a coach is doing it, is the misunderstanding of what it means to send something, have something be successful. And that's why you as the owner have to be able to say with confidence, know, this is what deems success? And if you can't, or you don't know what those things are, you're dying.



Tyler 55:12

How many leads did you get from your social media last week? Ask yourself that question. How many calls to action? Did you put out last week? How many products did you speak directly about last week? Okay, that's this, this is really, really, really important. Because if the answer is none, then every bit of effort you put into it was for not truly for nothing. Okay, every bit of money you spent and it was for nothing. And that doesn't mean stop doing it all together, it means it needs to be better. Because this is a tool and you cannot have these tools. You cannot spend time and effort using this tool for no reason. Okay, this is like taking a sledgehammer and just hammering it into the fucking ground for no goddamn reason. Okay. It's exhausting. It's not accomplishing anything that we want to accomplish. So, come up with a plan, make that plan, execute that plan, hold yourself accountable to the success of this plan. If right now you generate zero leads from social media this week, next week, I want you to get one and want you to try to get one. That's it. And then the next week if you don't, aren't what can we try to do to shake one loose? Maybe we need a more direct focus. Maybe we need to just be more consistent. Maybe we just needed to play this game for longer. But until you go from zero to one, you're not gonna go from one to 10. That's for sure. So start that they move in. If you got one last week, let's try to double it. Would you get to play this game? This is a hormonal thing he was talking about, about how you need to if you set a check in your social media in the morning, you checked your bank account in a year, you'd probably have more money. How many of you are really in regards to your business's social media, not paying attention to any of the metrics of its success? You just see stuff that looks cool, kind of maybe got posted. Or maybe you just ignore it. And that's unacceptable. Because you're gonna come to us in a year when your business is about to die. And you're gonna go, I don't know what to do. We've been really trying. I mean, yeah, I've scaled back our marketing and I look at it so you just haven't fucking posted anything or done anything have done nothing of any significance. And when you start paying money for us to help you, I'm not going to . It's not on me to save your ship after it's already sunk. Okay, you got to keep this thing afloat. You can do this, you can keep it moving. Your job is to earn enough money, just enough money so you're floating out there things extra and then you can pay us. We can take you to the next level. Don't sit on your heels and sink the ship, and then expect someone to come and save you because you ain't gonna have enough money to pay us to save you. I hate to break it to you. Okay, so it's on you to keep the ship afloat, and we'll help you pick up speed from there. So join the Facebook group. Thanks for listening to everybody who follows the Facebook group. The gym owners revolution is in the description of this episode. Follow the show at the gym owners podcast on Instagram. Follow me at Tyler Elphinstone. And John,



John Fairbanks 57:54

you can follow me at Jay banks f L. And if you want to



Tyler 57:57

know about the year Academy shoot us a message we can get you started right now you started this week we'll be selling big money sales in the next week or two. Everything will be gliding towards the glorious, glorious winds of success after that. So thanks a lot for listening to everybody and we will see you next week.