Creating Engaging Content for Your Fitness Facility's Blog - and More!

By Tim Mauk, Special FBA Contributor

When it comes to marketing and websites, it’s common knowledge that content is king these days, especially when trying to bump your organic search engine rankings. But before you go into hyperdrive with a blog, you will want to investigate your “why,” “who,” “what,” and “how” when it comes to content, as well as the efficient utilization of your efforts in blogging. This understanding of these topics will be pivotal for your content’s success when it comes to engagement. So, let’s jump right in!

Why Start a Blog for a Gym?

It’s best to begin with your goal regarding the “why” question for blogging on your gym’s website. Setting a well-defined objective for your business, campaign, or content creation efforts will help you understand why you should blog for your fitness studio in the first place.

For some fitness facility owners, search engine optimization (SEO) might be the primary driver as to why they want to begin blogging. By focusing on keywords, phrases, and topics to help distinguish their gym’s presence locally and worldwide, a blog can be part of the answer to “why” for this type of goal.

Other owners may be trying to make a splash in their local market and develop a name for themselves. Blogs can be a great “why” when it comes to displaying authority within a niche or topic of expertise. Content-based blogs can also be a way to engage with an audience further or even be used as a thought leadership medium to drive new members and visitors.

Who is Your Fitness Facility Blog Content Aimed At?

Once you’ve designated your “why,” the next biggest question becomes “who” in relation to your audience this will be geared toward. While many times, gyms and personal training studios may default to directing their content development toward the same primary target audience as their gym, there is also a different school of thought that should be considered. If you plan to build a blog as part of a retention and gym’s core target audience enhancer, utilizing the same primary audience type is a fine idea.

However, some fitness clubs might want to increase their message reach and build a more extensive audience base outside their core customer type. In these cases, it makes sense to have a shift in the target audience for this medium when it comes to your writing style, topics, keywords, and even campaign efforts for your sales funnel.

Regardless of how you select your audience, understanding their values, interests, wants, needs, and pain points is imperative to developing resonating content. When writing for an audience, you want to confidently know what is explicitly driving them to look for more information, explanations, or guidance in the first place. This research will serve you well in the long term as it will help you better align your content quickly by knowing who it’s for and what interests them.

What are You Going to Blog About?

Based on your “why” and “who” answers, you should start to see the answer to the “what” question concerning your gym’s blog content. Understanding these other elements beforehand will help you find what interests and engages your ideal blog audience. That said, you will have times when some content won't do as well as others. Taking a step back and analyzing your content based on engagement, analytics, and sales funnel conversions can help you take a pragmatic approach to your content creation strategy over time. Additionally, pairing content analysis with some testing mechanisms (like A/B testing, different styles, or different structures) can help you determine what works or doesn’t work within your chosen target audience.

Successful blog topics ranked objectively can look different based on your goals, but as we mentioned above, you can look at the quality of a blog based on various factors. To drive community engagement and spark conversation, data based on comments, likes, shares, and discussions would be necessary to help gauge improvement. However, when trying to improve the reach of your content (for SEO or online social sharing), data analytics like total page visits, new visitors, and visit duration all become points of interest.  Finally, for those looking to utilize their blog as a sales tool for new members, tracking conversions through call-to-action (CTA) clicks, sales funnel tracking, and conversions from your blogs become paramount to report on.

How Will You Create the Blog?

At this point of question answers, you may have a pretty solid idea of what you want to do. The final step is doing it. So, for this question, the “how” can refer to a schedule you want to hold yourself to for publishing, a plan to delegate writing specific topics to others, or even how to get a blog added to your gym’s current website. Whatever your “how” questions are at this point, these will be your final hurdles to getting started.

Have a plan, start posting, analyze your success, and refine your style to maximize your audience’s engagement or specific goal completion.

Maximizing Your Blogging Efforts - Work Smarter

Once you write the blog, you create a nice piece of long-form content. You can then break these posts into smaller marketing campaign elements for further utilization. These components can include social media posts, email notifications/newsletters, or even video recaps. Because these pieces can fit seamlessly into your marketing campaign efforts, linking to the blog for more in-depth information helps drive additional engagement and website traffic and can tie in well with your training facility’s sales funnel.