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. 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
omni channel approach to deliver strategic content.
Below are the 7 Pillars to Digital Marketing:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The goal is to generate targeted traffic to your website. SEO is a process of optimizing your website to get a higher ranking in search engine listings and get “organic” or “un-paid” visitors to your site via their search. According to MOZ, here is a list that will improve your ranking and ultimately your competitiveness.
- “Crawl Accessibility” – a process used by search engine web crawlers (bots) to visit and download a page and extract links to discover additional pages
- “Compelling Content” that answers the searcher’s query
- “Keyword Optimized” to attract searchers and engines
- “Great User Experience” – Compelling UX (User Experience) with FAST load speed
- “Share-Worthy Content” – that earns links or “backlinks” often known as Off-Page SEO. Positioning your brand as an authority
- “Title, URL, & Description” to receive a higher Click Thru Rate (CTR)
- “Rich Snippets” – These are programmed in to stand-out bigger and brighter in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Think about the results page you view – if there is one with a picture you may be more inclined to click on that one.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC) is a marketing model where a publisher of your ad gets paid every time your ad is clicked. 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 into new members or clients.
5. Native Advertising It’s a type advertisement that is seamlessy woven into a website so it blends in with the look and feel 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 a highly targeted to 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.
6, 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 stream line 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
7. Email Marketing This is a 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 types 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. 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.
7 Digital Media Courses: There is no doubt that digital marketing is the key to growing your fitness brand, reaching more customers and the catalyst to allow your company to create community and experience with your unique offer and the right messaging. The fitness ecosystem is booming and the service you provide both in-club and virtually needs to be strategically delivered. With paid, earned and owned media, and now automation with data driven software, there are unlimited ways to reach your audience. But you need to be in the know, to truly understand this constantly shifting space driven by technology. Below is a list of courses to consider to level-up your digital marketing game.
- Google Analytics/Google Academy for Ads
- Hootsuite Academy
- Udemy Digital Marketing Masterclass
- Skillshare Digital Marketing Academy
- Hubspot Content Marketing Certification
- Coursera Digital Marketing Specialization
- LinkedIn Learning
7 Blogs about Digital Marketing
Digital marketing as we discussed is constantly evolving. Here are a few blogs to help you stay ahead of the curve and in the know, written by experts in the field that will keep us up to date on emerging technology, trends and customer data.
- The Moz Blog
- Content Marketing Institutue
- Marketing Land
- Neil Patel
- HubSpot
- Convince and Convert
- Social Media Examiner
Now that you got a quick 101 on Digital Marketing, go out there are 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
