How to Make Time for Fitness Marketing
If you can’t find time for fitness marketing such as your social media, or to respond to customer service questions, or create a blog – or doing one of those has taken SO much time that you can’t get something else done… including your own workout… there’s an easy answer.
You need to decide how much time it’s going to take. Then stick with it.
Tasks expand to the time they’re given.
If you don’t create a work schedule based on what you want to get done and the time you’re going to dedicate to getting it done, you’re probably, pardon my language, screwed.
If you’re a perfectionist, or a what-will-people-think pleaser, its worse! No offense, these can be good traits IF you work them to your advantage. But if you let them keep you from doing anything… they hold you back and all you’re going to be is frustrated with the potential and the knowledge you have that you should be so much further in business.
Does this sound familiar?
“These are great ideas, I just have no time to implement them.”
Have you said that?
This came from a 30-year fitness industry veteran. He’s a business owner. He’s obviously done something right! Longevity in fitness that began three decades ago is not common. (Nine out of ten fitness businesses still don’t make it past three years). Yet, he painted himself into a corner and was doing so much himself that he couldn’t grow, couldn’t hire good help – with time to train them – and he eventually found himself in the same stuck point. He has a great business but not the freedom to enjoy it that we all desire.
I’ve been told by personal training directors and business owners that they just don’t have the time to do marketing. They too had limited time because they were still training clients, while juggling customer service, conducting meetings, overseeing articles and newsletters, or doing payroll.
I think you’ll agree that without fitness marketing consistently happening your business growth is limited. There are just too many other options both in fitness and in life to take your customers time, energy, and money for you to be able to count on them coming to you when they are ready.
In a small business, you often are not just your [insert your job title], you are also the chief marketing officer (CMO). That’s true if you’re the owner, general manager, personal training director, or a personal trainer. It’s YOU. You’re the brand selling you. People do business and buy you.
Even where someone buys from another member of your team, ultimately if they continue it’s because they bought and believe in YOU.
So let’s focus on time.
You’ve got to create an ad, a flyer, an article or blog. How much time does it take? Well, if you decide it takes an hour, it does. If you don’t decide it could take you half a day or you could be working on it for a week.
Maybe you do give yourself a week, an hour a day. But what you’ve got to do is decide by the end of the week you for instance, have the rough draft and images for a blog set. Then you spend that last hour proof reading, deciding key words, polishing and posting to be released.
Batches are Key
It’s easy to get caught up in just doing and being busy. Productive people are successful and successful people decided a long time ago to be productive on the most important tasks. Making time for fitness marketing is definitely that kind of priority.
When you look at the fitness marketing tasks you do regularly you can break them down and create a system for doing them better. It’s like cleaning the house. How do you do it? Do you clean room by room? Or do you clean all the toilets, then clean all the sinks, and vacuum all the rugs and dust all the furniture? Doing the latter is slightly more time efficient way to clean a whole house.
The same is true of doing anything in business. If you write a weekly (or more frequently) blog, there are a lot of details to it. For instance it might include all of these:
- Brainstorm the topic
- Research the demand, competition, and key words
- Outline the article
- Collect the research or do interviews
- Create a video
- Create a title
- Post
- Share to social media
- Add to archives (Social 365 is described fully in my newest book)
But rather than get to the night before a post is due and throw together a quick tips list, your marketing will go a lot further if you’ve planned your social media calendar and your topic is relevant to your launches. Preparing a series of blogs at once will make them all be more cohesive and lead your clients back to your products or services.
Try this trick to make time for fitness marketing:
Schedule a regular time slot to focus only on a specific number of posts, say a full or just half day every month. Decide how many posts you’ll create at once. Maybe you’d shoot for five. Decide the maximum time you’ll spend:
- finding research studies or collecting quotes from experts
- outlining the bullet points
- fleshing out the post or article
- finding the images to use
So you might spend one hour to find research for all posts. Spend another hour creating the bullet points for all posts. Spend half an hour or an hour writing the post and adding the images for each. That’s seven hours for five high quality pieces of content. But then you’re done for a month with an extra post in the tank in case something interrupts your next scheduled session.
You are having one of two reactions right now:
SEVEN HOURS??? for blog posts ??
or
That little time for so much content?
I hope your reaction is the latter! Because content marketing – good content – is key going forward. There is an abundance of crap out there that your customer is finding done by people who aren’t as good at knowing your customer as you are. So you can get ahead if you take the time to consistently create content that informs, inspires, solves immediate problems and gives quick wins. You’re not giving away the store to do that, you’re earning trust. You have so much more to give than the little pieces you give away. Fitness marketing you do once can also live many times. Make it audio, video, print and break it into pieces to use on social and lead back to your site. (A system I describe in my new book).
No one can know your audience better than you. Can you buy spammy canned blogs or hire someone to write for you? Yes. But will they have the same voice and ability to communicate with your customers? That’s a question for you to answer.
Save Marketing Time
You can save time blogging by creating different types of content. You do need to create some long copy. Those epic blogs that are cornerstone content targeted at topics your ideal customers are interested in are what bring them to your site. But you can do one of those a month and use recipes to fill another blog (so popular and so easy), use a list of quotes, a tips list, or interview people (customers, trainers, nutritionists) and include a round up of their response to a common question. There are ways to make a blog or any piece of content come together faster than you might be thinking. Mixing it up with long articles, recipes, video blogs, tip lists and round ups makes it more interesting for them and easier for you. Use these ideas to get you started.
After you’ve written that blog, be sure you give it legs and wheels by reading this.
If you’re marketing needs a boost, start now… you’ve got four weeks to get your marketing launches ready for fall and it’s a good time to do it! Here’s a read you can take to the beach.
