Thanks to a combination of social media, soaring health insurance costs, and affordable access to lifestyle tech devices, the health and fitness industry is booming. I mean seriously booming. Over the past decade in the U.S. alone, the $30 billion industry has grown by 3 - 4% every year, which might explain why you’re seeing signs for CrossFit gyms and açai bowls everywhere these days.
But between diverse business offerings like wellness retreats, meal delivery services, gyms, yoga studios, fitness-focused apps and software, personal training classes, massage therapy sessions, supplement sales and more, how can you make sure your fitness brand stands out from the crowd? This is where HubSpot and inbound principles can transform your marketing game.
Unfortunately, just building a website is not enough for your brand to get the wheel turning on creating customers. Without the right methodology and tools, you might be missing valuable opportunities to place your brand in front of the right people. When it comes to developing an effective marketing strategy, there are a few common problems you might run into.
Whether you’re a personal trainer or the head of a major fitness app, the scope and variety of the information you need to collect to design an effective marketing strategy can be overwhelming, to say the least. Emails, social media, advertisements, landing pages, you name it. Where are you gathering this information and storing it? How are you sharing it between team members? Is all of the information on one platform? Too much complexity and a disorganized data storage system can lead to analysis paralysis, meaning your marketing efforts will become stunted.
In the modern world, people are bombarded with content every single day. Gone are the days when a gigantic billboard was all you needed to get people’s attention and direct them to your yoga studio's grand opening. Now, you’re fighting for that split-second of focus that might make someone check out your website, but poor SEO strategy and ineffective content won’t encourage them to stick around.
On the topic of billboards, using a shotgun approach to marketing where you simply put your message out there and hope it sticks is much less effective than targeting specific buyer personas. Don’t have any buyer personas yet? Just hold tight, we’ll get to that part in a minute.
Social media is a fickle tool. It can help your brand awareness grow by leaps and bounds or it can make you feel like you’re throwing content into a void. Posting too much, too little, the wrong type of content, or at the wrong time of day can all impact the level of engagement your posts receive. This is also one of the primary ways that prospects will discover your brand, which means you need to be making a knock-out first impression.
Regardless of the specific products or services your health and fitness-focused business might offer, HubSpot is a fantastic tool for making sure visitors can find your offerings and allow you to nurture them to become customers. The active approach to marketing will help you identify your most profitable niche and position your business as an industry thought leader.
Over here at HIVE, we like to say that selling salt to a slug is a bad strategy. Sibilance aside (yeah, I’m a linguistics nerd), this is more than just a fun phrase. It’s the backbone of the inbound methodology, which focuses on getting your message in front of the right people at the right time in the right way. HubSpot makes it easy to create unique buyer personas to help you understand your audience and their motives as they move through the buyer’s journey. The fast segmentation and ability to target different buyers helps you formulate better lead-generating campaigns.
Even for smaller operations, personally responding to every single email and inquiry is infeasible. With HubSpot workflows, you can quickly tailor communications and craft relevant follow-up responses that are automatically deployed when someone takes a desired action on your website, such as downloading a guide to dietary supplements. You can segment contacts based on a variety of factors like content they've previously downloaded or topics they've shown interest in for optimal correspondence and improved workflow efficiency. This feature is great for nurturing contacts and ensuring that opportunities don’t slip through the cracks because someone wasn’t contacted soon enough or they didn’t receive the right information.
Have you ever seen a business advertise a great piece of content like a downloadable guide or a checklist or a video, but you have to search the whole website like you’re Indiana Jones just to find it? No one has the time to do that. Why don’t you go ahead and place that golden idol right in front of your visitors with a tantalizing call-to-action?
CTAs clearly tell people what to do next, which eliminates their frustration and increases your chances of capturing their information so you can stay in contact long after they leave your page. It’s incredibly easy to make appealing CTAs with HubSpot and the platform also has powerful data analytics so you can track the progress of the buttons.
Managing your personal social media channels is a completely different ballgame than maintaining a brand’s image and presence through social media. Posts need to be consistent in content, style, and scheduling, which can be a lot to juggle. Luckily, you guessed it, HubSpot has a solution for this problem. The platform lets you access all of the social accounts linked to your business in one place and schedule out content months in advance to avoid gaps in posting. So, if you post a weekly Wednesday Workout Tip, you can be sure that one will go out every Wednesday.
If you're ready to build your brand by attracting visitors with inbound marketing methods, HubSpot is the tool for you. Still have questions about inbound marketing or how to utilize all of HubSpot's amazing features for your health and fitness brand? Chat with one of our team members!