FITNESS BUSINESS ARTICLES
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Here's Why You Need to Use Online Marketing for Your Fitness Startup Online marketing is essential for any business
these days. No matter if you are a personal trainer, own a gym, fitness studio,
gym apparel company, or an online coaching service;
your business can benefit a lot from a solid online marketing
strategy. Anybody from a stay at home mom to a CEO will Google any product a service before they buy it. So you
have the make sure that wherever they search for anything in the niche you’re
serving, your fitness brand is up there on the 1st page of
Google. AdWords The quick and easy way to do that is through AdWords – Google’s
advertising service. Sure, you’ll need a budget for it, but the good part is
that you will only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and they come to
your website. Speaking of websites, you want to make sure your landing page
speaks your brand. Make it energetic and motivational. This is fitness we’re
talking about, and you want the people to get pumped up just by looking at your
business website. SEO The alternative to AdWords is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
This is a long-term strategy that will cost you
a lot upfront, but it should pay off in the future. It will take for
up to 1 year before you start seeing regular leads coming to your website from
your SEO efforts. That’s just how Google works now. So don’t expect to get
anything back from it right from the start. You always want to be on the 1st page of
Google. Getting listed on the 2nd page or lower will not drive you
any business, or if it does, it will be very few leads. So if you’re doing SEO
you need to go all out. It’s important to decipher between two types of SEO, “traditional” and “local”, and it is
important to know which one you need based on your type of business. If you are only looking to expand your in-person personal trainer
or a single brick and mortar store/gym, you will want to perform “local SEO”
which only targets the search results related to that specific geographical
area. On the other side, if you are looking to expand your online
personal training business or online apparel store, you need to focus on
traditional SEO which targets more general search results that are nationwide
or even worldwide. Be sure to determine which one you require and focus your research
and efforts there as the two types of SEO do have some significant strategic
differences. Email Marketing Once you start driving traffic to your website you want your
prospects to give you their email address and names. You can later use
this data to send out marketing campaigns and get more sales. People hold on really tight to their emails these days so you will
need to offer incentives to get any. Free downloads or discount
coupons for specific products or services that you sell are great ways to get
your people to sign up to your list. Once you have a solid email list, you can regularly get more sales
from email marketing, so this is definitely a strategy that you
should start from day one. Social Media Social Media is a great way to put your name out there. There are
so many platforms you can use – there’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn and more. Ideally you want to be active on at least 2 of them, but
if that’s overwhelming at first, you can just start out with one single
platform. Pick any that you like most and get active on that. Build up a
following on any platform and then expand to a second one. Regardless of the platform you are using, you want to make sure
your message is consistent with your brand strategy. This is where you interact
with your clients, where you engage with them and where they get to know you
better. Types of content Back in the day, when I got my personal trainer certification, the only form
of content people were consuming online were blog posts. To this day, written
content still represents a big chunk of what is generating sales for many
businesses in different niches. So putting your time and effort into
writing compelling articles is not a bad strategy. Then, the next big thing was podcasts - so audio content. Podcasts
still work great and are perfect for people who want to listen to
your stuff in their car on their way to school or to work. Now, there’s a big hype about video content. Thanks to the
technology advancement, watching videos online is possible anywhere at any
time. On top of that, it is more convenient than reading a blog post for
example. So, what type of content should you go ahead and create? The best
thing you can do is pick whichever you feel comfortable creating or the one
you’re best at creating. If you’re a great writer, go ahead and do that. If you
like filming videos, go for it. Picking something that you enjoy doing will
make you stick with it, which is more important that the type of content you’re
creating. Sure, at some point you may want to expand to a different type of
content as well. But for starters, pick just the one
that you like to most and focus on that one alone. Conclusion So that is pretty much it in a nutshell. I know
this barley scratches the surfaces of online marketing, but I think
it opens up your appetite for learning more about it. Bottom line is if you’re
not already doing online marketing for your fitness business, get on it now! I know it may be overwhelming at first, so start
off with just one thing, focus on that one thing until you get better at
it, and expand from there. Author
bio Tyler Read is
an NASM certified personal trainer with over 10 years of experience and a M.S.
in Kinesiology. In addition to training a wide variety of clients, |
