Jessica Yarmey, the founder and CEO of FlexSociety, shares how content creation can help you stand out in a competitive space.
Content creation is an important tactic that should be leveraged in any marketing strategy. Used correctly, content strategically supports your brand message and adds frequency to your marketing efforts. Content can help you stand out in a competitive space and can accelerate relationships with prospects, while simultaneously fostering loyalty within your member community.
Why Content Creation is Important:
- Content Communicates Brand. Frequent and consistent organic content should be used to introduce people to your brand. You should have a few different content pillars that are all a part of your brand platform ie. motivational quotes, member stories, staff spotlights and fitness education. This is a storytelling effort that paves the way for your sales effort.
Posting on your owned social media channels, you have full control of the message and can push content that strategically aligns with your mission, vision, values and voice. The goal is when someone enters your facility or joins a consideration set they’ll already know what you’re all about.
- Add Efficiency to Your Paid Media. When you have a frequent and consistent cadence of organic content, your paid campaigns can be more efficient. Watching your organic content performance can help you determine what content to promote with paid dollars.Think of your followers as a focus group. If you see a piece of content doing well organically with your focus group, you can repurpose that same content as an ad.
Additionally, when someone sees your ad, they will ideally already have seen an organic post or will see an organic post after engaging with your paid ad. You’re adding frequency to your message without adding extra dollars.
- Prospects Are Researching Via Social Media. Gone are the days when someone would look up a website in order to form an opinion of a business. Now, they visit social media. Of course, they can look up online reviews on Facebook, Google My Business, Yelp, etc. but they can also look up content associated with your brand and your location.
While you may not be able to control a negative review, you can control what is seen around that review. Your marketing efforts fall into three buckets: paid, earned and owned media. Content marketing powers your “owned” marketing. Your “owned” assets include your social media pages, website, newsletter, etc. Control your narrative and tell your story through content so when prospects search via social, you know what they will uncover.
How to Create Content for Your Facility:
- Start With Your Staff. As busy gym owners, you may be reading this and wondering how to add content creation to your already long to-do list. Content creation is something you should delegate to your team, unless you’ve grown up with social media and have a strong understanding of content creation.
You likely have team members who are organically living on social media and playing around with AI tools already. Ask them to design a content strategy that takes into account your mission, vision, values and voice. Review it together and then give them control of your social pages and your content creation.
- Extend To Your Members. Your content strategy should leverage your members. Relatable member stories and transformations can bring an authentic and approachable feel to your owned media. But you also likely have members at your facility who are good at creating content and posting on social media. Whenever members post and tag your facility, you should ask for their permission and repurpose their content onto your pages. Different members will be more active on different channels so your team will need to stay organized with who is contributing from which platform.
- Home Grown Influencers. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub, the influencer market is now a $21.1 billion industry and is projected to continue to grow at a rapid rate. While there is a paid influencer play for brands with a nationwide footprint, smaller brands or single location brands are better served by identifying and empowering members and staff to create content on behalf of your facility that can be tagged to your location online.
Depending on the person and their following, you may be able to pay them through merchandise or a discounted membership in order to produce a certain amount of content each month. Collaborating on posts should be mutually beneficial as both parties stand to grow awareness.
Every piece of content is an opportunity to educate, inspire and entertain. Content is a means by which you demonstrate your industry expertise, solidifying your position as a trusted authority. Most importantly, content is an engine that can propel your business forward without a large expense. Embrace content creation in your marketing strategy and you’ll expand your brand awareness and create a richness within your brand and your community.
