Content Marketing in the Sports and Fitness Industry

Step #1: Profile Your Company

You can't start marketing your brand until you've defined every detail about it. If you don't already have an in-depth company profile and a brand book, it's time to sit down and dig into the following questions:

• What pain point does your company solve?


• Who do you want to reach with your marketing?


• What impression do you want to leave readers with?


• What are your marketing goals?

As you create your brand book, think about the finer details that will change people's perceptions of your company. Do you make jokes or keep things serious? Do you use slang or medical terms? Do you try to break things down for the laypeople or are you marketing to a professional or highly knowledgeable audience? Answering these questions helps you form your brand's unique voice and keep it consistent.

Step #2: Profile Your Customers

Once you know your company, you need to spend some additional time digging even deeper into your market research to make sure you know your customers. If you haven't already created customer personas for your ideal clients, now's the time to do it. These personas help inform your marketing at every level and they can shape your brand's voice, too.

• Who is your ideal customer?


• What challenges might your ideal customer face along their journey?


• How can your content help the customer get over those challenges?

Consider questions that go beyond the age or location of your customers. Think about the platforms they use and how they prefer to consume content. Do they watch videos and, if so, do they watch them on Facebook, YouTube, or elsewhere? Do they interact with brands more on Instagram or another platform? Do they share content and, if so, what kind? Figuring out what engages your audience is key to success.

As you lay out the customer personas that you want to target, consider how your customers' needs, concerns, and preferences may influence how your brand presents itself. You should tailor your brand to engage your ideal customers, even if that means tweaking your current idea of who your brand is.

Step #3: Lay Out Your Goals

BIt's impossible to create a strategy for anything unless you have goals that you're working toward. So, before you dive further into the planning process, create a list of your company's goals. Ideally, you'll make them "SMART" goals, that is: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. In doing so, you help set your company up for success.

You should look to set both short-term and long-term goals for your brand. Short-term goals are achievable within the next six months or so, while long-term goals may be multiple years out. Ideally, your short-term goals should represent milestones on the way to your long-term goals. In other words, they should all be connected and support the pursuit of each other as you achieve them.

Examples of goals you may set include:

• Increasing your Facebook following by 5% over the next six months


• Doubling your Facebook engagement rate over the next six months


• Increasing your website traffic by 20% over the next six months


• Growing your conversion rate by 10% over the next year

These goals are interconnected because increasing your following goes hand-in-hand with increasing engagement — both of which help increase organic traffic. Eventually all of that will boost your conversion rates. As you reach goals, be sure to set new ones continuously. And remember — goals should be ambitious, but achievable.

Step #4: Select Your Platforms

Your brand can't be everywhere, and it shouldn't try to be. Now is the time to pull out the customer personas you created and figure out where your audience spends their time, and where they are most likely to interact with your company. You may find that your audience is active on a handful of platforms, but your brand should only focus on a few to start with. It's always quality over quantity with content.

Platforms may include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, and more. You should also plan on creating an abundance of content for your own website. You may eventually consider creating downloadable content, live streaming content, or even producing a branded app. However, in the short-term, your content strategy should pinpoint your website and 1-3 other platforms you want to build a following on.

Step #5: Choose Content Types

Once you have your platforms in mind, you can begin considering the type of content your brand is going to publish. The platforms you've chosen somewhat influence the content you create. For instance, if you've chosen YouTube, your brand must produce videos for your channel. Meanwhile, if you're going to be on Instagram, you'll need sharable photos.

Content you could publish includes:

• Blog posts and articles


• eBooks and downloadable resources


• Infographics


• Video content, like tutorials and tours


• Customer testimonials and interviews


• Podcasts and audio training

There's a long list of content types your brand could offer, and you should think back to the concept of quality over quantity. Don't stretch yourself too thin by putting all sorts of content types into your calendar. Start with a few and add new types as time goes by, if you feel there is an interest or need within your audience.

Step #6: Create a Calendar

Once you know the type of content you want to publish and the platforms you'll publish on, you can bring these two elements together and create your content calendar. Your content calendar is basically a schedule that helps you track when you're publishing where, and how often. It ensures consistent posts and helps you stay ahead of ideas, so you're never scrambling to find a topic last minute.

Your content calendar should lay out content slots from January through December, but don't overwhelm yourself or your team trying to come up with a year's worth of ideas. You can focus on topics in the next step. For now, just decide what your content production capacity is and lay out:

• How often you'll post to each platform


• What day/time is best to post to each platform


• How your content schedule accommodates for seasonal, themed, and timely content

Depending on your niche, you might mark content slots with a note to help you plan for seasonal content, sales, promotions, and other events throughout the year. You might also plan your content slots so that the topics connect with a theme each day, week, or month. These nuances are all things you can only pull off with the help of a content calendar, so be sure you create one that you'll always reference and rely on.

Step #7: Research Topics

Your content calendar may look daunting if you sit down and try to plan a year's worth of topics in a day. Fortunately, your brand only needs to look a few months ahead. However, just to make sure you're never without content ideas, it's a good idea to start an "idea bank" where your content's topics can incubate until they're ready to go into future slots.

As far as where to find topics, your brand has countless resources. First off, consider the ideas your competitors succeed with. Next, think back to your market research. With the help of keyword research and tools like Google Analytics, you'll be able to identify long tail keywords, short tail keywords, and the search volume for each so you can target topics that will actually drive traffic to your website.

Combine your keyword research with on-page SEO and other SEO strategies, like getting some authorities to link to your site and earning featured snippets, and you're well on your way to a content strategy that works for your business.

The last detail? You need a reliable content writing service to help you pull it off.