In today’s highly competitive market content marketing has become even more important. Whether you're just starting as an Online Personal Trainer, or a seasoned fitness pro, read on to find out exactly what content marketing is, why your PT business needs a content plan, and see the steps you need to take to create one for your online PT business.
Content marketing is the approach you take to generate and distribute content, on multiple channels. With the main aim of achieving your marketing objectives which you would have setup when creating your SMART objectives.
Content marketing includes the creation, editing, and maintenance of content that is specifically for your target audience.
It's about making content that your target audience wants to consume and helps move them along their journey to becoming a paying client.
Before you set out to deliver anything related to content you want to understand why you are doing it. If the content you want to create is not linked to a marketing objective you would want to think twice about creating it. This may be difficult to start with, but any time you decide to create content take a moment to think about the person you want to read it and what action you want them to take.
Content has multiple jobs, it needs to attract your visitors, nurture them and get people to become advocates of your fitness company and services. Hubspot, tells us that content marketing's job is to attract, engage and delight your target audience.
The other hugely important thing content does is boost your search engine visibility and ranking. If you want to get seen on Google, content creation is imperative.
There is no right or wrong answer here, content can have many purposes and take lots of different forms. However, if you follow the process below you'll be in a good place to create content that resonates with your target audience and achieves the goal of more paying clients.
For your Online Personal Trainer business your content process will have five steps:
1. Plan
2. Create
3. Distribute
4. Analyze
5. Review & Repeat
When planning each content piece it's important to ask what is the purpose of the content. Do you want the content to make people aware of your brand, or is it to get people to convert into leads? This content offer is important as it will help you shape both your message and placement.
For example, if the purpose is to get leads it may be a piece of content that's gated behind a form, this will allow you to collect email addresses to follow up with different messages. Or if it is a brand piece you can consider a blog post or video. For the brand content, the purpose is to attract a broader audience to your website who may be considering a personal trainer.
Once you understand the purpose of the content you can then think about the format you're going to create the content in.
The best thing about content marketing is that you can be creative with the way you present it to your target audience. You can create the same piece of content across multiple formats, you may want to choose one of the following:
- Blog post
- Thank you page
- Adverts
- Info-graphic
- Video
- Your website
- Social media posting
Ultimately the many formats you can use helps build the trust between you and your potential PT clients. A pro tip is to find out what pieces of your content are popular and re-purpose it into another format i.e using the words in a popular video to create a written blog post.
As we mentioned above, there are so many content formats. So, how do we know which one to use for your audience? This is where Target Personas can help.
Your target persona, in essence, gives you the template you need when creating content, it can help with questions like, Is your target client a visual learner, where do they consume their content, do they have children. The answer to these questions will be contained in your target persona and will ensure that you're writing content that will be well received by your target audience.
The topic and call-to-action of your content will depend on your customer, and where they are in the customer journey, or buyer journey.
Let's take a look at the customer journey steps in the image below:
For example, creating content about a problem your customer is facing will fit into the awareness stage. This could be a blog post about the benefits of keeping fit and healthy in a corporate job.
But content about the solution (your fitness product/package) is more suited for the interest and desire stages.
Content specifically about your product, or fitness/nutrition packages will fall into the desire and action stage. Post-action content could be if, for example, you have a new fitness/nutrition product that you would like to sell to your current customers.
To fully maximize content marketing for your Online Personal Trainer business all you need to do is to create content for the correct person (personas), at the correct time (Location in Customer Journey), and in the correct place (Content-type, and Placement). With this in place potential clients can move smoothly along the journey to become paying clients while your Google ranking gradually improves with time and consistency.
PT Distinction is the number one rated online personal trainer software. Our mission is to do everything in our power to help you build and achieve your PT Business dream. Keep in touch over the next couple of months as we go into more detail on how to set up your PT Business
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