How to Make Social Media Marketing Work for Gyms & Sports Clubs

Josh: Our hero today is Tyler Webb, a social media marketing specialist, and the other half. of the Uncle Charlie Agency with Jake Kranz from episode 34. In this episode, Tyler reveals how to conceptualize your audience on social media and how to speak to them. Then he breaks down the social network platforms that work best for certain types of audiences and formats.

And finally, he unpacks the formats that work best for generating interest and forwarding your business goals. Without further ado, Tyler Webb. Cool. Welcome to the Gym Heroes podcast. Tyler, can you go ahead and introduce yourself, if you would, and, tell us about your background in business and marketing?

Tyler Webb: Yeah. My name is Tyler Webb. I’m the co founder of a sports marketing agency called Uncle Charlie. You’ve probably already heard from, my co founder, Jay Kranz, at this point. We started Uncle Charlie back in the beginning of 2021. Jake and I both were just freelancing right out of college, and, you know, doing a whole slew of things, totally unrelated to sports oftentimes.

We didn’t really know each other headed into 2021, but Jake had reached out with a client that he was just doing a bunch of, you know, administrative operations work. Which ended up being our first client together, the American Association of Professional Baseball or Professional [00:02:00] Independent Baseball League here in the Midwest.

And he was looking for help with social media, which is a really general thing to need help with, but something a lot of people, you know, could use the help with. And, so he, he saw that I was posting about it a little bit on LinkedIn, that I was doing it for other people. And, that, you know, it was always a dream of mine to get into the sports space.

I just love how you can drive. A really compelling narratives and engagement connections, among people using sports as a medium. And so I was super on board to help him and, through that year, 2021, we started working more and more together. And at the beginning of 2022, we looked up and said, okay, we’re doing a lot of work in sports.

Specifically, and all of our work is kind of the same, being the social media management and content for these sports organizations, and we decided to create an agency around it. And that’s how Uncle Charlie started, then officially at the beginning of 2022.

Josh: Yeah. People go into social media and they’re like, I just need it to work.

Yeah. Social media is such a broad thing. It’s it’s, it’s different [00:03:00] platforms, it’s different content styles, it’s different. Usages for different audiences and, you have to be more specific and work your way down to figure out what you want to do, who you’re talking to, and how you’re going to do that most effectively, which is something that you’re good at, audience specifically to, to zero in on that first is something that I think a lot of gym owners, they, I mean, maybe they have a kind of a general idea of who they want to reach, but they don’t, the way they use social media often, based on what I’ve seen, is that they don’t post or act in ways that seem as if they have their audience in mind, or if they totally understand their audience.

So, I guess we should start with like, what, what is an audience first? Like, what is

Tyler Webb: that? Yeah, so I would say your audience can probably be segmented out into let’s put let’s put them in three buckets. There’s your top of funnel, which are people that don’t know about you yet, but you think that they probably should there’s their middle funnel where [00:04:00] The people that have some awareness of who you are, what it is you do, but have not yet converted on whatever you’re trying to sell.

And there’s the bottom of funnel, which are the people who have once purchased from you or are currently working with you or currently have something that you’re offering. And your goal is to retain those people and get them to sign back up or to purchase whatever thing it is again. Awesome.

Josh: So in the case of probably top of funnel, that’s where…

That’s more like, I guess, lead generation, right? So how would you, how, yeah, go

Tyler Webb: ahead, go ahead. Yeah. So, you know, I would say when you’re analyzing your audience, especially from like a, a social perspective, you have to understand that you can’t be, you know, you can’t like dictate who sees what you’re posting on social.

And why social, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll. Speak specifically, specifically to organic social because there are ways obviously you can segment out those three buckets of people through paid ads, you know, [00:05:00] through Meta’s platforms or whatever, wherever you’re buying media through email, you know, there are ways through other marketing functions that you can segment out that top, middle and bottom of funnel, but when you’re talking about organic social, you know, you’re just putting something up And you have no control over who sees it.

You don’t know where they are. You don’t really know what their interests are. You know, there’s certain ways that you can indicate to the algorithm like, hey, this type of person should see it. But it’s not a, it’s not a perfect sign. So, when you’re creating content, you have to create with all three of those segments in mind.

But I think the issue a lot of people run into, Josh, is trying to create with all of them in mind every single time. And then you’re creating for nobody at the end of the day. So, you know, when I think about audience, with our own clients, it’s, okay, you know, for each piece of content. Is going to serve a specific group of people and over time and through repetition, we’re going to create a more holistic brand direction.

You know, I like to talk about socialists steering a really big ship, like every post you cannot expect to like really agilely shift where you’re going. So like one [00:06:00] post isn’t going to make or break. who your audience is or who you’re speaking to. Not putting out one post isn’t gonna, you know, make or break that person never working with you.

It’s like, in aggregate, as you’re posting for people that have never heard of you and as you’re posting of people… For people that have heard of you and currently work with you, you’re going to slowly steer that ship in, in a more correct direction, in my opinion.

Josh: So how do you, how do you come to understand your, your audiences?

Is there, are there research techniques? Because I feel like understanding what to post to those audiences. It’s going to require you to understand them.

Tyler Webb: Yeah, I would say you have to reverse engineer that, to understand what action you want them to take. So, you know, let’s use the example of a gym that is here in Minneapolis, where I’m currently located.

You know, a gym in Minneapolis. Isn’t going to benefit from having their content seen by people all across the country, right? They’re gonna they’re only gonna benefit by having people within a 50 mile radius, you know See their content and because [00:07:00] that action will hopefully be them coming into the gym and purchasing a membership And so, you know, maybe there’s a little bit of a different thought there around how they’re creating content But I would still posit that there is value in having Really general brand awareness.

There is value in having a really strong segment of social proof when somebody comes to your profile, they see your conscience getting engaged with a lot. You have a lot of followers like all these vanity metrics that I tell people don’t matter. You know, they matter a little bit in the grand scheme of helping your brand look as legitimate as possible.

But in order to really understand who your audience is, I think that first I have to understand, okay, what do I want my audience to do? So in the context of the gym, we want them to sign up for a membership. So You know, we can understand that a person isn’t going to sign up for a membership just based off of a promotional graphic that’s posted on Instagram that has five likes.

There needs to be some nurturing along that process. And that’s where that top of funnel content really comes into play where you’re talking about maybe the general benefits of health and fitness. Maybe your. You know, having a trainer [00:08:00] at your gym, walk through a series of exercises. You’re like, you’re not being super salesy in the beginning.

You’re just trying to create content that is for the masses, you know, for people that are maybe even outside of your radius of 50 miles around Minneapolis, but it builds trust with the potential audience. It builds social proof. It builds engagement. And it creates in a sense like your direction for where you want to go.

You know, we’re a, you’re a page or we’re a brand that is passionate about fitness or is passionate about community or is passionate about having the best trainers, like whatever it is, you need to showcase that at a really high level without it coming across as being super salesy. And then as you start to do that really well, I would start moving down the funnel in terms of how you’re selling to people.

So maybe then in the middle of funnel, it’s like, okay, you can start posting some offers that you have at your gym. Thank you. And you can start, you know, talking about the benefits of those that way. And then at the, you know, very bottom of the funnel, maybe you’re doing testimonials with people that currently work with you.

Or maybe you’re doing features on, you know, people that come into your gym a lot. Like you’re doing all these like really self service y internal bits of [00:09:00] communication. But you have to understand that those aren’t the things that are going to sell people on coming to your gym. Those are great tools to retain people and build really great internal brand loyalty and community.

You know, again, at each stage you have, you have a different goal and your goal is to push people further and further down that funnel. So, you know, eventually everybody’s there and all you’re doing is trying to retain them instead of trying to sell them.

Josh: Yeah. So there are some, there are some messaging fundamentals that seem to apply across platforms.

But I’m interested in knowing how they differ specifically to maximize content performance on each one. So, like how does the usage and user base of Facebook specifically versus something newer like TikTok, how do those platforms differ in, in the way you should

Tyler Webb: use them? Yeah. So this is a really good question.

We’re sort of at a time right now with the social media platforms where there’s a pretty clear split emerging in terms of how people use the platform. So I’ll use Tiktok and, I’ll use [00:10:00] Tiktok as my primary example where you’re scrolling through a purely algorithmic based feed. Rarely do people scroll through the feed of people that they’ve opted in to follow.

They’re scrolling through a feed of content that’s being curated specifically for them. So oftentimes, when you come across a piece of content, you’ve never seen that person before. You’ve never heard of that person before. You have no context to who they are, what their story is, you know, what they’re even going to be talking about.

And so what’s really important on TikTok is building context immediately into your content. And people do that in all sorts of ways. The way they were The platform is really smart about encouraging people to do that early on was through trending sound. So, immediately as soon as you heard a sound or you saw some sort of visual format, you understood, you know, the joke or the premise of the content that was about to be laid out before you.

And that was really helpful because you might have been seeing that from a person you’d never heard of before. But you still… You know, you weren’t so overwhelmed or you felt like you had to scroll away because you knew essentially what the punchline was going to be, and when it was going to come.

And a lot of platforms saw that model [00:11:00] and started moving towards it, you know, obviously like Instagram, even to a certain extent, Facebook, and now Twitter, that have a for you style feed where it’s purely based on, an algorithm. And as you identify platforms moving in that direction, and this stuff changes all the time, like Instagram for a while went really heavy into that.

Algorithmic based, you know, recommendation only style feed and now they sort of steered away from it a little bit. So you have to through your usage sort of understand where these platforms are moving. But I would say as you see, as you see platforms move more in that direction, you have to really think strongly about building context into your content.

So it’s not okay to be like, Hey, our gym is having a 50 percent off sale this month because Enjoy your day. It’s likely that nobody knows where your gym is, what your gym’s about. Like they don’t know anything about it. So you have to build a context in your content some way. The way I love to do that is through.

Like narrative storytelling, so you can start a video off with some really enticing premise, you know, I call it the hook, where in that first three seconds, you say something, you know, [00:12:00] that pokes the bear a little bit, you know, maybe controversial in a sense, or maybe it’s like, you know, spitting in the face of what some people consider to be status quo, whatever you can get people to watch past that first three seconds.

Is a great entry into like, Hey, here’s what I’m going to talk about. And then the remaining, you know, 30 seconds to a minute can be you backing up whatever you, you, you started with at the beginning. But you know, it’s really important that you, that you, you focus on doing that early on, because just speaking to it, you know, an audience that doesn’t know who the heck you are.

is really not going to return the performance that you might want. And on the flip side of that, I’ll speak now to a platform like Instagram, where there’s still a lot of context that is inherent in each post. So on Instagram, I would say most people are scrolling through a feed that is primarily comprised of people that follow them.

And for a while, Instagram moved to put like, recommendation based content in the feed, so it kind of broke up. You know, between the people that you followed and the people that you didn’t follow, but I thought you might like, and I see them slowly move [00:13:00] away from that and only place the content from people that you follow into your feed.

And so you can be pretty confident knowing that, okay, when somebody sees this piece of content. They’re going to have context of, you know, who I am, what I do, where we are, all that sort of stuff. And now you’re focused on making sure they’re engaged as much as possible and, you know, exploiting the, the formats that are working well on Instagram.

So, for example, that, you know, that’s carousels right now on Instagram where, you can jam a bunch of information or, you know, visual into a single post by having it slide across. But you can feel confident that you don’t need to explain who you are every single time because those people have opted into following you and they’re just seeing you on their, you know, on their, on their following feed.

Let’s imagine

Josh: that there’s a, a brand new platform growing and we’re not really familiar with it yet. Right. And there’s marketers we’re looking at are like, Hey, how can we use this? What what if? What key information are we looking for to start to understand that platform in its own right so that we can start to leverage it

Tyler Webb: properly?

Yeah, I would say the first thing you have to understand is what I just talked about, which is, is this [00:14:00] a recommendation based platform or is this a platform where people are opting in to follow me and that’s how they’re being primarily served their content. So once, once you understand that. That’s going to dictate pretty strongly which direction you’re going to go with your content.

You know, there might be, this, this platform might be really heavily focused on video. So now you have to really hone in what your video storytelling skills are, and make sure you can be good at that. Or maybe it’s a, you know, a, a picture only platform. And so now you need to understand how can I represent my story, my content, how can I deliver my narrative through, through visuals only.

So, you know, again, the first step is understanding, is it recommendation based or is it? Follower based and then it’s understanding how can I best convey my message through the medium that that platform is encouraging. Awesome.

Josh: Let’s talk about, you mentioned formats a little bit. Carousels are working really well on Instagram, for example.

How can we understand the use of different content formats, like long versus short form, for example, or real videos versus tech [00:15:00] posts? Are there any general principles behind what they’re best used for?

Tyler Webb: Yeah, so I, I even hate saying things like carousels are working well on Instagram right now because somebody came back and watched this episode two years from now, that could be horribly bad advice.

You know, I don’t think anybody could have predicted the, the, the rise of real. So if somebody listened to me a year ago and I was like, you know, single images are working well, then that’s just totally incorrect. So one thing that you have to understand is that. All these platforms are trying to do is keep users on the platform for as long as possible so that they can serve them more ads and make more money, right?

And so once you understand that, you can kind of begin reverse engineering what the incentives are on the platform. So it’s understanding things like, okay, having somebody share my content. Or save my content to come back to you later is more valuable than them just liking or commenting. Having somebody watch the entire video that I post or scroll through all the slides of a carousel that I post is more valuable than them, you know, seeing it, stopping for a second and scrolling past.

So you have to kind [00:16:00] of play into these incentive structures that, the platforms put forward and that oftentimes just comes down to like watch time, repeat rate. And then how often your content is getting shared or sent to other people. And so if you can optimize for those three things. Then I think you’re set up for success on whatever platform.

So again, on TikTok, that might mean somebody watching your entire video and then sharing it with a friend. On Instagram, that might mean somebody sliding through the carousel a bunch and then posting another story. So there’s all different mechanisms or formats, like you said, to achieve that goal of keeping somebody on the platform for as long as possible.

That’s the end goal and more to your point about short form versus long form content. I would just encourage who’s ever watching and maybe they’re battling between the two just on a very like broad, from a very broad point of view, like understand what you’d like to do the best and what you’re good at and what you can’t, what your skill set allows.

And if that means, you know, not setting up a 10 minute video that you post on [00:17:00] YouTube because you’re not a, you know, maybe you’re not good in front of camera, you’re not good at editing these longer videos, or you don’t have a really. Good idea of what works well, like then don’t do it, then find a medium.

There’s so many like formats and mediums now on social that you can sort of go and find and see what works best for you. Obviously, the predominant one right now is short form video. So I would say to anybody, if you’re trying to get good at something, start with short form video. A lot of those skills in terms of how to add context to something, build a narrative through 60 seconds can then be extrapolated out to a longer form video, or could then be condensed down into a.

You know, photo carousel or something like that, but I, I would encourage people to start on how can I make really compelling short form 30 to 60 second video and then take those skills of having a really compelling intro hook, you know, concept being really good at storytelling and then, you know, extrapolate or place those skills wherever you want to on other platforms.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. In terms of efficient skill building, if you want to become a better marketer on social, you can figure out [00:18:00] how to build that context. In a 30 to 60 second video, building it for a long form piece of content is easy. It’s not even, there’s, there’s barely anything else you have to learn and you already know how to do it well.

So yeah, definitely if you want to do that, that’s going to be the biggest bang for your buck and it’s working right now too. So it’s worth doing right now. Um. Something interesting that occurred to me is, is it possible that different audience segments are actually distributed more on some social media channels than others?

Tyler Webb: How do you, like audience segments for a specific business? Are you talking in a specific demographic?

Josh: Yeah, well, I mean, potentially both, but I think like somebody that’s more top of funnel, you might have a lot of top of funnel on TikTok just because of the way it’s designed versus, The people that you’re speaking to on Facebook are more people that are already interested in the service you offer and your business specifically.

Yeah. At least from an organic [00:19:00] perspective.

Tyler Webb: Sure. Yeah, I don’t know if I completely agree with the premise that there’s different people necessarily on each of these platforms. That’s one thing I push back on a lot of people. You know, at this point, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, they have billions of people on the platform.

So, even if, you know, your segment of people is like, 1 percent of these platforms, we’re still talking about millions of people. And so I think it’s more about what goals you should have coming into a platform. And maybe that’s more to your question, Josh, but I agree with you on TikTok. I think people are using that now as a search platform.

People are using that as a way to hone in their interest or learn more about potential interest that they might have. And people are really comfortable seeing content from people, as long as it’s good, that they don’t already know. So it’s not like they feel like they’re being like inundated with new information all the time, or that they’re, you know, they push back on like, oh, I don’t, like, I don’t care about this.

Like, if you’re good at building a story, adding context, like we’ve been talking about, people are receptive on TikTok, you’re [00:20:00] right, to seeing new things. Learning about new people, learning about new brands, because that’s the entire basis of the app is you don’t know what’s going to happen the next time you scroll.

And I guess I would agree with you too on the Facebook point, where that’s less about, you know, that’s less about learning about new things or new people, and it’s more about, niching down to the people that you already know and maybe getting recommendations or getting better understandings of what the people that you trust and you know are already doing.

And so, I think Josh, to a certain extent, you’re right that, you know, on TikTok, maybe you should be talking in a much higher, on a much higher level about what it is you do. You know, less concerned about who’s seeing it, where they’re, you know, where they are, what actions they can take, and just be concerned about brand building and honing in those skills on how I can talk about my brand in a really compelling way.

And then take those and reassess how each segment needs to hear about your brand and understand that maybe on Facebook, they need to hear more, more social proof from other people. They need to hear more testimonials. They need to see, you know, [00:21:00] more about what the actual space is like. On Instagram, maybe they need to, you know, maybe they’re comfortable reading more about what it is you offer, or maybe they’re, you know, they’re, they’re there for more spur of the moment updates on, on your story, and they wanna know things that are happening upcoming.

So it is understanding where, those segments respond best to, to whatever you’re offering.

Josh: Yeah, I, I think of it more like, Google versus Reddit. Google is where you start the journey for information very at the very top. But Reddit is you often where you end up. When you’re looking for very, very specific information about that subject.

So maybe like you mentioned TikTok, people, people on TikTok are, are more there. It’s becoming more of a search engine for people that want to learn new things. And people there are more open to discovering new things. Whereas in Instagram and Facebook, people are more niched in work, especially

Tyler Webb: Facebook.

Yeah, yeah. And I like to take a step back of this specific [00:22:00] conversation. I want to say that you should really be focusing as a business owner on making the best content possible. And right now, especially, basically every platform allows you to post the same format in short form vertical video. And so I would encourage, again, you to get really good at that format, post it across all platforms and maybe You find that it works best on Facebook, and that’s kind of against the convention of, you know, where short form vertical works best.

But maybe that’s where your audience is. So all that is to say, I’d worry less about getting the perfect messaging right for the perfect platform. I think a lot of people don’t do anything because of that paralysis through analysis. And I would just focus on doing this stuff, putting it out there, getting that immediate feedback.

We live in a world now where we can get really quick feedback about whether this content is good or bad based on performance and refining that based on the feedback that each platform is giving you, but don’t feel like you have to be so cutesy with it right away because, oh, I don’t know if this would be perfect for Facebook.

Like, post it and find out and then refine based from there.

Josh: Yeah, [00:23:00] absolutely. And I, and I experienced this actually recently. I have a podcast outside of work, other than this podcast, and I’ve started very slowly producing micro content for it. And I, TikTok is like the king of the small, the micro content videos.

And the discoverability, but what I found was I am, I, I’ve so far gotten more visibility on Facebook and Instagram than I have on TikTok, like a lot more. Instagram not, not as surprising, but Facebook a little more surprising. And that’s, sometimes that happens.

Tyler Webb: It does. I mean, I, I, I pretty short form content myself and I’ll have a video that.

does really, really well on TikTok and then does horribly on Instagram or YouTube Shorts and, you know, vice versa, where a video does horribly on TikTok, but for some reason it does well on Instagram and YouTube Shorts and the content doesn’t change at all. It’s just a matter of the audience and these [00:24:00] algorithms are really fickle too.

You know, I try to, this is a long enough conversation where you can add the nuance to it, but, you know, these algorithms aren’t perfect and consistent every time. And there are always being tweaked and changed. So like while the general premise of, you know, what works on a certain algorithm remains the same, which is watch time and, you know, replay rate and shares and stuff like that.

There are always little things that these algorithms and platforms are testing to try to promote, you know, different types of content and longer and shorter. So it’s like, don’t get too. Caught up either by, by all of the analytics because it might also just be a slight tweak in the algorithm that you don’t know about, nobody knows about, you know, they’re not like the most consistent things in terms of performance.

Yeah, that

Josh: goes back to something that we need to recenter on for the, for the sake of, the listeners of, of this episode is that there’s, if you’ve, if you’ve worked in any industry, whether it’s marketing or, or tech or anything where you do a lot of metrics and [00:25:00] measuring, You don’t, you don’t hang, your business operations on, one post that blew up or like one week’s worth of metrics or one week’s worth of, worth of data.

Measuring is an ongoing process and you, in the longer you measure things, the more accurate. the overall data is going to end up being. So don’t just post something, don’t make a video, post it across everything, and then it works on one platform really well, and then you focus on that platform to the exclusion of the others.

If you can create something that is useful across all these platforms, You, you don’t, you’re not investing too much time to just post it on every platform. The content’s already made, so just disseminate it the best you can. Yeah, don’t, don’t get, don’t, and, and don’t get caught in like paralysis by analysis.

[00:26:00] The reason why we’re in the weeds on this right now is just so you can better understand things so that when you see weird data, you’re not like just totally caught off guard or confused. Yeah. Yeah. So don’t, so don’t take what we’re saying here, dear listener, don’t take what we’re saying here as a, as a, a reason to be caught in that paralysis by

Tyler Webb: analysis.

Yeah, I would just remind everybody that you’re again, you’re stealing, you’re steering a really big ship. Think of a barge over a speedboat where as you’re steering it, you know, maybe you slow down a little bit or maybe you speed up or maybe you, you know, navigate a bit off course, but over the long term, you know, as long as you’re steering it in the quote unquote right direction in terms of the content you’re creating, the quality of it, who you’re speaking to, then you’re doing the right thing.

We’re talking about directionality here, not getting every step of the process perfect. Okay. Absolutely.

Josh: Awesome. Well, that’s a lot to chew on. It’s a lot to process. Really, really useful information. Where can listeners find you if they want to reach out and ask you questions [00:27:00] or even partner with your

agency?

Tyler Webb: Yeah. I’d probably be most responsive, there on, LinkedIn. You can search Tyler web on LinkedIn, or you could also just go to uncle charlie. co, and reach out to me there. For examples of content that I’m making, so you don’t think I’m just blowing smoke. I, I create a lot of content on TikTok, daily content on TikTok, Tyler M web there on, on sports business, discussions and conversation.

And that’s been a really great way for me to hone my skills as a marketer, especially in creating short form video content. And you know, as I say, all this stuff about. You know, understanding content, understanding these platforms. I have to admit a lot of it comes from doing it myself and understanding what works.

And then, like I said, extrapolating those skills and trying to place them into other formats and onto other platforms. So go check that out if you’re curious to see it in action. Awesome, man. Thank you for

Josh: coming on. Maybe we can do this again sometime.

Tyler Webb: We’d love to, Josh. Thank you so much. bye!