Social Media for Dog Trainers: You Don't Need More Followers

So many of you come to me asking the same thing. How do I grow on social media? How do I get more followers, more traction, more views? You have all got it into your heads that gaining followers is going to pour money into your pockets.

Some context. Ten million views a month on Instagram might pay you about a thousand dollars. Ten million. Do you understand how hard that is? Yorkshire Canine Academy has almost 500,000 followers and averages two to four million views a month, and we make next to nothing in direct revenue from social media.

That is not what social media is for if you are a business owner. If you are a service business, if you are a dog trainer, social media is the top of a funnel. Nothing more.

The mistake almost everyone is making

The core mistake is posting every single day and prioritising status metrics, believing that is what grows the business.

I have worked with mentees doing £5,000, £10,000, £15,000 a month with fewer than a thousand followers. Some with fewer than 500. Not because they cracked the algorithm, but because they have a system after the follow.

Most trainers have such broken systems after someone follows them, and nowhere to actually funnel people, that they need a million views a month, two million, five million, in the hope that someone accidentally falls through the cracks and becomes a client.

The basic dog training funnel

Let us draw a simple one. Four levels:

1. Socials. Instagram, for the sake of argument.
2. Landing page. Where you send people from socials. (Most of you are sending them to a poor website instead of a proper landing page, which is a whole other post.)
3. Consult. The initial call or consultation you book from that page.
4. Sale.

If each of these stages leaks, you have to behave like a monkey with cymbals every day to shove enough people in at the top to make up for the poor systems underneath. Let us look at each leak.

Leak one: your website

If your website says “we offer a million different services and help with a million different problems,” it appeals to nobody. Send 100 people there and maybe one converts. A properly built landing page should convert something like 5 to 10% of visitors into a booking. If yours converts a fraction of that, of course you have to sing and dance on social media for hundreds of thousands of views just to get a handful of people through.

Leak two: your consult

Then there is the consult process, and a lot of you are getting this badly wrong. You try to train the dog in the consult. You try to hand over solutions. You overwhelm people. You talk for most of it.

Here is an interesting fact. We recently recorded and analysed 250 consultations at Yorkshire Canine Academy. The finding was directly correlative: the more the trainer talks, the less likely they are to convert that person into a paying client. Every single call, same pattern.

So if your consult converts at 20% because you will not stop talking, when it should be nearer 60%, the numbers get worse again.

Leak three: your offer

And then the sale itself. Some of you are still charging one-off sessions at £50 or $50 a time, so your average customer value is 50 quid. I have said this a million times in sessions, videos and webinars: we should not be selling sessions, we should be selling solutions, and those solutions should be priced anywhere from £500 to £2,000 to £3,000.

Two funnels, side by side

The broken funnel. 100,000 people see you. A tiny fraction reach the website because that stage is not optimised. A tiny fraction of those book a consult. You convert 20% of consults because you do not know how to run one. And those who buy pay £50 a session. For 100,000 people you make a couple of hundred quid.

The fixed funnel. 1,000 people see you. 10% go through to the landing page, which is 100. Let us be conservative and say 2% of the original thousand book a consult, so 20 consults. You convert 50% of those, again conservative, which is 10 clients. You charge £1,000 each. There is your £10k month.

Very, very simple. It is not a social media problem. You do not need more followers. You need the system after the followers.

If you want someone to go through your funnel stage by stage and show you where the leaks are, that is exactly what we do on a Vantage call.

Key takeaways

• Views and followers pay almost nothing directly. Even at 500,000 followers, social media is a top-of-funnel tool for us, not a revenue source.
• Mentees doing £5k to £15k a month with under 1,000 followers have one thing in common: a working system after the follow.
• A proper landing page should convert 5 to 10% of visitors. A generic “we do everything” website converts a fraction of that.
• Across 250 recorded YCA consults, the more the trainer talked, the less likely the sale. Aim for around 60% consult conversion, not 20%.
• Sell solutions at £500 to £3,000, not £50 sessions. 1,000 visitors, 20 consults, 10 clients at £1,000 is a £10k month.

Please stop chasing vanity metrics on social media. Learn how to run a business: a landing page that converts, a consult that closes and an offer worth paying for. If you want us to look at your numbers with you and tell you honestly whether Vantage is the right move, apply for a call.