Years ago, press releases, radio ads, news stations, and advertisements in magazines or newspapers were the standard for businesses marketing their products or services. These days, most business owners may scoff these off as outdated mediums( or even dead), opting to focus their efforts on digital ads on search engines or social media platforms. While there is nothing wrong with modern advertisement methods, we are here to tell you that there is still value in the ‘old fashioned’ methods of press releases and local news, making them far from a dead marketing tool.
Why Your Gym Should Write Press Releases
In a world of short-form content, temporary media, and limited character content posts, press releases stand as a professional-based newsroom for your business. While they might not be as snappy or sexy as a series of tweets or some well-made image storytelling on your Instagram, press releases allow you to convey newsworthy messaging from your business that carries a more substantial value for reference, citation, and linking than compared to its social media knock-off counterparts.
Increase Audience Reach
We are not here to argue that press releases are better than other avenues. And we also recognize that this might not be a hot ticket idea for fitness business owners; however, there is still value in incorporating them when appropriate. This value comes from the distribution methods involved with press releases. Since these are typically a more reliable and professional source of information and news, journalists or other news curators may pick this information up in a reference or citation. This redistribution of information then serves to potentially get your business, brand, and news out to a larger audience than you may have gotten in front of prior.
Local SEO Value
Once you have newsworthy press releases published and out in the world, this digital piece carries your branding, business name, information, and, typically, website URL. Assuming that these are published with legitimate news sources, when other sites reference the press release, these news bits can serve as a backlink to your website from a credible website. This backlink helps build what’s known as a backlink profile, which has a direct tie to your website’s authority and credibility score when search engines assign ranking scores. The more links from credible sources, the better your score can be. Additionally, the more topically local your backlinks are (geographically speaking), the more an additional boost may also be seen on the local search engine results pages. This local SEO could be a potential golden opportunity to leverage to help drive your facility’s website higher on local searches like “gyms near me” or “personal training studios in my city.”
Low Cost
Due to their length, press releases are relatively easy to write up. Whether you plan to hire someone to help write it or plan to sit down and try knocking one out yourself, the overall cost to have one written up is probably low. Suppose you have legitimate newsworthy things happening with your gym, such as opening a new location, renovating your site to be more inclusive, or hosting a public event of some kind. In that case, you can utilize a press release template structure to try your hand at writing one.
For additional ideas on press release worth news, Cision has an article covering 40 newsworthy topics.
Additional Content Value
If you have something that is press release-worthy happening at your gym or fitness studio, you can repurpose your efforts writing the release for other marketing materials. These materials can come in the form of a blog on your website, posts on your social media pages, video recap/coverage, and even sent out to your current members in an email newsletter format. If you are creative, the time and energy put into writing the initial press release can be harvested for more marketing and interactive materials with your audience, helping drive engagement, message reach, conversions, and client retention.
Local News and Your Fitness Facility
Local audiences are the lifeblood of operations for small to medium-sized gyms and training studios. Since many of the businesses in these categories can fall into the single or less than three locations classification, it makes sense why local audiences are more important than national audiences, like a large franchise chain would be interested in. But too often, business owners consider ad space when leveraging local news rather than being the news themselves. Making your business newsworthy can be a legitimate marketing effort in your gym’s campaign development process, so let’s jump in further.
Expand Your Reach
While we always advocate knowing your target audience thoroughly and leveraging this information in your marketing efforts, we also recognize that there are always going to be people who are outliers regarding the ideal client. But these people also help to keep the lights on many times, and we don’t want to stray away from easy members (note the emphasis on easy, non-target audiences shouldn’t be creating headaches for your business). That being said, local news outlets tend to expand your brand’s messaging reach into a more encompassing audience base. This exposure helps get additional eyes and interest outside your core audience, which can be a fantastic driver of general traffic.
It is worth noting, though, that this expanded reach is typically temporary. Often, many of the leads (and clients) tend not to make it very long or far with your business as they are not sufficiently aligned with your niche offering that differentiates your gym from the others. Sometimes, the stars align where the expanded messaging reach and target audience members overlap, and you get fantastic long-term clients from a simple news story.
Strong Local SEO Value
Like a press release’s local SEO value mentioned above, regional and local news stories have the same effect on your ranking score. However, a prominent difference between these two topics is that press releases don’t typically carry the value, but rather when news stations or other sites pick up the story and reference it. Meanwhile, reaching out directly and having a local news story or coverage happen has the same effect but is more targeted and carries potentially higher success rates. So, if you are looking for a more effective approach, getting local news to cover you is the way to go; however, that can be a tricky task sometimes due to the potential abundance of news in your area, the availability of coverage by journalists, and the additional time or energy involved in reaching out to each organization.
One approach to overcome these hurdles when trying to get into local news is to write your own pieces and submit them to journalists or the news sites directly for review. Depending on the story or staff availability, these stories can get published or picked up. Additionally, building relationships with local journalists or news groups can sometimes help as well.
Social Abundance
Local news stories always look good on your website, social media, or even in an email to your clients, letting them know you made it big. These give you something to put out and help break up the sometimes monotony of posts that studios and gyms typically run up against. These breaks can help your social media pages look more appealing to leads visiting and seeing some variety in topic posts that aren’t just member testimonials, highlights, or workout recaps.
Making A Splash
While some may opt to focus on social media and online search advertisements as their primary marketing methods, other channels that help drive the overall success of a marketing campaign for fitness studios are often overlooked. Of course, press releases and local news stories may not be an enormous lead generator, but they help drive awareness, interest, and other marketing-based value to your fitness business. Additionally, utilizing less-used mediums can sometimes help you stand out in the sea of noise in an almost guerilla marketing-like method.
