As we are starting a new year and a new decade, our athletes are excited. They have their calendar set for the racing season, and it’s likely they are feeling motivated and blowing up your phone or email.
Let’s talk about YOU, the coach. Are you excited to coach? Are you excited to run the business side of things? Do you have your calendar set for Content Creation? You should!
Content creation is the key to getting your coaching business discovered online—and I am not talking about throwing random stuff on social media and your blogs; I want to see some organization to your marketing this year.
So let’s talk about content creation for your business.
What is Content Creation?
Good content addresses topics and ideas that appeal to your athletes, followers, and potential athletes. It can be written content (like this post!); an education piece on Instagram or Facebook; or website content (especially the pages about your services or your team). Visual content is another great option and can consist of video on YouTube or IGTV, IG Live or FB Live, as well as infographics.
According to HubSpot, content marketing brings in three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62 percent less! All you have to do is educate and entertain your readers.
Why is Content Creation Important to Your Business?
Content creation is an inbound marketing practice and one of the best ways to attract new athletes. Let me explain:
By providing free content and useful information to potential athletes, you are educating them naturally, giving them advice, and adding value to THEIR world, not necessarily yours. This type of marketing, called inbound marketing, creates positive awareness about your brand and who you are as a coach.
Outbound marketing, on the other hand, involves promoting a product or a service via ads, plugs, promotions, and hard selling. When I see a coach doing outbound marketing, I tend to “unfollow,” and enjoy the content less because I feel that it is aggressively “selling.” Athletes like to be educated; not just sold services.
How Do You Come Up With Content?
We have chatted about this before, but the first step in creating great content is to understand who is reading it. I suggest a simple “survey” of your potential athletes and followers. This is something that I like to do at the beginning of 2020 to find out what people want to learn heading into the new season.
Try asking your potential athletes some of these questions to get a sense of what they’d like to read:
- What are you training for?
- What do you want to learn about?
- Do you read my blogs or website?
- Are you on my newsletters?
- Are you on social media?
- Do you like to read or watch or listen?
At this point, then you can start figuring out what type of information you can provide to your athletes and your potential athletes.
Once you have figured out what content creation is, why content creation is essential, and who is reading your content, then you can figure out where to put it, and how they like to learn — ranging from YouTube to IGTV to blogs to writing a newsletter.
In the online marketing space, you will often hear this mantra: “Know. Like. Trust.” Applied to coaching, this means that your potential Athletes and followers need to:
- Know you as a coach.
- Like you, a coach and a human being.
- Trust you as a coach and buy your services.
I hope that helps you organize your thoughts around your coaching content for 2020. If you have any questions, I am happy to chat with you more about it! Just shoot me an email at jen@jenrulon.com.
