Marketing Content Gap Analysis for a Gym
Contents
For some gym owners, their business content is essentially their bare-bones website, a flier they drafted months ago, a free trial card, and a social media page or two that have grown cobwebs. While this may ‘seem’ to work to them, it is not a sustainable way of operating a business in the modern market. One powerful action you can take for your fitness facility is to do a content audit on the business and look at your findings with a fresh perspective, comparing it to the values and needs of customers and potential customers in your target audience.
Performing a content audit and gap analysis for your gym may sound a little more scientific than what it really boils down to be. To help make it a little less scary, we will break running a content audit and gap analysis into a four-step process that involves:
Performing a Gym Content Audit
While it is called an audit, you can look at it more simply as an inventory if that is less intimidating. In the audit, you will collect all the information you have about your fitness business (digital and print) and compile it into one area. These pieces can include website pages, newspaper articles, flyers, brochures, online business profiles, etc.
In addition to collecting all of your gym’s current informational material, you will want to list out the unique distinction points of your gym as well as your target audience’s values, demographics, and where they consume their media.
Identifying and Filling Gaps
Once all your content is gathered, it’s time to analyze it. The first wave of review will look at the pieces from an objective point of view and see which ones are known to have yielded positive results for you. With these prior winners of collateral, look at them through the lens of your target audience and try to figure out what works with them. Maybe it’s the imagery, punchy bullet points, popping colors, or just a straightforward write-up on the benefits. Once you’ve identified the things that work in these pieces, take detailed notes about them.
The next step you will want to do is compare your gym’s outlined distinction points, looking at your informational pieces and identifying if these points are well-established and communicated. You may find that one of your gym’s selling points is well covered throughout; however, you lack information about other aspects that separate your fitness facility from competitors in your market. As you go through, note what points are missing, which points need to be clarified or highlighted, and which are well covered.
Now that your notes are laid out, you have officially identified your gym’s main selling point gaps. To begin filling these gaps, you can consider updating current pieces that are working to include additional information, or you can create new pieces of works with similar branding and style to those that worked in the past to help fill out the missing selling points. Something to remember is that you may want to have various versions of pieces that include more and less information. This creation of multiple pieces allows you to have a more extensive arsenal of collateral to help keep things fresh, opens the opportunity to A/B test materials with audiences to see which ones resonate better, and also enables you to make overview versions as well as more digestible versions of your gym’s offerings.
The final step is ensuring your collateral pieces resonate with your target audience. Utilizing the list of values, demographics, and where they consume their media, you can review the pieces you’ve identified and fill in your gap analysis to mentally test whether it will stick with your desired clients. You may find yourself again making additional versions of pieces to fit different demographic groups of your gym as well as the medium on which it is getting published. For instance, an overview flier targeted at younger clients on Instagram should look wildly different (regarding imagery and the number of words on the primary display) than one designed for a middle-aged audience on Facebook.
Utilizing Customer Questions for Content Direction
After your work in identifying and filling content gaps at the core of your gym’s business, it’s time to start diving more heavily into one-off pieces that are typically hyper-focused on specific topics, questions, or features. These can be done in the form of short videos, white papers, specific pages on the website address questions, etc.
The idea behind this portion is to focus on answering questions that your target customers may have about your business and answering them in a way that is public and helpful to others – because chances are if one person in your niche is asking it, others may probably be wondering as well. You can get these questions from social media, direct messages, conversations, emails, or even reviews about your business.
When done right, this proactive question-answering content enables people potentially interested in your gym to self-serve their research into your business before ever having to reach out to you. This not only adds a channel for lead generation via organic search, but it serves as its own marketing materials as you are not only answering questions they may have but also selling them on the features, benefits, and brand of your facility.
Meet Your Target Audience Where They Are
Once your content is all drafted up in various formats and styles to account for audiences and A/B testing, it becomes time to disseminate this information to the world in order to reach your target audience. While some people may be inclined to start launching it out everywhere, taking your time upfront and making more specific pieces for the channels and mediums your audience plays within first could be a wise path.
We recommend focusing on where they are first since it’ll probably be the more populated pond to fish in. Additionally, narrowing down your scope allows you to focus more on the customization of each message and style of the collateral to fit the medium and audience, as well as being reactive to the people it reaches. This reactionary method involves responding to people’s interactions and answering questions in a friendly manner. However, these responses shouldn’t be just a simple “thanks” or “hope to see you soon” but should be sales funnel driven by supplying links to additional or relevant information. For instance, a great response to someone asking about hours of operation on the weekend would be: “Thanks for the question! We are open 7 am-10 pm on the weekends, but visit our schedule page for the most up-to-date hours and events schedule here: website.com/hours”.
Making a Splash
When it comes to content and your business, having more is typically fine as long as it resonates with your audience. However, you want to spread out the pieces smoothly to avoid gaps in your collateral and content, which helps ensure that you are properly leveraging the assets of your fitness business. Additionally, as best practices keep developing more and more in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, having additional material on your website, especially content that answers questions that your audience finds helpful or valuable, can ultimately help promote your business’ authority ranking on the search engine side, which can help improve local rankings.