Video marketing is a natural tool for growing your fitness business. Most trainers enjoy showing or talking about exercises much more than making a sales inquiry. If you want more paying fitness customers, you want videos. In any advertising or marketing effort, images stand out before copy. If your awesome headline grabs someone’s attention first, your image will be a close second. Put a video next to a static photo and the video wins.

In a world of instant gratification, if you can give a prospect a piece of what they’ll get when they become a customer, you’ll outperform your competition, as long as you do it right. As a fitness marketing coach, the mistakes I see using video are common. The focus of this article is to take video to do it. Correct.

Mistake #1. Don’t do it at all.

If you are not doing video marketing. Beginning. You will make mistakes, but you can start to develop the habit and systems to record videos and post them regularly. From then on, you can start to focus on getting better results. Any less than desirable attempts can still be saved.

Mistake #2. Start without a goal.

When you contemplate writing a big, fat check for a radio or print ad, you think hard about what you want the ad to do and what action you want the prospect to take once they’ve been exposed. Your free video marketing strategy should be no different. After viewing, do you want the client to sign up for a bootcamp, a free session, and how should they contact you? Should they call you, click on your active link, or what action do you want them to take?

Mistake #3. Filming on camera without a script.

To make a video that’s conversational and friendly, casual and compelling, you need to know exactly what you’re going to say. That starts at the drawing board. If you’ve resolved the second error and have a goal, then your script should lead the client to want to do just that. That’s not going to happen by accident. Like making a sale, certain steps must be taken before asking a customer you don’t know until you see them for the first time to take action. What happens in a sale? You discover the problem, right? So, in his video, he will talk about the problem first, before providing a solution. You must give them something of value before asking for or in exchange for what you have asked for. Give them the advice they can use right now. Offer the “free gift” for entering your email or calling.

Mistake #4. Thinking in one dimension.

If you’re just thinking about pasting a video so you can pat yourself on the back for making a video without thinking about what’s going to happen next, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t have an annotation on your video that provides a live link for them to land on your homepage or signup page, your video won’t convert. If you don’t include a phone number with a live person answering and responding, you’ll put another hurdle between I’m interested Y I want to pay you.

Mistake #5. Using a video version for each screen.

If you’re talking to people who aren’t already involved in your club or programs, you need to build a relationship with them. If you’re talking to people who are already members but aren’t personally training, they need another message. If you’re talking to past or current personal training clients about what’s next or upgrading, that’s a different conversation. What you put on your Facebook page for personal training clients should serve a different purpose than the video you put on YouTube to attract people searching Google for fitness options.

Mistake #6. Creating a lame title that will never be seen.

Your goal is to appear as the number one video in the search for your topic. Consider how many times you click on a video, article, or blog that is on the second page of search results. Even if you’re seventh or eighth on the list, the chance you’ll ever get clicked is so small that it’s not worth it. Get help with copywriting so you can find it. Study the top rated videos and take notes. Find a fitness marketing expert. Don’t miss this step or the ones that have come before it doesn’t matter.

You can bring your marketing to life with a video done right.