Enliven Health & Fitness

Jennifer Johnson, owner of Enliven Health & Fitness, is a kinesiologist and health coach, working to help people achieve their health goals. For several years, she had worked under her own name, but now wanted to establish a business and transition her practice online.

Branding

I worked with Jennifer to put words to the main ideas and passions that drive her work. Over a period of weeks, we created a set of key statements and words that formed a vocabulary to express her approach to health coaching, and the kind of experience she wanted her clients to have with her.

Business Name

Using this new vocabulary, we next focused on establishing a name for her business that reflects her particular mission. At this stage, we jotted down every idea, even the nonsensical ones, because good ideas are often borne of a thousand lesser ones.

In the end, we settled on “Enliven” as the distinctive word for her brand, and “Enliven Health & Fitness” as the full name for the business, because her goal is to help people to discover a new hunger for living well — to make a life of living healthier.

Website Domain

Once a business has a name, finding a suitable domain name is quite simple. I advised her to look for something short so that shared links are easier to read. Using one of the new top-level domain extensions, we settled on enliven.fit.

Logo

For her visual identity, Jennifer wanted to use colours that communicate vitality and energy, but without being raucous. We used the “Sauna Pro” font, which is a little bit playful in its curling serifs, while still being highly legible.

And we used a simple leaf image to offset the business name to reinforce the focus on growth and living well.

Voice and Tone

First, we built upon the initial branding work, the key statements and words that express her approach, and established a “tone” she would use in her communication and marketing materials. She wanted to be a voice of encouragement and hope to her clients as they face challenging obstacles or health issues, and so she settled on taking a posture of compassion, brave vulnerability, and messages of hope and belief in her clients’ ability, speaking about seeking help as “the strong things to do”.

Website Copy

Next, we focused on creating new service pages for her website to express each part of the impact she wanted to have with clients. This allowed her to flesh out her branding statements into full service offerings, such as “Nutrition Consulting”, “Personal Training”, and “Accountability Services”.

Then, with her messaging established, we updated her social media channels to use her new branding and logo.

Marketing Strategy

In her determination to move her business online, Jennifer knew she would need to spend more time marketing her services than in the past. Most of her client connections had come from personal recommendations from her local area, but now she would need to cultivate marketing habits that would allow a wider audience to find her.

Digital Presence

We redesigned her website around her new branding, and spent just a little bit of time researching search terms she ought to use in her website content to help people find her in web searches.

Since her clients are individuals seeking help with their personal health, we decided that Facebook and Instagram would be her primary social channels.

We adapted her Facebook page first, following Facebook’s lengthy process to alter an established page’s name. And some months later, she added an Instagram account.

Content Marketing

There is a lot of marketing advice online about how many times per week a business should post to their social channels. But the best advice is simply to do what you can sustain for the long term.

Jennifer decided she would commit herself to posting twice per week, once on Monday or Tuesday and then again on Friday. Her first post would focus on a message about the importance of health, and the Friday post would share a recipe or tips for healthy living — something easy for a person to use right now.

The twice-a-week rhythm proved effective. She got into the habit of setting aside time each week to nurture her social media spreadsheet, and soon had an abundance of ideas flowing from client conversations and her own health research.

Over time, she added variety to the types of posts to include:

• Client success stories
• Recipes
• Health tips
• Longer educational posts about common health issues and questions

The Venture into Video

Jennifer’s work with her clients is very personal, mostly one-on-one. Because of the personal nature of her work, I encouraged her to consider making weekly videos to communicate her educational posts so that people could begin to make a connection with her.

She was nervous to start creating videos at first. In the early days, she asked me to review her videos before posting them — to make sure they were easy to understand and not too long. But into her second month, she seemed to have sidestepped my help and was brazenly posting them on her own! (I swear I wasn’t hurt…)

Success Stories

Seeking help with personal health is a vulnerable thing. Jennifer noticed early on that hearing about the success or progress clients had by working with her was very effective in motivating prospective clients to get in touch. Building on the success stories she had posted on social media, we created a new area of her website where she could share fuller stories, more like case studies, of the progress her clients experience.

These case studies have proven very effective in communicating the benefit of working with a health coach. Many times in the past year, reading a story of “someone just like me” has convinced a potential client to take on Jennifer as a coach.

Outcomes

New leads every week

Jennifer’s new website has become a valuable source of leads. Since launching her new branding in January 2020, she has had a constant stream of contacts of at least one solid lead per week.

Increased social media following

Her disciplined social media schedule has caused her following to grow by more than 300% in a single year.

Multi-faceted customer journey

Her weekly video posts have proven to be an essential part of a person’s “customer journey”. People rarely take action after a single encounter with a business. Usually, more than 10 or even 20 points of connection are needed before someone might choose to make a commitment. For this reason, Jennifer’s weekly posting has allowed her to stay on her audience’s radar, and to be the familiar and obvious choice when they are ready to act.

The combination of hearing from her personally by video, seeing the impact she’s had with clients from stories she has shared, and learning how she works with people from her website led them to get in touch.

Significant business growth

It has been a privilege to watch Jennifer’s business grow. In a single year, her business has grown over 300%, and she is almost always hovering around full capacity.

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