Digital Marketing Best Practices: Fitness Edition

As time goes on, the Fitness Industry is becoming more and more reliant on social media and digital marketing efforts. With the largest portion of the audience having at least one or more social media accounts, it is important to understand how to reach these individuals and start building your brand online. Just this year, Digital Marketing has surpassed traditional marketing efforts, marking a distinctive change in the way we market to others. If you are not optimizing your digital marketing strategy, you are putting yourself at a severe disadvantage and will likely experience limited success. Not to fear! These quick and easy tips will help you jumpstart your strategy and be on pace to reach your goals.

1. Establish Goals

Before one dives straight into the vastness of social media and digital strategy, it is important to identify what exactly you seek to gain from its utilization. There are many different social media platforms that help you reach your audience in different ways. Choosing these platforms should be based on actual research in your field and evidence of success from others. After you have identified your desired outcome, you can better focus on how you are going to get there.

2. Create Diverse Content

In digital marketing, there are a large variety of channels you can deploy to reach different groups of people. Therefore, it is important that each of these specific channels includes unique and relatable content that compliments that of the other channels. An individual does not want to follow multiple accounts that post the same cookie cutter content on all pages. Make sure that the content you are creating is something that your audience would want to see and is “engageable” to them.

3. Content Calendar

Reinforcing the importance of content, a content calendar helps you plan, organize, and even schedule what it is you will be posting across social media channels. By planning out the content to be posted ahead of time, it is easier to make sure that your themes line up and have a logical flow. In addition, creating a content calendar and keeping up with it allows you to better utilize your time on other important aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

4. Utilize Stories/Live

Stories are a very important tool that can get your brand more visibility on

Social Media. Because they appear on the Explore page, people that may not follow you may still see your content. Live streamed content is also something that could increase your ability to connect with your audience, asking and answering questions or highlighting a project you are currently working on.

5. Monitor Analytics

After you have your content squared away, it is just as important to evaluate how it performs after the fact. Looking at sentiment, engagement, views, likes, shares, etc. all help you to paint a picture as to what your audience prefers and how to make your content match these preferences going forward. There are many third-party analytics applications that connect directly with your accounts, but many platforms offer their own in-house analytics tools as well.

6. Build SEO

SEO is an important element of marketing that is often overlooked. To achieve higher rankings, drive traffic to your site, and increase overall awareness it is important that you develop a strategy for SEO. Some key things to focus on when it comes to SEO are keyword optimization, backlinks, and meta titles and descriptions.

7. Focus on Community

With all these aspects of Digital Marketing and Social Media to worry about, it may become easy to lose sight of your community. While followers and likes are important to a degree, the community you build is far more valuable.

8. Be Social!

When you think about the purpose of Social Media, we must remember to actually be social! Building a community requires actually communicating with your followers. This could mean responding to comments, liking posts or comments, or answering DMs. It is also important to engage with individuals outside of your network to expand it further. Social Media provides an outlet to find likeminded individuals similar to yourself and this aspect should not be ignored.

9. Provide Value

By providing your audience with valuable content that is relevant to their goals as an individual or a business, you can leverage the relationship into one that encourages profitable consumer action. Basically, you are providing free information to individuals in an attempt to build trust and demonstrate worth to your audience.

10. Be Authentic

At the end of the day, be yourself. Your audience will be able to see if you are truly passionate about what you are doing or if you are just trying to collect a check. Make sure your intentions are genuine and don’t be afraid to go outside your comfort

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