The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
Redefining Marketing with Trust and Expertise
What if understanding client psychology could transform your content marketing strategy and propel your business forward? This episode unpacks the profound impact of connecting with your audience on a psychological level, all while avoiding the burnout often fostered by hustle culture. Reflecting on personal experiences, we explore the delicate balance between strategic planning and execution during the often treacherous "valley of death" in business growth. By examining real-world success stories, such as a client who achieved impressive conversion rates through localized content, we emphasize the power of targeting a specific audience over trying to be everything to everyone.
Tired of the same old marketing gimmicks? We dive into relationship-driven marketing strategies that prioritize genuine connection and trust over flashy tactics. Learn how to leverage your existing relationships to enhance customer loyalty and engagement, whether by crafting content that speaks directly to your audience’s pain points or by positioning yourself as an expert in your niche. Drawing from experiences with professional athletes, we highlight the challenge of balancing specialization with broader business objectives, uncovering how to attract like-minded clients by resonating with their needs.
Our conversation also turns to the evolving world of content marketing, where quality beats quantity every time. Discover how to use content strategically across platforms like LinkedIn to foster community and collaboration rather than a direct sales approach. We share insights on aligning your content with your business goals and the importance of building authentic relationships through community engagement. To further support your journey, we've introduced a newsletter packed with actionable insights and structured guidance. Tune in to rethink the way you approach content marketing and relationship building in today’s digital landscape.
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Gym Break cast, where we go through all those visionary type ideas that come to us during our normal daily gym break. I'm your host, zach Coleman, and today we're going to kind of go off of a repeat from our last episode. A repeat from our last episode. You know, I've been thinking since we kind of pushed out that episode a little bit. We kind of talked a little bit about understanding client psychology and really understanding the motivations of clients to seek your services, how it relates to content, your services how it relates to content and how you can start really attracting people through your content. And it made me dive a little bit deeper into my thought process. You know, back again, you know, five, six years ago, I was talking a lot about how I was just throwing content out there. I was having you know, I was having a lot of burnout doing what I thought you could call it hustle culture, you could call call it trying to keep up with competitors, and it really made me start to think a lot about when I see prospects come in and understanding the psychology around, just where the market is right now in general. So many things don't work. So many things do work and you know I had to come to a point in my business, my brand, which I kind of call, you know, and I don't call it. This is normal business practices, and you probably will hear me say this quite a bit on the cast as I continue to grow and evolve, become a better leader, start to continually hire more leadership roles into the organization, but I start to talk a lot about this valley of death period. To talk a lot about this, this valley of death period, you know, and as I've been focusing in on just studios of different sizes, you know we focus a lot on we have clients like crunch. We focus a lot on their content, how to, like we've been talking about, you know, behavior and attracting through certain types of content, how that also builds retention. And so, as I've been continuing to grow, I noticed that I had a lack of first off. It was we were executing with no strategy, and then we started to, you know, bring in more leadership type roles and start to focus more on strategy, and then we lacked execution. And so I think that there's a fine line there when it comes to really understanding the premise of content is king when it comes to attracting clients.
Speaker 1:I had a client about, I'll say, about a year ago now that they signed up and then they left a few months ago and I was looking over some of his stats because we still have access to him and it was crazy to me because I've talked a lot about, I'll talk a lot about in the future of what I call marketing fatigue, or you can call it marketing FOMO, fear of missing out, and he's like we want all this traffic to our website, we want all these things to our website when it comes to all different types of content, and I was like, dude, that's going to cost you an arm and a leg. You're not a big company yet. You're still here, so acting like you are where you are at, especially for a local brick and mortar. Understanding the psychology of your client isn't global, it's local. You don't need to spray the wall with millions of calls. You don't need to put millions of pieces of content out there. It really depends on your audience and kind of getting into the next subject here, like marketing and how that intertwines with the client psychology side, and thinking about that client psychology, your target audience most likely is local or, if you're just starting. You should come up with a strategy and start smaller. Come up with a strategy and start smaller, but you don't need to validate your offers and your services past a certain point. What do I mean by that? I mean you can come up with offers and basically very basic that will eventually teach you the different ways you want to go.
Speaker 1:And the client that I had that left it was astounding to me Because looking over his stats, he'd get, you know local client, you know local client. He would get five visits a day through the content we were doing. Doesn't seem like much, right, but guess how many calls he was getting from those five? Five. It seems crazy, but it's true. And then you, we saw someone else take over because he's like oh you, I'm only getting this much traffic and I'm like, well, your conversion rate is off the route with those five. And that's the whole point, because we really focus on location and focusing on that, where the audience is looking at them, looking for them at um and the other one's just like, let's just spray the wall with all this different type of content, hoping something will stick, uh, and going that realm that, that that does work. But you're kind of going through the premise of where you're, you're spraying the wall and there there's no power.
Speaker 1:And that was like me, you know, four years. I was just throwing everything out there because I wanted to do everything. You know, we wanted to do everything, didn't really rely on partnerships, didn't really rely on not that I didn't want to have partners, it was just that we didn't have room for partners because we were trying to do everything, you know, didn't really think about our audience that much and the type of content that really resonated with them where they're at. I mean, look at this podcast, for instance. Why do we do a podcast towards this audience? So my biggest, one of our biggest value propositions coming into the door is that we very much focus our values on the types of people we bring in by me having team that value very similar values, if that makes sense. You know a lot of our writers, for instance, have some sort of athletic background in some way, so they're more passionate, they understand more in what they're writing for and so with that, I understand the premise of where and what are my audiences going to listen and watch the most.
Speaker 1:If we're talking about a podcast that you get your visionary ideas through doing your physical activities, because that's when you get your mental space. Then you're going to be doing it Probably listen to this while you're going on a run, possibly going for a walk with your family, going to the gym, working out and really pumping up those ideas to get your mental break. So the visionary side starts to come out, the strategic side starts to come out so that you can make a difference. And if you really want to create content that resonates with your target audience, you have to go back to that client psychology. You have to think about you know what types of channels and media are going to be best suited for my audience. That, in a nutshell, is a simple strategy and I I hate to say it, but so many companies, including myself at time to time have been like let's just do this, this and this, because that's what everyone else is doing, and so we have to get out of that spectrum, because all this AI stuff makes it seem like it's better, but it's just regurgitated.
Speaker 1:So last week we talked a little bit about my path and starting to use Magic Mind and how it slowly started to help my mental wealth, my well-being, everything that I've been kind of working on and you know I mentioned about last year I went through this whole TEDx journey. I started to learn how to lead more by example so that my team could. And you know there's nothing wrong with things taking a year or two to develop. Personally, I think that's pretty common in what we do in our journey and our learning experience. But as I've continued to take Magic Mind, it has completely helped me in the moment feel better.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned, I have been getting better sleep. I have been able to focus more. I'm actually feeling less overwhelmed, not feeling as burnt out I'm actually a little bit sick right now, funny enough and it has actually been helping me still be able to work while still maintaining some sort of healthy momentum towards what I'm doing for the day. But overall it kind of has really drastically improved because I have been really focusing, not just using Magic Mind, but I've been also using their sleep elixir. Their sleep elixir helps at night and, as someone who owns a business has anxiety, I've had a lot of problems with waking up at like 3.30 in the morning, not being able to go back to sleep. My mind doesn't turn off and Magic Mind has helped push that performance when I'm awake, but the Sleep Elixir has actually been helping me just have better quality sleep. You know I track my sleep now at night better quality sleep. You know I track my sleep now at night. I've been able to track my REM sleep, my deep sleep, my light sleep, and I can't say much into the tracking software and how good that is. But what I can say is, ever since I've been taking the sleep elixir by MagicMind elixir by magic mind, I've been able to really, um, just sleep overall better. I'm getting more deep sleep, I'm, uh, having a little bit more REM sleep than I usually have, um, and a majority of that is because I get a majority of my good sleep later in the night, um, through my rhythms and who I am. So usually between that 3 and 6 am time frame, and taking the sleep elixir has completely helped me with that, which just enhances my Magic Mind experience throughout the day. And so if you want to take advantage of this, why don't you head over to magicmindcom slash gym. Break Jan, again, that's magicmindcom. Slash gym. Break Jan, again that's magicmindcom. Slash gym, break Jan. And you can take advantage of the bundle, the 45% off bundle, where you don't just get magic mind, but you also get the sleep elixir and help you enhance your overall performance, mental wealth, and it all starts with that sleep. Right?
Speaker 1:We talked a lot about the different types of content. I talked about media a little bit and the power of content marketing. Well, different types of content are going to have different effects and when you're coming up with a strategy and you have a certain team in place, that's, of course, going to have to be taken into consideration. Or, if you have an agency, you have to take that into consideration. You know, when you're smaller, you're probably going to be looking for much more of a full service type agency, because you just don't have the money for hiring internal employees or a marketing director yet. But if you're a you know marketing director, creative director and or just a leader that's looking to become more of that brand visionary and understand somewhat how to allocate some of this stuff, you do have different disciplinaries that do different things better, but you also have different media that you can utilize.
Speaker 1:You know, like I said on the last one I kind of touched on it a little bit you know, if you look at the different types of content, we'll get kind of into it. In short. You have, you know, video content, written content that's visual content, and both of those are visual. You have sound listening content, of course, like this cast, a plethora of different ways you can do visual written. You have smells and things like that. That's kind of getting too far into the branding side so I'll kind of step back on that.
Speaker 1:But you know, looking at the different types of content are really going to directly correlate and how they can become more powerful can kind of build your content marketing strategy. There was a study out there recently that indicates that about 95% of people that watch shorts forget what they hear or listen to or watch by the next day 95% forget, 95% forget. So as you're in there getting thousands of views that happen within a 10 minute period, you're like, oh, all these views. You know that could be a FOMO situation that you have to deal with mentally, but it could also be like understanding, like is this going to work? Tiktok, for instance, is made for a younger demographic, so if that's your demographic, use it. If it's not, then don't.
Speaker 1:And really simplifying your marketing strategy towards starting to focus on the things that are working. I call this marketing fatigue. I think it's when companies want to be like a Nike or a large brand because they watch those movies or they see those ads and they think that it's cheap to create a very good marketing strategy, when in reality it does take multiple disciplinary activities and communication internally to make all those pieces fit together properly. I mean, you have blog posts. You need good content writers. You have copywriting and offers that's copywriters. You have designers, communicators, video editors. These are a lot of different types of situations, but I think the goal around this is that you have to kind of build your structure and the types of people you bring on and or you hire based around your needs and or, if you're, for instance, we have started to focus very heavily on just doing for our local businesses, just doing Google business profile type stuff.
Speaker 1:And with our website development, and you know, pay-per-click ads, everyone's like, oh, you need to get on the Facebook game. We tried, we worked at it a little bit. You know pay-per-click ads, everyone's like, oh, you need to get on the Facebook game. We tried, we worked at it a little bit. But I came to realize that this, you know, after going through the cost per clicks and the types of content, it's Facebook's just a billboard. You know you can put a billboard up. You billboard up on the on the side of the street for $4,000, targeted around the community. That you want to do because you pick a strategic location. It's the same thing as if you're spending $5,000 a month on Facebook ads or $2,000 a month and attracting them through the internet.
Speaker 1:Are they even at the internet? I mean at the internet? Are they even on the internet, you know? So, I mean at the internet. Are they even on the internet searching for your services? So you know, think about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So how can you use those different types of content to attract your types of clients? Well, you know, if you went to the spectrum of the very basic, you have informational. The spectrum of the very basic, you have informational, commercial, transactional, type. That's something in SEO that we call intent. So, thinking about the intent of the types of content. But you can think more gradually in how you can utilize different types of content.
Speaker 1:For instance, we do do shorts and we do sometimes do it for our clients, but we don't use that. We know that that content is meant for attraction. It's not meant for getting leads, building our business up. It's meant to say, hey, have people watch us for a while, build some awareness and get views on us so they know who I am and they know of our company in some way, form or another and then maybe, just maybe, from the funnel perspective, it starts to build a little bit of trust in them. So I'm not expecting anyone to come from that. Do we still watch views and impressions? Yes, I focus much more on the likes and dislikes. I'm not from an ego perspective, because I really don't care what people think, but it's more so from a hey, if more people like this, this is resonating more with certain types of people. Who are those types of people? And then how can we make more content off of that that relates to those scenarios? Right, and so that's a certain type of content that we utilize, that form, long form content. You know the videos that we do are much more people remember it more.
Speaker 1:Podcasts like this that go 30 minutes during a leisure time, understanding how to build that type of stuff also very similar. So you have that, but then you also have okay, well, zach, what about the? Everyone tells me I need to be consistent and have consistency in my content. I think you do, but I do think that people forget about the quality side. There's times when you can just post certain things and there's time when quality starts to take into effect, right, and so start to think about the quality of your content. And by quality I don't mean if you're just starting out like, yes, you need to get started, you need to test, you need to do, but you're going to get to a certain point and that's the evolution of part of the evolution on the marketing side. Is that strategy? Think about what types of content, which channels, how one relates to another. You can get better quality too if you decide you're only gonna do one or two things.
Speaker 1:One or two things could take one person and if it's working, it's working. I tell clients all the time. If it's working, it's working. I tell clients all the time if it's working, it's working. Let's just improve it Through the countless studios that we have worked with. The one common thing that we hear all the time and I'm laughing because I hear this all the time people are so into the social media side that they'll sit there and they'll say something along the lines of oh yeah, we do challenges every month.
Speaker 1:The owner is the one preparing, building their personal brand. That's all they're doing. It's like I get it. But then they say I ask them okay, well, how many people are closing those challenges? Oh well, about 15%. Oh well, about 15. Okay, well, how many people are? Let me ask you how many people are closing when they walk in? Oh, we're about 50. When they walk in because they see us or they've already built trust with us, or they're in the location so it's easier from. They're already here and I'm like well then, why are you focusing on spending all of your time and marketing expenses on challenges? I'm not saying you don't do challenges, but why are you doing that when what's working is your client acquisition? You don't need this crazy campaign online. You don't need this crazy thing to make it to a million, two million, three million. Sometimes the grassroots or the community stuff comes in much better.
Speaker 1:Which leads me to our last topic, which is building relationships through content. Right, there is a huge correlation. Which people have got away with this on social media in itself? Which people have got away with this on social media in itself? That social media is a game of direct sales, not of impactful relationship growing in sales, right? So when you look at that relationship side.
Speaker 1:And as an example, you know, when I first started on LinkedIn, when I first started on LinkedIn, I was going out doing what everyone else told me. We were emailing a bunch of people trying to connect, just to be like let's jump on a call, let's do this, and I realized the power. Our impressions improved, our other stuff improved, even our phone calls improved. When we actually started building relationships. We'd meet a person out and about or we'd we'd uh be like, oh hey, you know, like let's, let's have a conversation again over linkedin or over this. They've met you before. They've already built a little bit of trust with you.
Speaker 1:So social media needs to get back to community. That's what it was made for and it's been turned around completely to just be a hack and slash. There's this I've actually I won't say the name, but there's a company out there that has a group page on Facebook and I used to do this that's how I recognized it back at, you know, seven years ago like I was saying where I create a group and then I would just post blog posts in the group and that's it. No interactions at all. No interactions, because it's not what social media is for, you know. It's about asking questions, it's about getting ideas, it's about working together.
Speaker 1:So utilize social media for that. You can mix it with a little bit of direct sales, but remember that's what it's for. You can attract people. You can attract people to your social media, maybe possibly through like direct. But instead of trying to get them on a call to you know, do this. Maybe you just say, hey, I'd love to have a Zoom call or grab a cup of coffee. See how we could work together, you know. Or you go to. You go to an event where you actually meet people. You use that as your channel and then you get people onto your social media. Then you start doing a newsletter, get them into your funnel, and so think about relationships in social media in that way.
Speaker 1:Back to the quality side Quality is subjective. It's subjective in all forms of communication, but it goes for, you know, any sort of written content as well. Use this for I'll use this for an example. When we work with our large brands that have, I I'll just say, 50-plus locations and we talked about this blogging strategy earlier we do a lot of content marketing for clients and real human. No AI. I actually vet for using AI. I'll pay the extra expense for real content, real value for our clients.
Speaker 1:And one of the plays for any studio or membership subscription type situation is retention. Retention is the biggest goal. Yes, you can try to get 50 clients tomorrow, but that's not really the goal. The goal here is that you want to focus very heavily on retention. Blogging isn't just, for instance, content marketing isn't just and this goes also back to attracting clients isn't just a direct play. It's a trust building. It's a retention play. It's a trust building. It's a. It's a retention play. Maybe you've built trust with somebody, very similar to email marketing existing clients, keeping the conversations going, retention right.
Speaker 1:Maybe you're building content that helps them do other things outside of the studio environment, outside of you, utilizing your product to get them to understand how they can use it better or how they can be like oh, I don't have your product today. I'm going to do it the old-fashioned way. For instance, a Brilliant campaign would be like those tablets. I won't say any names because I'm not sponsoring any of them, but those tablets, I love those tablets. I have one where it's just ink tablet, written tablet. I use it for all my notes, my note taking, and you utilize it, but then sometimes you forget it. Oh yeah, but I had that email the other day. They told me what can I do if I don't have my tablet? Oh yeah, and then they say I can upload it later. They gave me this convenient way. Maybe they even have a bonus like, oh, here's a regular notebook or sticky pads, or how to use sticky pads and do this. So there's multiple ways you can do things. I don't want to get off tangent here, but um, where you can utilize content as much more of a retention play and that's that's much more of a quality play, because you're focusing on existing clients.
Speaker 1:Now, email marketing is very similar to nurturing, not just before sale but after sale and building those relationships. You know we love to say that we help build communities because the marketing channels that we utilize we use from a relationship building standpoint. We don't I don't like direct sales. I'm a warm marketing type of guy. I'm a brander at heart, building relationships and nurturing through that. So anytime someone sends me an email, for instance, that I've never heard of them before, 99% of the time I'm like ah, you're here in business, yeah, we're not looking to do that type of business. Or I just get put into an email subscription and I didn't. They didn't subscribe, I didn't subscribe. Right, it's annoying. I think we all get annoyed by that and I think the same thing comes from you know um how I take nurturing leads and building relationships.
Speaker 1:If you were to take after this, after this podcast, which I'll ask that you go down and subscribe to our newsletter so that you can you can get insights into these casts and into the video portions and our newsletter that's coming out, then I would definitely do so. You know, creativecom slash number sign newsletter and, yeah, I'll just put the link down in the description. But you do that. You gave your conscious decision to go into my email marketing campaign. I didn't just say, oh, give me your business card, and I took your email and added it. Right, I asked. It's asking, and asking is part of building relationships, right? Asking um serving um pre-value, that is value at the beginning. So, nurturing these leads the role of of how email marketing works in this scenario is you really want to nurture those leads and start to build continual interactions with them. So if it's pre-sale, it's before they're. Like a member, for instance, you could display offers, you could display certain situations to get them into the door.
Speaker 1:But my biggest thing is how do you build relationships better off of relationships you already have? So here's a good trick for you we talked a lot about in a previous episode. Trick for you we talked a lot about in a previous episode maybe reviews are getting reviews and are your KPI for how you perceive the growth of your marketing. Right, reviews do more than one thing. Reviews will help you show new audience. Like I said, law of attraction behavior oh, this is the way I can see if they have good customer service, good brand customer services, around reviews. It's a good starting point. That is that is.
Speaker 1:But what happens? Instead of just asking your customers for a review, you do something better. You create a campaign, email marketing campaign. You take all of your existing members. You highlight them by the longest. The longer you're there, the longer you've already built a relationship with them, the more they trust you. And you just send five emails a day and say, hey, we love that you're part of our facility. Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:Maybe you say something about them because you know them personally. If you're a smaller boutique and you say something along the lines of you know, we love that you come here and we love that you take advantage of our facility. We know that you really value it. By chance, do you have any friends that would be interested in coming on too? I'd be more than happy to give you a month free if you're able to bring a friend. What does that do? Well, let's step back a little bit. You ask them for the review at the same time. Hey, can you give us a review? And, by the way, we really value you. You valuing them and giving them props is going to leave the review, so you're hitting your KPI of review.
Speaker 1:But it's also using that relationship to build further relationships, and that's a way you can utilize marketing from a relationship side instead of a direct side. This also helps SEO, by the way. So anyone out there that's thinking about doing what my last client did that I talked about earlier and just say let's just spray the website with thousands of keywords and hope something sticks here and something sticks here and you can just use a GBP and get reviews. And yes, there's some strategies that we use behind making those rankings go up faster, but it's a relationship builder. Use it as a relationship builder. So how do you use content to position yourself as an expert in your field.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go into this a little bit deeper in the following months when we talk about the different types of content, even down to emails. We'll get deeper on some things, but for the very surface level, on how you can take content to position yourself as an expert in your field, let's go back Understanding client psychology. First, who is your client? Which kind of platforms do you know? They go on? That already is going to build your expertise pretty fast. That already is going to build your expertise pretty fast.
Speaker 1:And then, three you write your content more around the outcome and the pains of the client, less so around, I'll just say, gimmicky marketing tactics. We're moving away from the time of going five ways to do this, six ways to do that, and really just trying to build more value around outcome. I mean, I'm talking to my content writers right now because they're having the challenge of getting out of that mindset of like, oh, I have to put this type of person here and this type of person here. So you don't need to say the person, you just need to say what their pain points are and what type of problems and solutions you're trying to solve and you need to take those and that will be what drives them to go. Oh, they understand us. So that's how you position yourself as the expert in that field. You understand the field I mean, we could get into story too, but that's for a different time and you write about that because you're going to attract those types of people, because those are the types of people that have those problems. Yes, there's multiple industries that could have the same problem. I mean, in business, I'll say this is what's funny with niching, which we'll talk about on a different episode as well but you know, is that you come into the premise of dealing with people who go oh, I had this happen once. Let me explain to you About seven years ago.
Speaker 1:You know a little side story. About seven years ago I used to work with a lot of professional athletes. We still have them as one of our audiences, but I don't necessarily work with them as much, because we couldn't necessarily validate them, because all of them wanted different things. But that's besides the point. The point here is I had a call with a coach. She was a really famous female basketball coach at a college, one of the big colleges, and she goes hey, so you're going to help me with our content strategy. Do you have you worked with any other female coaches? And professional professional basketball I mean not professional, I'll say college basketball environment, and I'm like that's too niched. I'm like I want to have a business. If I only focused on 30 people, I could if I was a one man show. But I'm not. You know, I'm a growing business.
Speaker 1:Who's, you know, continuing to try to improve, keep things in line, and I'm like no, we were broader and we'll talk about that a little bit more too, on the different types of of companies and the different types of audiences and service compared to niching, because there is a complete different spectrum of niching. I just so want to call it niching, because I call it niching. There's niching compared to certain types of services. But for now, to keep on track with building relationships through content, you know, take a complete step back right. I got went completely off subject there.
Speaker 1:But you know, building relationships is key when it comes going through content and if I were to give you one key takeaway from that whole experience of that subtopic, I would say that you know, I found out the power of what LinkedIn can provide me, not through posting consistently posting consistently, though it helps to post consistently. It's important to focus on quality, but those aren't the major factors. The major factors that are going to start moving the needle are building relationships through the content, utilizing those platforms like LinkedIn to build relationships or use relationships to build your content, and then the client psychology around the types of platforms and the stuff you're going to use. That's a good takeaway, but I think that's it for this one. I think we're going to, I think we're going to cut it here.
Speaker 1:Again, I'm your host, zach Coleman, and I'd love for anyone listening to this again. Like go subscribe to our new newsletter. We basically take all the ideas and topics that we talk about within the week period that we're developing, in the week period that we're developing, and we create this sort of an action plan of different types of takeaways and key points that you can take away from those and going through some of those problems that I've gone through too and kind of summarizing it all up and giving it to you guys so that if you guys don't have time to watch the full videos or you need guidance on where to find those videos or audio casts that you can go to them. So, again, go to our website at creativecom. Link's going to be in the description and the show notes down below. Again, I'm your host, zach Coleman, and I hope you all have a good one.
