Although this article is written with fitness business owners and managers in mind, content creation is an important part of any organisation’s advertising and marketing strategy.

There are a number of methods (channels to market) to publish your content to the world or, hopefully and more specifically, your target market. This can include newsletters, social media campaigns, and/or blog posts.

However, if you are regularly sharing content, how do you know that what you are sharing has a direct, or even indirect, impact on the success of your fitness business? Is the content you are publishing helping to achieve your business goals?

Small businesses, especially personal trainers and small gyms, will usually focus on sales and scaling their business and, subsequently, may not be able to afford or being will to invest in public relations (PR) and business campaigns.

Therefore, content creation should be focused on generating leads that would provide the most impact on the business, and can be perfect for the marketing goals/needs that you have.

The success of any lead generating content can be easily measured and you can gauge its impact on your marketing efforts. For example:

• How many people responded to the content?
• How many subsequently became customers/clients?

This means that content creation can aid in developing a steady flow of (new and recurrent) business – it can be a very effective method of growing a small business.

Below are three principles for creating effective content to aid in generating leads for business growth:

1. Create & Share Content that is Valuable to your Target Audience:
   1. Sharing your insights and relevant information can be an effective method to generate leads.
   2. Invest the time and energy in developing and publishing informative, high-quality content that will help to showcase your attitude, skills, and knowledge in your particular subject – thereby demonstrating your trustworthiness and expertise in the subject.
   3. Potential customers/clients generally want to speak/listen to a subject matter expert (SME) when they want to learn about a specific topic.
   4. Although people may wish to hear the comments of current or previous customers regarding product or service recommendations, when it comes to more technical matters, such as advice and guidance on performing an exercise correctly, they are more likely to seek a SME.
   5. Content creation can demonstrate to customers that you have the technical expertise they seek.
   6. There are three points to consider when developing content that is informative, high-quality, and that drives leads:
      1. Audience: To develop a content for a targeted audience, you must have a specific audience in mind. Define your audience and develop a buyer persona, defining their demographics and buyer personalities. This will give you an insight on who you are writing for, how to write the content, and also help you identify which topic(s) will be relevant.
      2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Once you have defined your target audience, it will make it much easier to define the keywords that will help you optimise your content.
      3. Content Format: Your content can be published in a variety of formats, including: blogs; white paper; infographics; eBooks; guides; and videos.
2. Have a Clear Content Strategy for All Your Channels:
   1. Research suggests that traditional forms of advertising and marketing are less effective with consumers than they used to be.
   2. This is how developing and publishing valuable content for your fitness business can play an important role in helping you generate leads.
   3. Content is the ‘king of the digital marketing realm’. It is about attracting and engaging your target audience. But how?
   4. By developing and publishing information that is relevant and valuable to your target audience, you are more likely to attract customers to your business and, importantly, generate a sale.
   5. however, to achieve this, you will need to develop out a content strategy that allows followers to expect a consistent rhythm in the delivery and, further, that your content is covering the same key points consistently.
   6. By developing a content strategy, you will reduce the chances of publishing irrelevant content, or feeling stressed in producing last minute posts.
   7. Having your marketing channels disjointed can confuse your audience and is generally considered as less targeted.
   8. Therefore, remember to:
      1. Always align your content to your business goals and do not forget to be consistent; and
      2. Define your audience;
      3. Create a targeted keyword list; and
      4. Test what content format works best for the audience you have defined.
3. Implement ‘Calls-to-Action’ that are Clear across all your Content:
   1. To ensure that your content will generate leads, make sure that it is action-orientated and that you inform your readers what to do next.
   2. The content that you created and shared can be a very persuasive, and effective, way to set-up your Calls-to-Action (CTA).
   3. Having valuable content primes up your audience to your fitness business message/goals and, therefore, it should be fairly easy to show them an offer they cannot refuse.
   4. When creating a CTA, make sure that it is easy to find. Do not make your audience search for what to do next – it will put them off.
   5. It is important, and effective, to create a sense of urgency and remind your audience to take action immediately.
   6. Further, a CTA that is benefit-orientated can be more inviting than the basic ‘click here‘ button.
   7. Lastly, limit it to one CTA, the more options you give your audience, the more confused and indecisive they may become – which can also put them off.
   8. Having strong CTA’s are important to the lead generation process.