7 DIGITAL MARKETING IDEAS FOR YOUR FITNESS STREAMING BUSINESS.

The 101 on Digital Marketing to Better Connect with your Audience, Drive Brand Awareness and Generate Leads

Where is everyone spending their time (especially in today’s climate)? ONLINE!

Digital Marketing is simply reaching your target market where they are most of the time, on their devices for fitness streaming business. If you are on social media, searching for specific products or websites, reading e-newsletters or blogs, you are experiencing digital marketing.

The fitness industry caters to many different “personas”. Know who your ideal customer is. Understand their fitness goals, their pain points, wants, and needs then speak their “love” language in creative ways via multiple platforms. You can start broad and then drill down creating different buckets of buyer personas, but deeply understand your over-arching value offer and use an omnichannel approach to delivering strategic content.

Below are the 7 KEY IDEAS to Digital Marketing:

Website + Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The goal is to generate targeted traffic to your website. The purpose of social media is to drive current and potential customers to your website to learn more about your offer and subscribe to what you’re selling. The key is to create a site that quickly and seamlessly communicates your vision, brand story, and your unique value proposition. Once you get them there you need a strong SEO to optimize your website to get a higher ranking in search engine listings and get “organic” or “un-paid” visitors to your site via their search. The more people you drive to your site, the more loyal customers and brand ambassadors you can create. SEO basics such as having compelling content, enabling keyword optimization to attract searchers, offering a great user experience or compelling “UX” with faster load time, offering “share-worthy” content that earns links or “backlinks” to our page and the right title and description to achieve a higher click-through rate. SEO will improve your ranking and ultimately your competitiveness. We don’t need to be programmers but should know how we can increase visitors to our site with SEO capabilities.

Content Marketing is a form of creative and promotional content such as blogs, newsletters, Vlogs, email campaigns, podcasts, E-Books, white papers, and more. This is a great tactic to help generate brand awareness, increase traffic to your site, and gain qualified, prospective leads. Stand out from other fitness content creators by understanding your customer’s fitness journey. Ask them questions, get feedback, and then give the support, expertise, and tools they need to successfully accomplish their goals and feel part of a community along the way. We at Endorphins believe there are “jobs to be done” within the marketing arm of a fitness business. We have identified 4 Key ones that Fitness Streaming Addresses:

• Access
  • Anyone anywhere at any time can have access to Video On Demand or Live Streamed fitness classes and personal training sessions
• Schedule
  • Live Streaming is closest to taking an in-studio class when it comes to a set time schedule. But the beauty of Video On Demand, fitness enthusiasts can take a class whenever it fits in their schedule.
• Pricing/ Types of Offers
  • VOD (Video-On-Demand)
    • One-time FEE for content
    • Good for Seminar/Workshop
    • One-time Class/Session
    • Bundled Package ie. 7-Week training plan
  • Subscription (SVOD)
    • Recurring fee for access (ie Netflix subscription)
    • The monthly fee for access
    • Continuing education
    • Multiple classes or training plans
    • Course Options
    • Challenges
    • Workshops
      • Pros of Subscription-Based Model
        • You can earn a recurring income
        • Your income is more predictable
        • Customers stay subscribed for longer
        • The business model is built for scale
        • You can easily promote this to online and in-person client
        • Video content can easily be repurposed for marketing

• “Gymtimidation”, a fear of going to the gym, is one of the most common issues that stop people from achieving their fitness goals. Research has found that roughly 50 percent of Americans feel that working out in a gym (around other people) is extremely difficult and challenging. And 31 percent admit to feeling anxiety whenever they think about embarking on a workout regime to get physically fit. Another 16 percent admit to feeling intimidated while they are working out around a person of the opposite sex. Virtual fitness apps and platforms are the perfect solutions for Gymtimidation. For those that don’t feel comfortable going to the gym, have transportation issues, small children at home, an online/digital approach is a viable and valuable solution.

Social Media Marketing is vital for your fitness business. It is now THE MOST profitable digital marketing platform to promote your brand and reach a wider audience quickly and with little cost. With IG, FB, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you can promote your fitness streaming business, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads. Social media is also a great way to bond with your customers with daily posts and info to help create brand loyalty and a deeper connection. Even if they just browse by your posts, they see you’re there for them and available, constantly connecting with the creative content they crave. There are also plenty of social media scheduling tools such as Sendible, agora pulse, and SocialBee to help you connect channels and monitor analytics to streamline your social media strategy and give you the insights to better understand which campaigns are working and which are not. Your social media message and followers have a direct impact on your subscriber-base for your digital offer. The messaging, branding and offers on social media are vital to deliver the right message and drive traffic back to your website for your prospective fans to learn more. Video is one of the most versatile and engaging content and an extremely powerful marketing tool because it’s easy to digest and entertaining. It’s important to choose the right type of video for each specific social channel. Different types of the video include Explainers; to help educate people about your offer, Interviews; showcase an expert or influencer, Product Reviews; demo videos by a brand ambassador, LIVE Videos; to get upfront and personal with your audience. Choose the right type, the right message, and perfect platform and watch your fan base grow.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Search Ads, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Paid Advertising is a marketing model where a publisher of your ad gets paid every time your ad is clicked. It’s basically a very specific type of marketing that lives on search engines. It’s a “paid search” ad. SEM leverages the power of search engines like Google to reach potential customers at the perfect time and place. Businesses running these ads will only get charged when a user clicks on their ad. You should expect to pay about $1-$2 per click. Google Ads is one of the most popular ways to use this advertising method, your ad will pop up when someone is searching for a “streamed yoga class” or digital fitness app on Google Search enabling clicks to your website or calls to your business. Well-timed ads can turn those searching for something similar to your offer to new members or clients.

Native Advertising It’s a typed advertisement that is seamlessly woven into a website so it blends in with the look and feels of that site to not disrupt the overall experience of the viewer. It is thoughtfully placed to almost look like it’s part of the publisher’s messaging, usually in between paragraphs. This is highly targeted to a specified demographic and contains valuable information that will be of interest to the viewer. It is a paid ad but matches the feel of the media format it appears in. You are likely to see Native Ads in “Feed Ads”, that appear in your feed on various social media channels, in “Search and Promoted Listings” on the top of Google search ads or in a sidebar, and within “Content Recommendations” that appear within an article you just read.

Marketing Automation refers to software that can automate your marketing operations. Marketing departments can now use this automation software to automate email newsletters, social media postings, lead-nurturing workflows, campaign tracking, and reporting. This technology automatically manages multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels. Your fitness business’s over-arching goal is to bring in more members or virtual clients, this automation will help to do that by maximizing efficiency across all departments to streamline lead generation, sales, up-selling, and customer retention. There are so many channels we need to manage, this management software will help execute but will also collect data including customer interactions and behaviors which will allow you to target the right message to each member. You can also gather analytics with marketing ROI measurements to see what messaging is working and what is not.

Here’s a list of our Top 7 Marketing Automation Software:

• HubSpot
• ActiveCampaign
• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• SharpSpring
• Marketo
• Omnisend

Email Marketing This is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your fanbase. You can promote content, discounts, events, and simply direct your audience to your website. A few examples they type of newsletters your fitness business could send out would be blog subscription newsletters, a friendly follow-up to ups to new website visitors, Fitness tips, holiday promotions, or summer series for in-club or virtual class specials. According to OptinMonster, 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis, and some check email as much as 20 times per day. The bottom line is email reaches most of the people it’s intended to reach, so it’s highly effective and a necessary component of your digital marketing campaign. Research shows that email marketing has one of the highest ROI.

Now that you got a quick 101 on Digital Marketing, go out there is start applying these pillars to help grow your fitness streaming business. We at Endorphinz are here to guide you and provide all the necessary tools to help better build your brand with a digital approach.

Be Well,

Ann Marie