“We’re not a fitness company. We’re a media company.”
Greg Glassman, founder of CrossFit, taught me that lesson in 2014. I had been writing for CrossFit Media for a couple of years but didn’t really understand the broader purpose of media until then.
The realization hit me like a lightning bolt at the time, but it’s even more true today: Every company is a media company.
No matter what your mission is, what your model is or even what method you choose, you must to talk about your business or you’ll be invisible.
You can’t rely on HQ to talk about CrossFit or Mark Wahlberg to talk about your F45 franchise. You can’t rely on anyone else: You have to promote yourself. And that means producing media.
At the absolute minimum, you should be able to produce three pieces of good content per week. That might mean a blog post, a podcast and a YouTube video.
You should be able to divide those three pieces of content into 10 pieces of social media: clips, snippets, stories, reels, carousel posts, tweets and pictures.
This media output is no longer the ideal: It’s now the minimum.
Media Ideas and Step-by-Step Instructions
Start by recording your mission.
Here’s the video I did for my gym, Catalyst, last year as we refined our own mission:
Here are 10 other prompts you can use to create content:
- Why do you love your method?
- Why did you want to start a gym?
- How are the coaches at your gym different from one another?
- Can anyone do these workouts?
- What options do people have for training?
- What’s the best time of the day to train?
- What should people eat before training?
- What should people eat after training?
- What’s the best warm-up?
- What’s the best exercise for weight loss?
Remember: These are the questions most people ask. The answers might be obvious to you, but they are not obvious to the majority of people. Most people are not fitness professionals—so share your knowledge and build your audience.
Want a jump start on your media? Here are the steps.
- Hold up your phone and turn on the video camera.
- Pretend I’m interviewing you.
- Hit “record” and provide your answer to the first question.
- Then hit “stop.”
- Repeat the process for each question.
- Upload the full version of the video to YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok or any other platform that will accommodate the length and format.
- Then upload shorter clips as Instagram Reels/Facebook Stories and YouTube Shorts.
- Tweet a link to main YouTube video.
- Write a 20-word intro—such as “what’s the best warm-up before my workout?”—and share the video on Facebook and Instagram.
- Wait two days.
- Repeat the process with the next video you created.
Yes, you can use AI to do some of this for you. And if, after doing the above exercise, you still can’t publish consistently at a B+ level, then you should try using ChatGPT or something that can help you. But jumping straight to AI without a media plan is like hiring a robot to make you breakfast and then not giving it a recipe to follow.
We teach gym owners how to produce a full media calendar, give them hundreds of sample blog posts and images to swipe and use, walk them through ChatGPT, and give them prompts to copy in our Growth Course. Click here to talk to my team about it.
Tell Your Story
The bottom line: If you weren’t publishing media three times a week in 2022, you were being buried by your competition. If you aren’t publishing media three times a week in 2023, you’re being buried by an army of competition.
Media is no longer a nice-to-have. Every company is a media company.
It’s time to tell your story.
