E: 3 How to Get More Clients Without Posting Every Day

Marketing your horse business without the social media hamster wheel.

How much time did you spend on social media last week — posting, editing, filming, writing captions, stressing about what to post, looking at your analytics, comparing your engagement to someone else's — in the name of marketing your business?

Now how many clients did that actually bring you?

For most equine professionals, the honest answer to the first question is: a lot. And the honest answer to the second question is: not many. Maybe a handful. Maybe none you can directly trace back to a post.

Tune in to find out what actually brings clients in the door.

Transcript

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Let me ask you a question and be honest. How much time did you spend on social media last week? Posting, editing, filming, writing captions, stressing about what to post, looking at your analytics, comparing your engagement and your post to someone else's, all in the name of marketing your business. I bet I know what happened. I bet you got sucked in and didn't even get all of those things done, right? But if you did, if you did, tell me how many clients that actually brought you. For most equine professionals, the honest answer to the first question, how much time, is a lot. And the honest answer to the second question is none or not many, maybe a handful. Maybe none you can directly trace back to a particular post. But the advice you constantly hear from every business coach in every industry, every marketing guru, every person selling you a social media course is you should post more. Show up every day, be consistent, build your build your uh audience. The algorithm rewards, la la la la la. Well, that's an ever-moving target. Here's what I want to offer you as an alternative. What if the most powerful marketing tool you have has nothing to do with Instagram, nothing to do with TikTok, nothing to do with Facebook? What if you've been pouring your limited time and energy into a channel that is genuinely the least efficient way to get clients in this specific industry? Here's the scoop. The equine world, the horse world runs on something much older, more powerful, and infinitely more sustainable than a content calendar. And today we're going to talk about how to use it on purpose. Welcome if this is your first time listening, and it might be because this podcast isn't very old. I'm your host, Audrey. Let me take a second to introduce myself. My background's a little wonky, a little unconventional, and I think that's what makes this show different. I've been running my own functional health practice for over 20 years. During that time, I was full steam in education. I got a master's degree in science, master's degree in nursing, FMP, doctorate in naturopathy, all while adding buckoos of certifications along the way because I don't sit still well. At the same time, I was embedded in other people's businesses, consulting, sometimes running the growth function of their business myself, scaling companies from early stage all the way to seven figures and beyond, both in person and online across multiple industries. Before healthcare, I ran a marketing business of my own. So the business side isn't something I stumbled into. It's something I've been doing my entire career. In fact, it's something that I set out to do initially, but didn't think uh didn't think marketing was a valid career choice way back in the late 90s. About 10 years into my functional practice, I built the horse business and grew it too. And what I found in the equine world was some of the most talented, dedicated professionals I have ever encountered with almost no business infrastructure around them, not because horse people aren't smart, but because horse people are not being taught this, right? Horse people are some of the smartest people I know. Um, but nobody nobody teaches this. You come up learning your craft, not your commerce. And so that gap is what I want to close with this podcast. Uh so whether you've been at it for 20 years or you're just starting out, welcome. I'm really glad you're here. Let's dive in. I want to start by saying that this might feel controversial, and I want to be really, really precise about what I mean. I am not telling you to delete your socials. I am not telling you that social media has no value. It absolutely can for the right person with the right strategy in the right season of their business. It's a very useful tool. But I want you to think about, as useful as it can be, what it's really costing you. And I'm not talking about time, although that is so real. If you look at the uh screen time on your phone, then you know that that is for real. I'm talking about mental energy. I'm talking about the comparison spiral, I'm talking about performance anxiety of putting yourself out there constantly, the pressure to be entertaining and educational and on-brand and consistent all while running a physically demanding, emotionally demanding service business that takes care of actual horses. That is a lot to ask of yourself. And for most equine professionals, the return actually does not justify the cost. So here's the thing about social media that nobody wants to say out loud: it's a platform designed to build audiences, not necessarily to convert clients. And those are two very different things. You can have 10,000 followers and a half-empty client roster. I know people who have 100,000 followers and cannot sell a $15 book. You can have 200 followers and a full book and a six-week wait list. I know people in all of those situations. The question is not how many people are watching you. The question is how many of the right people know you exist, trust you, and are ready to hire you. And in the horse world, specifically, where these decisions are deeply personal, where people are handing handing you access to animals that they love and it your trust in you is everything. That kind of relationship is almost never built through a carousel post. It's built person to person, barn to barn, referral to referral. So let's talk about how to build that intentionally and setting instead of just hoping it happens. And I promise in future episodes, we'll talk about social media and we'll talk about how to do it well and how to do it right and how to make sure it's a useful tool and not just a time suck. But in episode one, I said that most horse businesses run on referrals and world and word of mouth. And that's a really, really good thing. The problem is not that word of mouth is your primary driver. The problem is when it's entirely passive, when you're just hoping that people mention you, when you're not creating conditions that make referrals more likely and even easy. Before we talk about how to make it intentional, I want to talk about why it works so powerfully in this industry and in this industry specifically. Understanding that is what makes this whole strategy make sense. The horse world is a community, right? It's a pretty tight, interconnected, trust-based community. Information travels hot and fast, reputation travels faster. And if you think about that in context of like a barn, how barn culture actually works, people at the same barn talk constantly. They watch each other's horses, they watch what products are being used, what practitioner practitioners are being called, what results are happening. And when a horse looks noticeably better, moves differently, holds their weight, comes out of a phone, people notice and they ask. That is not something you can replicate with a post. That is embodied, visible, real world proof. And I think as we move into an age where images, I mean, we're already in the age, I guess, but where images are more likely to be doctored and you know, all these kind of things, the visible real world tangible proof is the most powerful marketing tool that you have. The other thing about the equine world is that barn managers, trainers, sometimes farriers, they function as informal gatekeepers to entire communities of horse owners. One good relationship with the right trainer or the right barn manager or the right vet or the right body worker, depending on who you are, can open the door to 15, 20, 25 clients. More than that sometimes. One bad experience, or even just kind of a meh neutral one, where you didn't bother to acknowledge the trainer, you can quietly close that door for a long, long time. I've seen it play out over and over. I've seen horse professionals who grew steadily, who have full books and wait lists, almost never the ones with the biggest social media presence, right? They might get a social media presence after that, but usually it's on the backside of success. They're the ones that show up and reliably do excellent work, communicate well, treat every horse owner like it is the most important relationship that they have and not just, you know, transactional. And it's not an accident, it's a strategy, even if it doesn't look like one from the outside. And good ones don't look like one from the outside. So, how do you actually do this on purpose? How do you turn word of mouth that's already happening or could be happening into something more reliable and more scalable? Well, there's a couple different things that really move the needle here. The first one is a referral conversation. Most equine professionals never directly ask for a referral. They hope clients will mention them, but they never actually say the words. Totally get it. It feels super awkward. It can feel like you're asking for something, but if you frame it correctly, it's not awkward at all. It's just, you know, an honest flow and part of the conversation. So at the end of a session, when uh, you know, a client is happy, when the horse responded well, if the owner is clearly pleased, that's your moment. Something like, you know, I really loved working with insert horse's name. If you know anyone whose horse could use this kind of support, I would love an introduction. That's it. Simple, specific, not pushy. Just plants the seed at the exact right moment when the value of what you do is most visible. Most people wait until they're desperate for clients to think about referrals. So they're, you know, the trainer is out of training horses and no more people on their waiting list. So they're calling people, hey, do you have a horse? Do you know anybody? Yada yada yada. The best time to ask is when things are going well and the client is in a positive emotional state. That's when they're most likely to follow through. The second thing that moves the needle is a relationship with the barn manager or the boarding barn owner. This one is massively underutilized, and I want to spend a minute on it because it can genuinely change the projectory of your practice in a single barn. Barn managers, head trainers are connectors. They know every horse owner at the facility, they know which horses have issues, they know when someone's frustrated with their current practitioner, they know who's new, who's still building a team. If they trust you and think of you first when a horse has a need in your area, you don't need social media at that barn. You have a referral pipeline. So, how do you build that relationship? You show up on time, you communicate clearly about what you found, what you did, you loop them in, not just the owner. You treat the barn manager as a professional peer, not as a gatekeeper to get past. I frequently do conference calls with the horse owner, the trainer, the barn manager, the groom, the farrier, the vet, like all in one big conference call, right? You have to keep that conversation. You have to follow up, you have to check in. You occasionally share something genuinely useful, not a sales pitch, but actual information that makes their job easier. And here's one big thing. Critically, you never go around them. You never create a dynamic where the barn manager feels bypassed or undervalued. That is the fastest way to lose access to the entire barn. The third thing that moves the needle here is staying top of mind between appointments. And this one is way easier than most people think. You don't have to send a newsletter, you don't have to post three times a week. You just have to show up in your clients' lives in a way that's useful between the times that they're actively paying you. Once your business grows to a certain point, it absolutely makes sense to send an email newsletter. And I do that. I also send a text. Sometimes I send a funny something or other meme. If I'm thinking of a client's horse, I will, you know, send a message and say, hey, I was just thinking of so-and-so. How are things going? Right? I will put reminders, two-week reminders after appointments in my client management software to send me a notice like, hey, check in on such and such, check in on so-and-so. It's not um, it's not a high bar. Like the bar is genuinely low here. Most practitioners do absolutely nothing between appointments. So anything, a check-in, a text after a session asking how the horse is feeling, a quick note when you read something relevant to their horse's situation, or if you saw a post, a happy birthday to a horse that you know well or they're human, all of those things stand out because almost nobody does it. The fourth point is uh creating a referral-friendly experience from the start. And that's really about the overall experience of working with you, not just the work itself. So do clients know your availability and how to book? Is it easy to share your information with a friend? Do you have a simple way, a business card, a QR code, a direct link that makes it frictionless, if you will, for a happy client to give your information along? A lot of referrals die not because somebody doesn't want to refer somebody to you, but because they can't remember your exact name or your website, or they didn't have your number handy, or they forgot what you called your service. So make it easy. Make it easy for them to refer to you, and then more referrals happen. Now, beyond referrals, there are ways to build visibility in your market that are far more effective than posting every day. Uh, and most horse professionals have never thought of this as marketing at all. And so the first thing is barn presence done, right? So anytime you go to a barn with multiple horses and multiple owners, each one of those visits is a marketing opportunity. And I don't mean like in a you know pushy business card pressing way, but in the sense of how you show up, how you communicate, how you treat people is being observed, all of that's being observed the whole time you're there. Horse people watch for each other and they talk to each other, they notice things. And so I always take the approach of leave it better than you found it. Meaning, if I walk down the barn aisle and somebody has left a bag of, you know, empty bag of chips and a water bottle, I'm gonna pick that up and carry it to the trash can. I mean, I'm not gonna clean their barn, but I'm not gonna walk by garbage either. Does that make sense? Um, being pleasant, being professional, being easy to work with, again, leaving the barn better than you found it, literally and figuratively, is marketing. So explaining what you did in a way that makes sense to the owner without being condescending, that is marketing. Taking 30 seconds extra to acknowledge the barn staff is marketing. None of this requires a camera, none of it requires social media. Little things. Once you've gone once, if you know kind of a head count, sometimes I'll call ahead or I'll ask, like, who's who's on site at the barn most days? I'll bring something for them. I'll bring uh Route 44 T's or um you know something from a you know a nearby place, it costs seven or eight bucks. And typically you make that back in you know 15 minutes. The second strategy is making strategic partnerships with complimentary practitioners and even you know not competing against other practitioners that do the same thing that you do, right? Uh so I want you to think about though who else is serving the horses you work with. So if you're a body worker, who's the very who's the farrier? If you're a vet, who's the trainer? If you're a trainer, who's the vet? If you're a nutritionist, who's the bodyworker, right? These practitioners are seeing the same horses you are, often more frequently, a warm relationship with two or three of the right practitioners built on a mutual respect, not, you know, kind of a transactional like you you help me, I'll help you. But like a mutual respect can be worth more than a year of content creation. Um, I frequently, again, I work with trainers and vets, uh, and sometimes the vet refers me, and sometimes the client brings me to their vet, and sometimes the farrier sends the person to me, and sometimes I send somebody to a farrier. Sometimes I'm finding a farrier, you know, in a far-off land compared to where I am in Texas. But having these collaborative relationships is really, really important. And not just outside of your field, but I collaborate with people that are inside of my field. And I think that, well, number one, if you're a horse owner and you're looking for uh a practitioner and they don't collaborate with other practitioners, that's a big red flag. But that that that's not for this podcast. Um, but but the key here is is that it has to be genuine. Horse people have a radar for BS, right? They have a radar for people who are networking, kind of like in that chamber of commerce way, versus people who are actually who actually care about horses in the community. So lead with care and referrals follow. And something that I taught in my advanced certified equine functional nutrition practitioner course recently was that uh, you know, referring out is leadership, right? It's collaborative, it's scaling, it's within your scope of practice. And so one thing that we focused on in the classwork uh in the in the most recent module is that and these are people learning to become advanced anti-inflammatory functional nutritionists. So we were saying that good practitioners know nutrition, great practitioners know when nutrition isn't enough, right? And so referral isn't failure, it's not giving away your client, it's leadership, it's collaboration, it's making sure the horse wins. Uh the third um kind of point strategy, if you will, is education-based visibility. This is the one that I use the most. I see it underused the most, kind of in the wild, and it's so powerful. Teaching is a way to reach people, it's a way to help more horses. And you can teach a short clinic at a barn, you can do a lunch and learn, you can do a demonstration, you can do a quick workshop, you can, you know, help owners support their horse between sessions, you can do a QA. All of these things position you as authority in the room in the way that an Instagram post could never, okay? And you don't even have to travel to do this. You could offer it at a barn you already go to, you could do it virtually, you could invite the owners, you could invite barn managers, you could invite um, you know, people from several different barns and do a zoom, although I do think there's a lot of power in in-person. But the goal is to get as many people to come either to your in-person or online event. You don't have to sell it out, just be genuinely useful. You let people connect and let them tell you what they need. People hire people that they trust, and there's no faster way to build trust than to give them something valuable like education with no strings attached, and let them experience your expertise firsthand. Now, this is the last one of these strategies, and I'll be brief here because it could be in its own episode, but it's simply asking for reviews or testimonials. Not in a desperate way, but just in a human way. When the moment's right, a written testimonial that a client sends you that you can share with permission does more work than 20 posts. Because it's not you saying you're good, it's someone else saying you're good. It's a peer, it's someone else in the horse community saying you're good. And that is fundamentally a different type of credibility. Again, we'll talk more on how to get reviews and testimonials and how to use them in later episodes. So all of that brings us back around to where social media actually fits because you'll probably say, Well, Audrey, I see you posting. Um, and you'll notice I don't post hardly any self-created content. I answer the questions that the community asked. Now, I promised, you know, and and and because of that, I stand by, like I promise that I'm not going to tell you to delete your socials. So, but I will tell you where social media actually earns its place. A couple things. Number one, it can be useful as a credibility layer, but not generally as a client acquisition strategy. When someone hears about you from a barn friend and they go look you up, because they will, everyone does, right? Facebook stalk them. What they find should reassure them. A profile that shows that you're a real human, that you know what you're talking about, that you have a point of view, and that some other people trust you. That's it. That's the whole job of the social media. And you don't have to post every day for that. You don't need to go viral. You don't need any of that. You just need enough of a presence so that when somebody looks you up, they feel good about what they find. And for some businesses, depending on what that is, that might be, you know, I'm going to use Instagram as an example. That might mean filling your nine post grid, you know, the nine post so that there's no holes, no scrolling, right? Um, but that that might mean posting once or twice a week or even less, but being really intentional with those posts. Those things actually demonstrate your expertise. A case study with a client's permission, that's a good one. A question that gets your community talking, that's a good one. And not silly questions, right? I see a lot of uh people in this industry posting questions just to get engagement. And while there can be some strategy behind that, most of the time that's that's not really the way things work, right? Uh something genuinely educational is usually good. Um, no need for a daily good morning from the barn post that doesn't tell anyone anything. And again, there's a time and place. So when your audience gets to a certain size, sometimes that can be helpful as long as you're posting enough of the right things as well. But remember, social build uh social media is a credibility layer, useful, worth maintaining. But if it is your primary acquisition strategy for clients, that is a trap that is costing you time, energy, mental bandwidth, and you could actually be putting that into things that that work, that actually help, that do the work. Again, my equine business was built entirely on referrals, and then I added social media as a credibility layer, as bigger people, uh, more famous people started finding me. People started finding me from other places other than local. So it's and you'll also notice that if you go through my social media, it's never it's it's all very educational. It's not anything special. There's not a bunch of graphics and different things. It's it's all very educational and it's all done very fast. And I think that's a a pretty shining example, and I can give you other examples of people in the social media world that do that, where the horse world doesn't reward the loudest voice, it rewards the most trusted one. So as long as you can kind of keep that as Your compass, your north, your what do they call that? Your north star, your marketing decisions get a lot simpler. It helps you to stop chasing shiny objects. Um, and so there's a couple things that I want you to do for homework this week because we've been doing that. All of them take less than an hour. Um, number one, I want you to think about your top five current clients, the ones that are happiest, the ones whose horses are happiest, the ones who who you also genuinely enjoy working with. And then think through have you ever directly asked any of them for a referral? If not, plan your conversation, plan what you're gonna say, and pick a moment in your next appointment or sometime this week to say it. The next time a session goes well, that is your moment. Okay. I might give you four things, but let's get through these three first. Number two, think about one place you go, one barn you go to, one arena you go to, where you have not built a real relationship with the manager or the trainer or the owner, who's ever in charge. And I don't mean a transactional relationship where you kind of know each other and you walk past each other, et cetera, but a real one. One that's genuine, non-pushy. So I want you to think about one thing you could do this week to start building that. Show up five minutes early, maybe, maybe 10 minutes early, and actually talk to them and then send a follow-up note after the session with a horse that they work with. Something small, something human, doesn't have to be anything dramatic. Just hey, I found such and such. Here's what we did, here's what I expect. Perfect. Number three, I want you to look at your social media with fresh eyes, not as a performance, but as a client. If a barn friend mentioned your name and someone went to look you up right now, what would they find? Does it reassure them? Does it tell them who you are and what you do? If not, I want you to do one hour of intentional cleanup. Clean up your bio, clean up your pinned post, clean up the description of your services. That will do you more than a month of daily posting. The other thing, and this is like 3.5, while you're doing your social media inventory, if you will, I want you to look at the content that you post. Is it informational? Is it entertainment? Is it educational? Is it all pitch pitch, sales, pitch, pitch? What is it? Right? And then from there, once you decide what it is, is that conducive to getting you clients? I have a lot of people with a lot of followers that talk to me on a daily basis about, man, I wish I could X, Y, Z in my business. And guess what? It does not start with well, let's see. They have they have what I would consider an entertainment account, meaning people watch because they do cool stuff, right? They do cool stuff with horses. They got, you know, cool writing videos and neat angles and all of these things. They've spent a bunch of money on cameras and drones that take pictures and all this stuff. But none of it tells me what they do if I should use them. If I should it tells me they're a good good writer, maybe, right? But I want you to look at your account and really look at what the type of content that you're posting. Is that the type of content that brings in clients or that just people think's cool when they scroll by? Right? All right. Now, again, to kind of circle back to what we started with, the horse industry runs on trust. It always has. It's an industry as old as time. Long before there is an algorithm, horse people were building their practices the same way. Showing up, doing good work, treating people and animals well, and letting the reputation do what reputations do. It's not old-fashioned, but it is the most herbal marketing strategy that there is. Social media is just a tool. And like any tool, it's only worth using if it's the right one for the job. And in this industry, for most equine professionals, I don't care where you are in the equine horse business, for most equine professionals at most stages of their business, the right tools are relationship referral, excuse me, relationships, referrals, and visibility that is built person to person. If you can get really good at these, if you can be really intentional with these, then let social media do the smaller job it's actually suited for, which is confirming what people already know, what people have already heard about you and your business, confirming whether or not that's true. You don't have to be everywhere. You only have to be trusted where it counts. So thanks for being here as usual. If this episode made you think differently about where your clients actually come from or could come from, I'd love for you to share it with another friend or colleague in the equine world that is a horse professional, horse business owner who's been stuck on the social media hamster wheel. That's how we close this gap. We do it together. I'll see you in the next episode.