There are so many online trainers and coaches marketing their services on the internet and social media these days, it can be hard to stand out and promote your services. So what’s your plan to market your business, get new leads, and attract new customers to your online training business in 2018?

There are different ways to market your online personal training services, made for every fitness business’ budget:

• Social media ads
• Word of mouth
• Testimonials
• Cold Calling
• Attending local events
• Google Ads (search engine marketing)
• Email marketing
• etc.

But what about social media contests?

Using social media contests to get more leads for my fitness business is something I recently experimented with and it proved to be quite successful, even on my first try. Let me share with you how I did it and some of the basics you’ll need to use this marketing tactic for your own business.

What exactly is a social media contest?

A social media contest is an offer you promote through social media posts or paid ads that requires your audience to complete a specific task in order to qualify for the offer. An example could be a social media ad telling leads to “Enter now for a chance to win 1 month of free online personal training” that directs them to a form on your website. Not only does this get you the lead’s contact information and open up opportunities for future email marketing, but you’ll be sending them to your site and will likely see a spike in traffic.

You could also take things one step further by asking leads to share the post for an extra contest entry! Now you’re also expanding your reach and audience—a necessary step to help you get more leads.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Set up your own social media contest by following the steps below:

1. Decide on your offer

The first step, rather obviously, is to decide what you are going to offer as your prize for your contest. This could be anything you want! Three months of free online personal training? One month access to your membership platform? One year of free personal training?

Something to think about: the better the offer, the more people are likely to take part in your contest. Make sure it’s something that is worth people’s time to sign up for, but also not going to cost you too much as a free give away.

2. Set up a landing page for your contest

A landing page is a dedicated webpage used for a specific marketing campaign or tactic—like a social media contest—and are a great way to quickly bring leads to specific content on your website. They are also often used for information collection. (If you are not familiar with how to build landing pages, you can easily hire an online freelancer to do this for you, even for a limited budget.)

Your landing page is the section of your website that you will use to promote your contest further after leads click through your social media post, and you’ll want to make sure it includes a form asking people to enter their name and email address. You can even ask for further information on this form if you like!

In my most recent contest, my landing page form included an optional field asking people “what is your main fitness goal for 2018?”. Since the whole idea of this contest is to collect potential leads for my online training business, I wanted to know more about these leads. Through this field, I was able to collect the name and email address of these leads as well as their fitness goal, which was a huge help in contacting these leads post-contest.

3. Decide how you are going to promote your contest and set an end date

There are a few ways you can promote your social media contest to get new leads for your business. If you already have a large following on social media you might want to start by just sharing your post with your current followers and have them tag friends in the comments for more entries to your contest.

Another option, and one that will allow you to reach a whole new audience, is to use paid ads and promote/boost social media posts. Just like landing pages, this can be tricky to create if you are not social media savvy. But with some research, or maybe the helpful hand of a freelancer, they’re easy enough to create. Once you have your ad set up and ready to go, decide how long you want to run your contest for. I would recommend a minimum of at least two weeks to make sure you get a lot of leads out of it.

If these contests are set up correctly you can bring in many brand new leads to your business, and the best part is, based on their entry in the contest, you know these leads are already interested in online personal training. After your contest is over and you choose a winner, my advice would be to contact all of those who didn’t win (using the information about their fitness goals from the lead form) and offer them a discount to get started in your online personal training.

I hope this helps you set up your first social media contest and that it brings in some hot new leads to your business and starts your 2018 with a bang!