Frank Overton, FasCat Coaching
Content
At FasCat, content is our bread and butter. We have over 300 training tips on our website. Useful information is better than advertising. If you write a training tip that connects with an athlete, it helps them discover your approach to helping them solve their problem. They will reach out.
We send out a Training Tip Tuesday email newsletter. We put a lot of effort into that, sharing our knowledge to help athletes ride faster.
We also have a weekly podcast that we put a lot of effort into. It’s a great chance to interact with listeners and answer their questions.
Between podcasting, YouTube, and our Training Tip videos, we have good online visibility.
RELATED: Fast Talk Podcast—Are Training Zones Dead? With Frank Overton and Neal Henderson
Social Media
We do about five posts each week on social media. Personally, I don’t want to read about training when I’m scrolling, so we reserve the bulk of our content on training for the newsletter.
Twitter seems to work well for debating and arguing. I’m fine with defending a position, but really less interested in engaging in those debates, so we aren’t very active there.
Website
I built my first website for $750 on Dreamweaver. I paid for it with pizza and beer—and no one came. This is why I think it’s critical to build your network as a coach. Figure out how you are going to get people to your website. Data needs to drive your decision-making when it comes to marketing, whether you use Google Analytics or another platform.
We upgrade our site periodically, but in 2011 we set out to build a better website to increase business. Over the years, we have increased our digital marketing efforts, and tried to follow best practices. All of the tools to build a robust website are out there if you are willing to invest in them, and learn them.
At FasCat we rely on an outside team for design and tech work on the website, but all content (including images) and messaging is handled by our team. We also remain committed to having a customer service team that is made up of coaches. Naturally, coaches are the best people to answer questions from athletes. Because content is our main marketing tool, it’s worth our time to keep it authentic.
RELATED: Establishing a Positive Coach-Athlete Relationship
Event Marketing
We do some event marketing. We might pitch a tent in the expo at popular races, like Steamboat Gravel. It’s super fun to meet everyone, especially athletes who we have coached remotely.
Online Partnerships
We are also working in support of the Human Powered Health women’s World Tour UCI team as their data scientists. We will help the team crunch numbers and create synergistic content. It’s a great opportunity to reach a wider market.
RELATED: Measuring Performance and Progression
Mike Ricci, D3 Multisport
Content
Early in my coaching career, I found that I was writing a lot of long emails in my attempt to answer questions that athletes had for me. I decided to repurpose that information into articles, and I started posting two articles a month, or 25 each year. Now I have over 600 of them.
Today I use more videos, many of which are just 30–45 seconds. I started out using Vimeo, but now we use YouTube because it gets more views.
There are so many tools available, and if you can learn them, you can avoid additional costs as you promote your business and build your website (e.g., we use Canva for design).
While content marketing is important, our primary marketing tool since Day 1 has been word of mouth. I track our prospective athletes and I ask all of them how they heard about D3 Multisport: 87% come through word of mouth.
Mike Ricci, D3 Multisport
Social Media
We are on social media, but it’s a mixed bag for us. I don’t do anything on Twitter. I find it’s an odd medium and I’m not looking to weigh in on controversial topics.
One of the biggest challenges we face is how to best use Instagram. We have reached out to companies who assist with social ads, but it’s a difficult space to navigate.
