Any personal trainer or fitness expert will tell you, that establishing and maintaining the correct form is more important than the number of reps, or the speed at which you do a particular exercise.
Neglecting to maintain the correct form and muscle control not only wastes your time, by failing to work the targeted muscle effectively, but can also lead to harm.
Similarly, you could write and post blog after blog and publish it on your business’s website, but if written poorly (and therefore failing to drive conversions or achieve its goal), and unoptimized, your efforts are wasted.
Don’t sweat for a muscle you’re not working effectively!
In this blog, we explore why marketing is like exercise.
Goal Setting
Focusing in on what you want to achieve is crucial not only when exercising, but across the entire marketing mix!
Before writing a blog post for example, you need to think carefully about the precise message you wish to convey, and the effect you want the piece to have.
Are you writing to sell? Is the piece intended to sell a place on an online course?
Are you writing to build your brand? (Business or personal) Is the piece intended to position you as an authority in your field/ build brand credibility?
What action do you want to reader to take? Perhaps the piece is intended to drive podcast subscribers?
By starting with the end goal, you give yourself the best chance of creating something which will achieve it. If you don’t know what you want to end result to be, how can you steer your marketing in that direction?
The same applies to building a website. First, we target the muscle!
What does the website need to do? Will it sell products, services or both? What are the conversion points?
A business selling products might need a site with e-commerce functionality, or they may instead wish to simply promote their products and drive users towards third party sellers like Amazon, or to physical stores.
All this and more must be established before the build begins. Remember, we want to work the right muscles in the right way!
Tracking Results
Once you’ve targeted the muscle, and are working away towards your goal, tracking your progress is essential!
Measuring the results of your marketing efforts, to ensure your marketing strategy is bearing fruit, and to see if it ought to be tweaked, is key.
With so many measurable elements across the marketing mix, the trick is to zone-in on only the useful and valuable data. This will differ from business to business, dependant on the marketing vehicles and channels you utilise, and the conversion points you establish.
Let’s say, for example, you’ve developed an online course. You’ve already created a landing page on your website where tickets can be purchased, and you’re ready to promote the course across social channels, sharing a link to the landing page in each post.
Beyond post impressions, the number of likes, the engagement the post receives, and a number of other possible elements, it’s essential that you measure the number of click throughs the URL has received.
This particular metric is where the highly valuable data is found. By measuring the click through rate, you can gauge how effective your social media posts are at driving people to click the link.
This metric, when considered along side the number of tickets sold via the website page, could also illuminate potential issues with the content of the landing page. Getting people from social over to your website but not making sales? Perhaps your content needs some work.
Compare the Competition
For fitness fanatics, tracking your progress to gauge your continual improvement over time is all well and good, but when you’re in competition with others, you need to be able to benchmark your efforts against that of your competitors.
In marketing, benchmarking is key across the whole marketing mix.
In SEO for example, you may choose to use tools like SEO Moz to track your rankings against that of your competitors, to compare your top-performing content with theirs as well as the number of backlinks they have obtained and where they are coming from etc.
There are also a number of benchmarking options available in Google Analytics to help you remain competitive in the marketplace.
Hire Professionals to Help You Achieve Your Goals
My final point regarding why marketing is like exercise, is that while most people can exercise on their own, professional athletes train with professional help. Often an entire team, of coaches, trainers, nutritionists, physiotherapists and more!
The Marketing Optimist are a dedicated team with expertise in every area of digital marketing, providing you with the support you need to steer your marketing towards its goal.
