Why your organic content isn't working

I had a chat with Robin yesterday (hey mate!) about joining our PropaneBusiness programme. (Go here and book in if you'd like to discuss it too: https://propanefitness.com/onlinecoachstart). And we covered a lot of ground in around 45 minutes. His business. His plans for online. And what we do, our systems and how we help PTs and coaches move online. Anyway, we spent quite a bit of time talking about "playing the game" with social media. How it seems to be the done thing at the moment to: * Spend 1-2 hours making an infographic * Spend your entire morning producing and editing your IGTV video. * Broadcasting everything from your midday poo to your family holiday on your stories. And, as with a lot of things, because it's what a few well known PTs credit their success to - it's easy to find yourself in an endless loop of doing this without ever really stopping to consider... ...is this actually doing anything? You probably track a good bit of your training, diet and habits - right? You want to be sure that what you're doing is working? ^^^ posting content on social media FEELS good, because you get likes, comments, more followers and maybe the odd supportive DM. But, here's the 3 key problems:

1. Unless you already have a large following, it's damn hard to build one.

Think about it for a second. Social media platforms are businesses. They have investors and shareholders. They're in this game to turn a profit not to let you grow your business with their audience totally free of charge. Their preference is that an Instagram feed is filled with funny things, family stuff, pictures of your best mates wedding or new baby. Not Mr/Mrs random PT and their new fat loss programme...that you've never heard of. UNLESS you're paying for the privilege in the form of incredibly well produced, high volume, polarising content multiple times per day...or cold, hard cash. They allow ads for a reason - revenue. So, unless your audience is already big enough to be fully sustaining your business, you're on a long and frustrating road to build it. (You wouldn't still be reading if that was truly the case) And, fingers crossed they don't just decide to change the algorithm overnight and throttle your organic reach.

2. Almost impossible to attribute revenue and success

There's a saying in online marketing: "Tracking what causes someone to buy is like saying I had 7 beers last night...which one made me drunk". It's tough. However, we do need to be very careful to monitor whether what we're doing is actually causing something significant to happen. We have actually figured out a way to track opt ins from different organic platforms and we're running a test at the moment. (Sorry - that's one for the PB clients only!) But consider this. All those hours you spend perfecting your social media presence. Do you know how many clients that's generated over the last month? Which bit of content, specifically? How can you repeat that every day? Sure, you can play around with a hobby like this. But if you're trying to actually build a company that coaches scores of online clients, these tactics (even with proper tracking) are very difficult to get results from.

3. Lack of volume.

Let's take a sample online following of 5,000 people. Remember, "follower" doesn't REALLY mean much. Someone has seen something at some point that made them think, "yea, that's a bit interesting". It doesn't mean they're just BURSTING to buy something from you. So there's still quite a bit of work to do to convince strangers to become customers. And, because most content you produce on Insta essentially disappears after 24 hours, you need to post daily. However, let's boil down the numbers. An average story will be seen by 5-12% of your audience. So, 500 views on your story every day - not too bad! Let's say you get a 3% action rate - people who click the link in your bio (you won't have unlocked swipe ups yet). ^^^ that is an EXCELLENT action rate by the way. So 15 clicks. Your landing page converts at 50% (again, strong). 7-8 opt ins. And your lead -> sale rate is 5% (very good). You make a GRAND TOTAL of....no sales. Sure - some days it'll work, others not. But that's a lot of blasting your personal and social life on an expiring reel of content to encourage absolutely no one to work with you. Not to mention - unless you're growing your audience by hundreds of people every day, the same people who see your stuff each day will EVENTUALLY get bored. Convinced yet? I hope so. The biggest risk you face as an online coach is spending time and money on stuff that simply doesn't work. Stuff that gives you a hit of "oooo I'm popular" but doesn't actually move the needle of revenue, profit and cash. Great...thanks for the gut punch Jonny. Thanks for ruining my morning. Well...here is what to do instead. 1. Build a sales process that moves someone from stranger to client in the shortest time possible (7-14 days). 2. Test this and refine it until it converts at 3-5% (for every 100 leads, you pick up 3-5 customers). 3. Do this before you do ANYTHING else - no, no one cares about your free recipe guide, or the infographic you're making. 4. Calculate your KPIs - figure out what you *could* afford to pay per lead and still make a profit. 5. Go out to social platforms, Google, Youtube & LinkedIn and PAY for reach. ^^^ when you can do this and you can invest £100 (for example) and make £100+, with a few clients who will pay monthly AND a bigger email list it is sheer lunacy to spend your life on social media instead. I get it though. Easy to say, hard to do. There's only so much I can teach in an email and this is already pretty damn long. So, want help with this? Go here and book a 121 session with us to discuss all the details of how we can help you: https://propanefitness.com/onlinecoachstart Jonny