Gym Marketing: Attract New Members with Helpful Tools
The fitness industry is more competitive than it has ever been. Society has been on a fitness addiction of self-improvement promoting. Leading to an increased demand for fitness products and services. With service demands booming, fitness brands and businesses have had no issues with drawing people to their services. The challenging dilemma business owners now face in the fitness industry is keeping customer engagement in their brand. Competitors will happily steal customers away when customers begin to lose interest. The secret to inspiring continuous customer interaction with your brand is compelling content in gym marketing.
Credible Content
Content marketing helps you reach potential clients in beneficial, intriguing ways. It opens the platform of not only telling clients why they should take a look at your brand but why they should keep coming back as well. The content needs original information, genuine, authentic, educational, and make people feel they can trust your business. Delivering credible content will influence the vital part of developing emotional connections and strengthen your reputation. Not only will customers remain involved with your business but they motivate them to share your brand information with contacts as well. Outsourcing reliable content through content marketing is achievable in numerous ways.
- Blogs
- Videos
- News Coverage
- Demonstrations
- Product Testing
- Reports
- Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is an essential tool to make your gym marketing stand out from the rest. It advertises what your brand offers with little effort. It supports friendly customer service by helpfully making information available to anyone. Not only will inbound marketing attract new customers but it will convince previous customers to remain immersed in your business too. An enabler for successful inbound marketing is sticking with credible content. Take advantage of the opportunity to make content fun and exciting. Integrate your brand's content into useful inbound marketing tools.
- Social Media
- Mobile Website Access
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Promotional Emails
- Ebooks
- Flyers
- Friendly Connections
Potential customers are serious about finding a fitness facility that makes them feel welcomed and supported during their fitness journey. Offering a sales pitch with conditional attachments will send mixed messages and discourage potential members from your brand. Encouraging a friendlier feel for your brand will keep people engaged and inspire emotional connections. Emotional connections persuade customers to remain loyal. Friendly and passionate relations start with first impressions. First impressions for your business are often found in the business’s content and marketing. This only enforces why making content credible is crucial for keeping customers engrossed with your brand.
Take Away
The brands in the fitness industry are experiencing difficulties in keeping people involved because of high rising competition. This does not mean your business will drown in the rivalry pool. Influential gym marketing can set the standards for why customers remain faithful to your brand. Contact us today for more information!
Why You Need An Inbound Marketing Agency
With inbound marketing being the most effective strategy for growing your brand online, it is crucial that your business is focusing on and adequately executing each of the incoming components to achieve optimal results. They must be fully operating to reap the rewards of generating quality traffic, leads, and sales for your business.
However, this can prove challenging for some brands. Not having the time to create ongoing content, overwhelmed by all the different strategies and how to manage them, and unsure where to begin in online marketing are all common obstacles that some businesses face with implementing inbound marketing. If any of these hurdles hit home, hiring an inbound marketing agency is your solution.
In fact, check out these four reasons why your brand should strongly consider an inbound marketing agency to help improve your online strategy:
Leverage the Experts
Online marketing techniques are always changing. What works today in SEO, for example, may not work tomorrow. Instead of trying to keep up with the trends, leverage the expertise of an inbound agency that knows of the latest marketing techniques. They know what’s working in online marketing and what’s not. Use their knowledge to your advantage so you can focus on what you do best in your business.
Enhance Your Content Strategy
The key to a solid content marketing strategy is aligning your content with your ultimate business goals. If you consistently find your team struggling with content ideas an inbound marketing agency will help you get a clear picture of the brand's goals and target audience so that you’ll never run out of ideas of what content to share.
Eliminate Paralysis by Analysis
Because there are so much information and plenty of internet marketing strategies you can implement, some companies get stuck in trying to decide which techniques to use, what to do next, or what tools to deploy and so forth. Your inbound marketing agency will know which online tactics and marketing automation tools that are best for your unique business goals and objectives.
Bottom Line, Get Results!
You've spent a lot of money on your websites, yet your pages are not generating any traffic or leads. You're not even showing up on the organic searches in Google! It’s simply time for you to get results. Every day that you wait in trying to figure it out, you miss opportunities for leads, sales, and new customers. Contact us today for a consultation on how you can get to your next level and create the results you deserve!
13 Facts About Video Marketing You May Not Know
There’s an old but true axiom in the marketing world: consumers justify their purchases based on logic, but they buy based on emotion. Your neighbor will tell you he bought that shiny, new convertible in his driveway because it gets great gas mileage, or performed well in crash tests, or its great resale value. The truth is he probably bought it because it’s sexy and tells you he’s climbing up the social ladder.
Creating that emotional connection with customers sells your products and services. And the best medium to sell with emotion is video. Video brings your company to life and shows rather than tells customers who you are, what you value, and why you’re better than your competitors. Study after study shows that consumers prefer a compelling video about a product or service to a comparable print description.
How Do You Sell Wearable Cameras? Rescue a Kitten
GoPro sells wearable action cameras, high-definition gadgets for outdoor sports enthusiasts who want to capture their thrill of victory moments skiing, surfing, and skateboarding. In 2013, firefighter Cory Kalanick got the call to rescue an unconscious kitten in Fresno, California. He was wearing a GoPro camera. That video, heart-breaking and hopeful, made its way to YouTube where it caught the attention of 1.5 million viewers in its first few weeks. GoPro saw an opportunity, edited the raw footage, added its logo, and re-released the result (“Fireman Saves Kitten”) on its own YouTube channel. The video went viral, capturing 5 million views in its first week.
Founded in 2004, GoPro racked up $150,000 in sales in its first year. By 2013, annual sales had shot up to more than $985,000. In 2014, that number jumped to almost $1.4 million, taking the company to an IPO valuation just shy of $3 billion. It would be hard to argue that a kitten put GoPro on the map, but it sure didn’t hurt.
Video Sparks Emotion and Emotion Boosts Sales
GoPro isn’t alone in boosting sales and company image by tugging at the heartstrings. For example, Chipotle’s video (and mobile game), “The Scarecrow,” brought awareness to its sustainable farming campaign with images of animal confinement and toxic pesticides. More than 17 million consumers have viewed the video on YouTube.
And then there’s HelloFlo, which sells feminine hygiene products. The company scored big with a video using humor and heart, “The Camp Gyno,” featuring a young girl who gets her first “red badge of courage,” then helps other girls at summer camp. The video cost about $6,000 to shoot, got 6 million views in its first week and was named ad of the week by Adweek.
By the Numbers
The numbers tell the story: video marketing works because it’s what consumers want. Here are 13 facts about video marketing you may not have known:
- Four times as many consumers want to view a product video instead of reading about it
- Half of internet surfers want to see a product video before entering a store
- Consumers who see a video are about twice as likely to buy a product or use a service
- More than half of internet users watch videos all the way through
- Half of consumers say they want to see more company videos
- Companies which use video grow revenues twice as fast
- 52% of marketers say video content has the best return on investment
- Two of three consumers want videos of 60 seconds or less
- More than 100 billion people are active users of YouTube
- Half of all marketers plan to add YouTube to their marketing strategy in the next year
- Two of five marketers plan to add Facebook video in the next year
- Almost half of consumers watch an hour or more of Facebook and YouTube videos each week
- 80% of consumers say video demos help them make purchases
What now?
Video is an essential component of an integrated, inbound marketing strategy. To learn more about the ways you can generate leads and drive sales by engaging marketing content, contact us today.
What Should You Look For in a Digital Marketing Agency
You've tried juggling your marketing. Either you're doing what you do best—focusing on your core business needs—or you're losing hours on social media and trying to figure out why your website won't work right on mobile. Let's face it. You need a digital marketing agency.
A quick web search gives you plenty of company names. But how do you pick one? How do you differentiate between sizzle and substance? High bills and high conversion?
Here are a few things to look for when selecting the digital marketing agency that's right for you.
Social Media Experts
Content is king. You want a digital marketing agency that has tapped into where your audience gets their media. They should be able to formulate a strategy to put your company on the lips of your target audience. Engagement is key to social media. Will the agency craft a plan that tells your brand story in a way that relates to the audience? Look at how they handle their presence? Has their blog been updated recently? Marketing is ever-evolving. If there hasn't been a blog update in months or if their Twitter feed is empty, it's not the marketing company you should hire.
Adaptable and Innovative
You can't afford to be a step behind. You need to keep up with the competition, or better yet, stay a step ahead. Marketing is always changing. Radio was big. Television was huge. Now, social media is the current forefront of marketing, and the most consumed content is video. Social media platforms are adapting to the content their users want, and that means video. It will be the next cornerstone of inbound marketing.
Strong Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing means motivated customers come to you and want you to market to them. Rather than inundating people with expensive hit-or-miss ads, you generate content and capture an audience. They follow you because you talk to them, you interest them, you engage them. This is less intrusive, often less expensive, and establishes more than leads; it creates repeat conversions.
Flexible and Scalable
Would you wear a one-size-fits-all suit to a meeting with your biggest client? What would you think if a vendor came to meet with you? When choosing a digital marketing agency, why would you choose one that wants to sell your company cookie-cutter solutions? Look for a digital marketing agency that will tailor their services to your business needs. They should respect your firm as the unique entity you've worked so hard to create.
Real Data Analytics
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data tells you about your buyers and how they are interacting with your company. They can tell you how you're perceived, what campaigns are generating leads, and, more importantly, what strategies are converting leads. Without sufficient data, an agency is fumbling in the dark. Sure, they might have an occasional hit, but they won't know why or how to duplicate their former.
Take your time and evaluate your options. At HARNESS, we tailor our services towards your company's needs to give you the best results. Whether you need us to complement your existing traditional marketing efforts or we're your first foray into working with an agency, our focus is you.
Contact us to harness the power of inbound digital marketing.
5-Step Guide to Video Content Marketing
Video marketing is the newer, shinier version of content marketing. By developing a solid message with quality video to portray your message and share it with others, you're creating the most powerful marketing strategy. Follow this 5-step guide to video marketing to create a strategic inbound marketing methodology.
1. Know Yourself and Your Customers
What is it about your brand that sets you apart? Why is your brand valuable? Think about your ideal customer and then study that population. People are like schools of fish; similar ones swim together.
Seek out this information by conducting surveys, gathering data and organizing that data to make it applicable to your strategy. If you find out what makes the customers tick, you can use that information to draw more people in. A strong message backed by attention to customer service is what improves your brand image and increases leads/sales.
2. Care About It
Why did women in the 1950s need to have those Tupperware containers? It was because Tupperware knew how to create messaging that appealed to women at that time—freedom and family. Owning a set of Tupperware showed women how they can have financial freedom while still espousing the happy American family way of life.
If you don't care about your message, nobody else will. What is it about your story that would make others care about it? How can you make your customers valued?
3. Know your Competition
It is most likely you're not the only one in your specific market. That is why it is essential to know your competition. If you have already video marketing content, review the material and identify if it addresses trends. Sift through your content and highlight areas that need to be changed or cut. Try finding weak parts could be improved.
Compare your history with the history of others within the same market. What are their gaps? Look at what all the other people are doing, brainstorm how it could be better and go for it.
4. Position Yourself Accordingly
Be reasonable with where you are in the market. Have you been in the industry for one year or fifty years? How long has your competition been providing the same products/services?
After doing all the research, plot out your growth. Where have were you years ago? Where are you now? Where do you desire to go?
Those three questions stated above, along with the information you gathered in steps 1-3 will lay the blueprint for your successful outcome.
5. Create
After you've done all the steps, you can now create a video marketing strategy that will take people's unfamiliarity of your brand to interest to emotional investment.
You lead people through this journey in one short film. Make sure your material addresses everything you learned in your research.
Set the goal to create video content that will stick. Think about the videos that have stuck with you, what was it about those videos that attracted you? There is a lot of factors involved but knowing your audience will make these easy to identify.
If implementing a video marketing strategy seems like a daunting task, contact us for help. All of your research is only worth it if you're able to produce a robust piece and execute your marketing strategy.
Key Elements to a Winning Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound marketing is the best way to promote your business online. Leveraging this strategy significantly increases brand exposure, boosts follower engagement, drives traffic to your blog and lead pages, and improves lead and sales conversions. If you want internet marketing success for your company, embracing the inbound methodology is the way to do it.
There are four essential actions in the inbound marketing strategy. Each element must be actively working to achieve the best outcomes in your marketing efforts. Here are the major components, with examples of techniques and tools, you can use to create a winning strategy:
#1 Attract Visitors
The first action is driving traffic to your site…but not just any traffic. The goal is targeted to quality visitors that are interested in your message. Having clarity of your target market is vital to creating content that solves their problems. Once you have established your buyer personas, you can align your entire content marketing strategy including social media, email messages, SEO, blogging content and videos to their interests.
#2 Convert
B2B Companies that blog only 1-2 times per month generate up to 70% more leads than those that don’t (Source: Hubspot). This stat illustrates the power behind the inbound strategy and how it dramatically impacts lead conversions. Convert website visitors into leads by using tools like landing pages, web forms, and lead offers. The key is ensuring your lead magnet is enticing and valuable enough for viewers to give their contact information in exchange.
#3 Close
The third element of an inbound marketing strategy that works is closing your leads into buying customers. It is in the nurturing process where you are grooming prospects to move them closer to a purchasing decision. Email marketing and marketing automation are excellent tools to fostering relationships with your leads that build trust. Thus, wanting to do business with you.
#4 Delight
You’ve earned a new customer…good work! But it doesn’t end there. This final step to inbound marketing is where you build loyal, raving fans who proudly promote you to their networks. How do you make this transition? By continuing to feed valuable content that resonates with your audience. Tools such as surveys and social monitoring are ways to gain feedback to improve your customer initiatives and create amazing experiences.
Ensuring that these four ingredients are working in your inbound strategy is imperative to achieving online marketing success. When executed correctly, you will maintain a steady flow of traffic, leads, sales and returning clients to your business.
For help on creating an inbound marketing strategy that increases your brand exposure and improves online conversions, contact us here for a schedule consultation. We are ready to help get you to your next level.
Inbound Marketing: Defining How it Can Work in the B2B Industry
At one time, the B2B industry seemed to treat inbound marketing almost like it was a foreign concept that only applied to B2C. While it is partly true, it doesn't discount the possibilities of using this technique with those selling to other businesses.
There is abundant evidence that inbound marketing works for both the B2B and B2C industries. Marketing to businesses is no different from marketing to a consumer.
In both instances, marketing supports the sales of a solution or commodity that can address a market problem or demand. Even if the resolution or the end product varies, pain points are the same.
With a well-crafted inbound marketing plan, clients will come to you rather than you to them.
Creating Valuable Marketing Content
Statistics show that B2B businesses that blog bring in 67% more leads than those who don't. But the blog won't matter if you don't target the content to the right demographic. Create personas first, to get an idea of what the customers may want to read, see, or hear.
The more compelling your content is to help solve pain points, the more apt businesses are going to find you when searching for information. Using proper SEO to aid you in Google placement, it is worth remembering quality content never gets ignored.
Even if you curate some blog content, make sure it's up to industry standards.
Using Email to Reach Customer Leads
Even with marketing automation becoming more and more popular, far too many B2B companies don't use it enough. Sending automated marketing emails to leads is a perfect way to combine reaching out to people while still attracting them with the content you provide.
The key is to entice them first so they'll visit your website to see more. Using video in your marketing emails with some element of storytelling helps considerably. Try to wrap a narrative around a problem and how your business products bring solutions.
Using Social Media to Attract Businesses
Using hashtags on social media as you post content works well to attract more business on a daily basis. Try to find out what keywords the industry use. Incorporate those regularly and apply as hashtags on Twitter.
One way to do quick research is looking for those keywords on Twitter or Facebook to see what conversations are taking place. Starting conversations on social media to prove your expertise is a technique you can use.
Contact us to learn more about how inbound marketing can work to make your B2B company grow.
Climbing Gym Marketing: Improving Your Inbound Marketing
One of the biggest problems in climbing gym marketing is that their social media efforts do not bring them the results they expect. They take beautiful, interesting pictures for Instagram and Pinterest, but don't get traffic to the gym. This does not mean that the pictures are bad, it just means you need to make minor tweaks to your posts. Here is how:
Write Good Descriptions
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but no one will find your picture without a description. If you are using social media solely for climbing gym marketing, your post needs to be keyword rich, but engaging. Don't just post a bunch of hashtags or keyword phrases, either. Write an interesting comment and include a strong call to action with every post.
Reply to Comments
It's not what you say, but how you say it. Once people find your pictures and comment on them, you need to take a moment to convince them to take the next step. This should be done naturally and uniquely. For example, don't write "Thanks for the like, visit us in person to see more." Instead, try something more personal, "Tammy, I'm glad you like the technique we are using. If you contact us, we can show you how to do it at the gym."
Include Links
Not everyone will want to pick up a phone to contact you. If you have a website, take advantage of it. Include a link to every picture. This will allow people to easily gather more information about you as a climbing gym, making them more prone to buy.
While taking one-of-a-kind photos or videos for social media is a great first step, it takes an effort to make the perfect inbound marketing campaign. To learn more techniques that can help your climbing gym grow, contact us today.
3 STEPS TO CREATING GREAT MARKETING CONTENT
Content Marketing integrates very well with Social Media marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here is what you need to do before you start creating content:
Identify Your Audience
To do that, you have to:
- Select your niche: This is a particular group of people who are interested in the topic you write about.
- Refine your niche - for example, "fitness enthusiasts" is a niche, but it is relatively broad. "Mountain sports enthusiasts" is a more targeted niche and would make a more precise target.
- Dig down! Micro-niche is a subset of your chosen niche. For example, "Sports climbers" or "ice climbers" are micro-niches in the "mountain sports enthusiasts" niche.
Conduct Research
That being said, you need to spend a good amount of time to get an idea of what the trending topics are. Platforms such as Buzzsumo, Reddit, Feedly are excellent resources to gain insight of what’s trending in today’s market.
Decide On Your Content
What do you think your customers will be more interested in - a blog post, videos, podcasts, newsletter, reports, white papers, tutorials, infographics? Different types of content work better on certain platforms versus others. For example, if you decide to create a video, you have to keep your distribution method in mind. Each platform has specific requirements technically, aesthetically, and within the expectations of your viewer.
Your prospects will consume media in any method THEY choose.
Just because you choose to utilize a white paper does not mean that your particular prospect engages with that type of content. You must be sure to cater to all types of content consumption across all platforms.
Strategize, execute, manage, and analyze your content.
Timing is everything in today's digital market, and optimal sharing time is different from one channel to the other. The only way to perfect your content sharing timing is to analyze your social media data and find out when your audience is most engaged.
25 Tips for SEO
Earlier this year, John Rampton put together an excellent article for Forbes capturing advice from 25 top professionals in the search engine optimization field. Some of these authors include Joost de Valk, CEO of Yoast, and Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz - a solid lineup of knowledgeable individuals.
Many of these tips point to information that we often share with our clients - content is king. There are many things you can do to on the technical side make your site visible and available to Google, which tell search engines that the site is technically proficient, provides a smooth user experience, and is mobile-friendly. If you are not adding value to your user's day, you are only interrupting it
After that, it is about providing value to users. If you are not adding value to your user's day, you are only interrupting it (this should be a mantra for all sales people in this day and age). Interrupting a person's day without providing something valuable in exchange means that you are going to be unfollowed, unsubscribed, or hung up on if you are making a traditional sales call.
How do you provide value on your website and at the same time optimize for search?
The answer: by creating content that entertains and solves users’ problems.
The truth is that many search engine optimization “professionals” have attempted to create a mystique around the practices supposedly required to optimize a site. It is true that some technical requirements are beyond the scope of most marketers and they involve coding and design that streamlines the flow of information, but beyond that SEO is about content that is valuable to your visitors and is easily shared.
There is a great deal of wrong information on SEO that has been shared on the Internet featuring tips that may have worked a few years ago but will now get your site penalized by search engines due to unethical link building or other areas that create a bad user experience.
Here are some questions you should be asking yourself:
- Which problems are your customers and future customers hoping to solve? For instance, are they looking for entertainment or to find reviews on the latest tech gadgets? Do they need to find a solution for an engineering issue in their plant?
- How can you provide information to solve these problems?
- What phrases might they be using to search for those answers?
- What is the best medium to provide this information?
By answering these questions before ever writing a word of content, you are better able to cater to your users’ unique needs. Define the problems that your prospects are hoping to solve and which terms they are using to find this answer. By building your content (in a way that makes sense without forcing it) around those search terms, you are more likely to provide value and useful information that Google will prioritize.
But what about the medium?
Remember that consumers will reach you in a variety of different ways from both mobile and PC. Visitors are going to consume information in the way that makes the most sense to them at the time. For example, one user may prefer to read a blog post while at work because she is unable to watch a video at the office, but that same user prefers to watch a video over reading articles while on her iPad at home.
People are finding you on mobile, which accounts for over 60% of website traffic on average, will most certainly prefer to watch a video rather than reading a long blog post on their phone. Google and Facebook are giving more weight to video because it adds tremendous value to user experience. On Google, you are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results if you feature different video on your site. On Facebook, you will see as much as 80% higher engagement with your content that features video.
By utilizing written, graphical, and video content, you can capture a wider breadth of a user while providing a deeper user experience. Google sees this and rewards the sites that are willing to make the investment in creating quality content for their users.
It can get confusing with all of the information that is available on the Internet about this topic. Feel free to reach out to us directly if you have any questions regarding SEO as part of your larger strategy.