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Marketing8 min read

Content Marketing in the Fitness Industry

Content marketing is essential for any business, including the fitness industry. This article will break down fitness content marketing strategies.

The online health and fitness industry is an increasingly hectic one, so it's more important than ever before that you put your best marketing foot forward.

In the current age of savvy search engines and skeptical audiences, content marketing is the most effective way to market online. But with a crowd of strategies vying for attention, it can be difficult deciding what's the best road to take for your fitness company.

This article will break down the content marketing strategies specific to the fitness industry, and set you up with a solid foundation for launching your own tailored marketing campaigns.

But first thing's first.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and distributing relevant, valuable content to a defined audience. The objective is to drive profitable customer action through brand awareness and customer trust.

In essence, you're gaining and holding the customer's attention by creating content that is valuable to them.

That personal trainer you follow on Instagram? She's content marketing through social media. The foodie blog you're addicted to? They're content marketing with blog articles.

Videos, podcasts, Pinterest boards, Facebook threads - content marketing comes in many shapes and sizes, but all of it has one thing in common: it's valuable and relevant to its audience.

How can it help your business?

Just as your morning run has multiple health benefits, good content marketing does multiple things for your business.

It increases brand awareness

Studies show that familiarity with a vendor and their brand directly influences a customer's purchase decision-making process. Familiarity breeds trust, which in turn breeds customer loyalty - the holy grail of marketing and a key component of a business' success.

Content marketing puts your brand out there in a way people actively want to consume. It's more likely to be shared on social media, encourages conversation and word-of-mouth interactions, and makes your brand more valuable in the eyes of search engine algorithms.

Speaking of which...

Content marketing boosts your website's SEO

Search engines love content marketing, and is it any wonder? With over 130 trillion websites to trawl, Google has its work cut out for it sifting through the debris to connect its users to relevant, valuable content.

Content marketing is attractive to search engines because it is by definition valuable and relevant content.

This is why any SEO specialist worth their salt will recommend content marketing as a way to boost a website's search rank. After all, websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages which isn't a statistic to sniff at.

It influences customer engagement

The internet changed the game of customer engagement. Where once a customer would often need to walk into a physical store to engage with a brand, now they can follow them on Facebook and tag them in comment threads.

Customer engagement drives customer loyalty, which is the holy grail of retaining customers and keeping them happy.

Content marketing invites customers to engage directly with your brand. Whether it's sharing your blog post, or liking an Instagram pic, each time a customer interacts with you, it's shoring up the relationship between you both.

Those relationships are the backbone of your business' success and anything that helps foster them is worth its weight in gold.

It increases your authority in the fitness industry

Being an authority means people trust that you know what you're talking about. In the fitness industry that trust is key in retaining your customer base.

After all, no one wants to take fitness instruction from someone who doesn't seem to know what they're doing, not with their health and well-being on the line.

Content marketing is a great way to increase your authority by demonstrating the specialized knowledge you have.

Whether it be educational blog posts, or instructional videos - creating and distributing informative content demonstrates you're in a position to deliver that information, which in turn demonstrates your authority in the field.

Content Marketing and the Fitness Industry

So now you know what content marketing is and how it can be of benefit, how can you use it to market to your own customers?

Know your audience

Do you specialize in beginner exercises? Have a talent for putting together weight training programs? Knowing your specialties means knowing the audience those specialties will likely attract, which in turn means you can target your marketing efforts more effectively.

If you specialize in endurance training programs, you don't want to spend your time writing blog posts about weight loss tips. You'll certainly get an audience, but it won't be the one you want.

Once you know who you want to be targeting, set about learning how they behave online.

What fitness industry specific hashtags are they using? What sort of blog posts are they reading and sharing? Getting an idea of the sort of content your target audience is already engaging in will mean you can better tailor your own content to suit their wants and needs.

Decide on format

Once you have an idea of the sort of content your audience gravitates toward you can investigate what format you want your own content to take.

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and while diversifying your content can help you reach more people, you don't want to spread yourself too thin. It's quality over quantity.

Video, blogging, and social media are the most common forms of content marketing in the fitness industry, so let's break them down.

Video

High-quality videos are a boon in the fitness industry. Whether they be advertising meant to inspire, or educational fitness instruction clips, video content gets people engaged and hitting their share buttons.

You don't have to have Nike's advertising budget to make quality video content either. Video cameras are more affordable than they've ever been but at a pinch, your phone camera can get the job done.

Blogging

The fitness industry lends itself more to visual mediums — it's much easier to demonstrate an exercise than describing it after all — but you shouldn't discount the power of a good blog.

Blog posts are a great medium for sharing inspirational stories or quality recipes.

How many words you write will depend on what you want to get out of the post. Aiming for a rich comment thread? Super short, discussion-directed posts are ideal. Looking for a lot of social media shares? 1000-1500 words suit that goal.

Just remember, if you're wanting to max out your SEO potential, longer, more thoroughly researched and informative posts are the way to go.

Social Media

Social media isn't just for sharing content, it's also a medium all its own. While it's possible (and recommended - more on that in a bit) to repurpose your content across different platforms, there's a lot of value to be had in tailoring your content to specific social media formats.

But which platform is right for you? To answer that, we need to look at how people in the fitness industry are using them.

Instagram

Fitness instructors are the stars of Instagram and for good reason. Instagram posts and videos are the perfect way to demonstrate poses, stretches, and movements. The instant nature of the format also lends itself well to fitness goal updates and milestones.

What's more, the inspirational culture of the platform goes hand in hand with the fitness industry's own ethos.

Succeeding on Instagram is dependant on your ability to sell yourself as your brand, but if you can get the balance right, you'll have customers knocking down the door.

YouTube

Where Instagram is great for short, one-off demonstrations, YouTube's strength is in being able to demonstrate entire routines. It's video quality options make it ideal for longer format, more visually rich content as well.

A search for "fitness" on YouTube gives you over 34 million results which may seem daunting at first, but quality content rises quickly through the chaff.

YouTube content is great when paired with other social media platforms - embedding videos on Facebook or posting excerpts to Instagram for instance.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with over 2.01 billion monthly active users. It also gives you the largest suite of tools to create diverse, marketable content for the fitness industry.

Starting a business page to engage with customers via the wall or messenger is easy and free, and if you have a budget to work with Facebook paid ads are worth the investment.

Short posts do the best and as always, quality images are eye-catchers.

And more!

These are only three of dozens of possible social media platforms that you can use to content market your fitness industry expertise.

It's a good idea to diversify your reach across platforms, but be mindful of becoming a "jack of all trades but master of none". Choosing one or two platforms to concentrate your time and effort is often the best strategy for cultivating audience engagement in the long run.

PS: Don't be afraid to repurpose content

Different marketing content will suit different formats, but sometimes it'll suit more than one, and that's great! Repurposing a Snapchat post to Instagram, or a blog post excerpt as a Facebook status is a great way to get more mileage out of a single piece of content. 

Building the content

So we've covered content formats and platforms. The next step is creating the content itself.

This is a good place to look back at your notes on the sorts of content your target audience is already engaging in. Are your customers' feeds crowded with recipe posts? Are they sharing engaging fitness routine videos? 

Whatever the content, you'll find it falls into one of three categories: 

  • Educational
  • Inspirational
  • Instructional

The fitness industry is a balance of all three of these concepts, and your content marketing will do best if it is as well.

Educational content is a great way to demonstrate your fitness expertise. A blog post about the role of specific muscles in different workouts is an example of this sort of content.

Inspirational content is awesome for driving your customer engagement and motivation. Instagram posts are tailor made for inspirational content marketing.

Instructional content is another way to show you're an authority in the fitness industry. YouTube exercise routine videos are a great example of this.

Each individual piece of content you produce will do best if focused on only one of these concepts at a time. You only have so much time to make an impression on the internet, and you don't want to dilute your message.

Speaking of messages.

All the best marketing tells a story

Humans are creatures of narrative. We teach, learn, live, and breathe stories. That's because stories are tailor-made to elicit emotional reactions from us. The best marketing campaigns in the world all tell engaging stories.

So how can you harness the power of narrative in your content marketing?

Luckily, the fitness industry comes suited to the act of storytelling already.

In every Couch to 5k success story, every weight loss goal achieved, every marathon completed, is a story. Fitness success stories practically market themselves, because they prove to people that anything is possible with enough determination.

Tapping into that format for your own content marketing is guaranteed to be its very own success story.

Be consistent

Content marketing isn't just relevant and valuable, it's also delivered consistently.

Customers engage more with content when they expect it, so going weeks between social media posts is a marketing no-no.

The frequency of blog posts, in particular, must be kept as consistent as possible. Failing to do so negatively impacts the way customers engage with your brand, and drives down your SEO to boot.

And there you have it

Whether you decide to kill it on social media, start your own fitness instruction video series, or become a fitness blogging guru, these content marketing strategies will steer your business in the right direction.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways of marketing your fitness business. It engages your customers, boosts your brand, and builds your authority as an expert in the industry.

Mastering these content marketing strategies will give your business the edge it needs to succeed in an increasingly busy industry, which in turn will give you a truly inspiring story.