Sweat Equity: Marketing Tools for Fitness Professionals

Welcome back to Sweat Equity. In this edition, we’re looking at several practical, universal ways to ensure you’re giving your fitness business the best possible marketing edge in an intensely competitive industry.

Even though tumultuous is the best adjective to describe our current daily rhythm, people are nonetheless making the effort to return to habits and activities that represent their flavor of normalcy – gyms and clubs, for example, are up and running in many states. This is the time to take advantage of all-things-digital to make sure your clients know what’s new with your fitness business.

New This Week: Sales-marketing integration…Email marketing…Voice search optimization…Google ranking for websites…COVID-19 snapshot…Interview with Chris Pearson.

Still with us? Great. Let’s get started.

If you’re ready to grow and manage your business better, book a demo with our team today.

Marketing Tools 101

Everyday tools to streamline marketing success

How to Make a Power Play With Sales-Marketing Integration

Did You Know That…

• 45% of US consumers will abandon an online transaction if their questions or concerns are not addressed quickly. (Forrester)
• 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service. (RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report)

If you strategize selling memberships, training packages, and marketing schemes, it’s time to consider strategizing sales and marketing integration.

Whether you have a sales team or you are the sales team, when sales and marketing are seamlessly assimilated, you significantly increase your business’s customer experience. And customer experience is a power player in the customer retention scheme. It seems like a no-brainer, right?

The genius behind combining sales and marketing efforts is that it allows you to signal a need and provide a solution in a single encounter. Deliberate sales-marketing integration drives a smooth transition from potential customer to client.

[Source: MetricTheory]

So what does it look like, practically speaking?

• Have proper resources available to help potential customers with questions and/or assistance during the buying process
• Stay in constant contact with potential customers in your niche ­– stay on top of their problems and always have the solution
• Be ready with a unified message that interconnects your sales and marketing content; meaning, once a customer begins the purchasing process, make sure what they find in the sales process fully represents the advertising that drew them in from your marketing approach
• And, as always, support and promote your product with client testimonies

Email Marketing Best Practices

Email marketing is still the main thing when it comes to digital communication. It’s a great way to connect with people who are interested in your brand. Engaging your clients and prospects with email campaigns isn’t complicated but there a few “rules” to follow to make sure your emails don’t get lost in the infinite email matrix:

1. Begin with a strong welcome. You’ve got a matter of seconds to catch or lose your reader’s attention.
2. Pay attention to critical time slots, meaning, consider what time of day your audience is most likely to access their email so your email is sure to hover at the top of their inbox.
3. Consider frequency, such as daily, weekly, or monthly and set a day and time for punctual distribution.
4. Follow your email’s spam stats and churn rate and adjust accordingly.
5. Include a means to receive feedback from your recipients.
6. Make sure your subject line is interesting
7. Offer an opt-in method for people who’ve received your email via forwarding
8. Make sure the sender’s name you’re using is identifiable and memorable.

Hubspot’s data shows why now is the time to capitalize on marketing strategies with email campaigns:

[Related: Here’s the low-down from the experts at Hubspot:  17 Email Marketing Best Practices That Actually Drive Results]

Email Marketing Services

When marketing gurus talk about email marketing, they aren’t insinuating that business owners should send individual emails to potential and current clients. Most businesses out there turn to an email marketing service where they can draft emails, sort them into campaigns, and send them to pre-built mailing lists. Here are some of the more popular email marketing services available:

And here is a great article discussing the differences between the companies mentioned above.

Optimizing Your Business for Voice Search

“Hey, Alexa, find the best gym near me.”

Shopify, one of the top eCommerce retail machines, says voice search optimization is a must for your business. And that includes you, too, fitness professionals!

Voice search does precisely what its name implies: people use voice assistants, like Google, Siri, and Alexa, to find certain businesses and services. And you definitely want your business to surface when JoeFit says, “Hey Google, who’s the best online fitness trainer for building muscle?”

Here are some tips from Neil Patel’s voice search strategies to make sure voice assistants can find and recommend your fitness business:

• Use natural language. Your website’s FAQ is a great place to incorporate conversational phrases that closely mirror voice search questions
• Use your SEO long-tail keywords to incorporate conversational phrases
• Take advantage of Google My Business to ensure you appear in listings that match your business

[Source: SayOne]

Websites Are Still Fitness Industry Influencers

Start taking advantage of your fitness business’s website

What Is “Ranking”?

Ranking is when Google places your site in their search engine result pages. Ultimately, everyone hopes to land on the first page of result listings – but, wishful thinking won’t get you there. Without getting too technical, we’ll give you the short-story: ranking is influenced by your website’s size (bigger is better), your content quality (keep it updated), and your perseverance using link-building.

So, can you increase your site’s ranking? Of course. Can you do it quickly? Well, that depends on how faithfully you pursue website updates and improvements.

What factors should you be continually improving to increase your website’s visibility? Here are a few to get started:

• Website navigation: ensure that structure and architecture are logical and efficient for visitors
• Really, really good content
• Mobile optimization
• Clearly-stated objectives and CTAs
• Speed: monitor image sizes and caches
• Links and more links (and always make sure they’re working)
• Google Alert helps to track (so you can share) when your business is mentioned
• Finally, make sure Google knows you/your business (sites like Schema help with formatting)

The SEO experts at Moz also explain: “While search algorithms and ranking factors are constantly changing, the general consensus within the SEO community is that the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority that effective off-page SEO affords a website still play a major role in a page’s ability to rank.”

Speaking of link-building, trending in this conversation is the business intelligence approach to link-building: A Business Intelligence Approach To Link Building

[Related: The Ultimate Guide to Google’s Top Ranking Factor For Local Businesses, How To Get High Domain Authority Backlinks From Sites That Seem Impossible To Build Links On]

How To Write an About Page That Sells Your Brand

Talking about yourself is never easy but your about (or biography) page presents an organic opportunity to tell your audience (and search engines) several things about yourself and your business:

1. Tell a story and use “I” language. The goal isn’t to reveal every detail about your life but rather to help your audience connect with you and your brand. Share interests, hobbies, unusual facts.
2. Highlight how you’re working to enrich the lives of others.
3. Present some type of call-to-action. What would you like them to do next? Asking them to subscribe to a newsletter or your blog, or to follow you on social media are a few examples.

[Related: In his short essay, People Like Us Do Things Like This, marketing-guru Seth Godin reveals why humanity craves connection.]

Check out the About Me page of our client, Madeline Moves, for some inspiration.