How To Create A Content Strategy That Works

Caitlin Barry | January 19, 2023 at 4:59 PM

Cooking Up Content

Believe it or not, content creation is the backbone of all marketing strategies. It's the posts we like on social media, what we watch on YouTube, everything we see on a website, what we listen to on a podcast, and so much more. In order to succeed, every brand must have a strong content strategy. But how does your brand even know where to begin?

Chris and Eric Martinez, two brothers and business coaches who are experts in streamlining content strategies in a way that's effective and resonates with audiences, sat down with Hollywood Branded to chat about their expertise. In this blog, Hollywood Branded discusses properly utilizing content marketing and how to build and grow your business, no matter your niche.

The Importance Of Integrated Sales And Marketing Strategy (1)

A Little More About Chris And Eric

Chris and Eric are the founders of Dynamic Duo Training, an online exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle consulting business. As business coaches, they have worked with over 700 personal trainers, fitness professionals, and health enthusiasts to grow and scale their online fitness coaching businesses.

They are also #1 International Best-Selling Authors and hosts of the podcast Dynamic Lifestyle Podcast. The two brothers have developed and scaled an online business driven by content marketing. They practice what they preach daily, and that’s to live a dynamic lifestyle, which in their eyes means to keep evolving in all areas of life, including personal growth, career, relationships, and adventure.

Interview Transcript Highlights

Question: Chris, Eric—you both got to a place where you have established yourselves as business coaches, doing so through content marketing, and you really are playing at a level higher than most of your competitors in this industry. How did you get here? What's your back story?

Answer (Eric): Great question, Stacy. I'll definitely take the listeners through our personal story and kind of how we did get here. I think it's a great point just to like talk about this because someone—even just one person listening to this and is going through an adverse situation—it could really change your lives. When we grew up, you know, we grew up in a really picture-perfect family. My dad was a state California correction officer at San Quentin State Prison, and he was hard on us. He taught us a lot of work ethic, just all about education, school, everything. And when we were seventeen years old, we lost him in a car accident. You know, three days before Christmas, we got a knock on the door from a California Highway Patrol officer. That's really not a good sign at two in the morning, and I remember I thought I was having a nightmare. I saw my mom screaming on her knees. And, you know, they had said that he fell as he fell asleep behind the wheel.

So instantly there, you know, our entire life just turned like a 360. You know, we lost our role model, our leader, just in a blink of an eye. And after that, three months later, my mom lost her mom due to cancer, so it was like a ton of bricks had hit our family and my mom to where I felt like we lost a big part of her too because she turned to alcohol. She turned to antidepressant pills. She just wasn't the same person for a long period of time, and Chris and I, you know, we have an older brother; we were all just grieving our own way, and we were lost. We didn't know how to deal with that type of loss. So we went just in different directions, and you know, Chris and I turned to just like, you know, alcohol; got into a lot of trouble with the law, but after that, you know, went through the motions.

Then we're twenty-four years old, time just passed, and we're going through college, and then we actually were flipping through a magazine, like the muscular development one. And then we actually hired a mentor that was doing online coaching and getting into it early back in what was it, 2008, 2009, Chris?

Chris: Yeah, it was 2008.

Eric: So then we hired him as our first mentor. He built an online coaching business, and we were just like students and sponges and saw what he was doing. We saw the possibilities. We went on to get our certifications in personal training, our masters in sports, nutrition, everything. And then we just, you know, took action. built our first business, Dynamic Duo Training, where we helped tons of people with just like customize exercise nutrition programs for, I want to say, almost eight years. Did extremely well with that, and then the last four years, just pivoted to B2B coaching, just helping health and fitness coaches do the same thing. And, you know, we've written a couple of books, we have a great podcast called the Dynamic Lifestyle Podcast—over 450 episodes. So that's kind of what has brought us to here.

Question: What I'd love to understand is where do you see benefits from content marketing and podcasting? How have you seen this help you scale?

Answer (Chris): I would say, like just like as far as content marketing, what we teach our students is, there are three ways to basically create traffic (and traffic these days is attention.) So, you know, everybody that's a creator, a coach—I'm a business owner; I mean, obviously, you want traffic. You want attention like on your brand, right? So the three ways basically creating traffic that's basically everything you can do organic-wise, like Instagram, Facebook, having a podcast, having a Youtube channel, having a blog, and Newsletter, right? The second way is borrowing traffic. That's joint ventures, that's collaborations, right, that's affiliate programs. The third way is paid traffic. So that's obviously anything like, you know, media buying Facebook, Instagram, Youtube ads, Google ads, whatever it is. We teach people in our program to really start with creating your own traffic because not everybody has deep pockets to be able to spend on paid advertisement. Nor should they because they don't have a foundation or an authority or reputation that backs that up, right? And the second one is a lot of people just don't know how to sit there and borrow traffic at that high level yet. So your best bet, if you're starting off on this, is to start by just creating content. And what that does is it gets people to know, like, and trust you. How do you take a friend from a stranger to a friend to a buyer? And the only way to really do that honestly is through your content marketing to showcase your story, the value, your mission, your vision, results that you actually provide, right? And you know, there's a lot of people that say that, you know, you don't need content marketing. But I'm a big believer. After being in this like for 11 years, building two multiple six-figure businesses, and helping coaches that you need content marketing, you know. So that's kind of like my stance.

Eric: Yeah. And I think just really quick to add to that, Stacy. I mean, if you really look at it in a holistic way to where you're seeing that where the future is going—I mean, everything's going virtual. Everything's going digital. And to me, it's just, you are shooting yourself in the foot if you are not getting on board and building an online brand. And it all really does start with your personal brand, like, you know, Stacy Jones, Eric Martinez, Chris Martinez. It's like our personal brands are not replicable. So people buy people. So that's the beauty of it; you can build an online personal brand, and, you know, who knows what opportunities are going to come with it? It doesn't have to be a business right away, but it's like if you're giving value, building that audience, getting your message out there, I mean, you just never know what door can open later on.

Question: Where would you all say when you're working with different coaches, how do you tell them to start? Because it's daunting.

Answer (Eric): I think the biggest thing is it is a mindset shift, and if you are a business owner, if you are going to create content, you have to reframe your mindset to look at this as business media, not social media. I think too many people get caught up in just like the going down the feeds, consuming, consuming, consuming, the rabbit holes, putting so much emotion into it. No, put your business hat on, put your business lens on, and treat this as a business media platform.

So then, also, what that means is, you are no longer the content consumer. You are now the content producer, and it's very different when it comes to that. It's like you are treating this platform to sit there and give value to people. It's not about you. And then, yes, you are happy to monetize this, you know, for your God-given talents. So those are two really, really big mindset shifts that people really need to understand and just use the platform for what it is. Get in and get out. Don't get too emotional with it. Don't sit there and try to people please everyone. Just post what you need to post and just collect the data and try to just speak to those people and just gain that audience, and don't worry about all these hundreds and thousands of followers that are going to sit there and just always buy from you, because that's not true.

Question: So, what do you want to do once you produce content? How do you parlay it out into the world and release it? How do you work on monetizing that content?

Answer (Chris): I would say, like, the biggest thing that our focal point would be is the podcast. Now from there, you know, like you said, we are playing at a different level from everybody, so everybody's gonna have kind of different social platforms. But we utilize pretty much every single one of them, you know, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, a podcast; I even consider a newsletter like basically a social media platform. So those are like kind of like the five pillars that we really like, you know, use our content. So it really starts with the podcast and Youtube channel. From there, it's like, you know, once we have a podcast set up, it's like, okay, great. The rest of it's like really promotion, and that's why we do like the video component to go on Youtube because it lives evergreen, and then also it's the second biggest search engine optimization besides Google, right? But from there, if you have the video component, then you can play the game of, like, you know, putting reels, and you know, chopping that up into content on Instagram and Facebook. Right? And if you have a newsletter, great, you could always let people know, "Hey, this episode came out," and just have them anticipate that every single week that a new episode came out. So that's really kind of how we play the game of like distributing our content. It always starts off with the podcast.

Eric: Yeah, and I think that to add to that, we're very intentional, though, about what we're putting out. So we have a content calendar that's mapped out for each month. And literally, I mean, you could do this. You could map out your entire content for the month and just batch it all up on one day, or you can just do it every week. Literally, I mean, for me, what works well is just blocking out two hours on a Saturday, and literally mapping out all the pieces of content that we want to put out there for the week and whether that's just intentional. Do we have a launch coming up? Do we have something that we want to sit there and really heavily promote? Is it just like a theme? Is it something that we want to test out? But it's that's the beauty of it is just like we sit there and batch it all up, so we're not stressed out. We don't have anxiety during the week and be like, "Oh my gosh! What do I got to post this week?" It's literally all mapped out breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is what we're posting. This is what the stories are, so just it makes life so much easier. And then, whatever. You know, like after that, it's out of my control as to what's going to happen. Is the algorithm gonna, you know, perform well? Are people going to like it? Are they going to share it? Those are my uncontrollables. What's in my control is I can show up every single day, I can produce the content, I can put out great content. Try to inspire and help people. Yeah, I just have to live with that and just go with the analytics, the KPIs and keep doubling down on what's working and what's not, and then just go from there.

Question: What are some mistakes people make when they are producing content besides trying to make it perfect?

Answer (Eric): Yeah, I think it's just there are a lot of mistakes. I mean, people, just number one, they just don't know, you know, let's put this in a context of a business owner. People don't know their audience. They don't know their messaging, and they don't have an offer. So when you don't have those three things, I mean, it's going to be extremely challenging and difficult as to what are you going to put out on a day-to-day basis and even a weekly basis. Who am I speaking to? Who's my perfect future client? What are their wants? What are their pains? What are their desires? What are their needs? What are they thinking? What are their false belief patterns? How can I sit there and reframe their mind? How can I get them to think differently? What are my solutions to their pain points? What's my methodology? What makes me different than all the other people? So there's a lot that goes into that. So if someone doesn't know their audience and messaging, they're going to be speaking to the masses, and that's going to be just very confusing. It's like fishing in a huge pond, like good luck. And then, you know, if you don't have an offer, again, what are you going to do? What's your call to action actually gonna be? Where are you leading people? What is it that you're trying to do?

So I think if we start up with those three things: audience, messaging, and offer. Those are huge mistakes that people are making. But then again, we could go down the whole thing of like people just overthinking just paralysis by over-analysis, like Chris said. People wanting to put out A+ work instead of just putting out B+ work, getting their hands dirty, helping people out, and not making it about them. So I mean, yeah, there's just so many layers to it.

Chris: I'll add to this really quickly. I think that the mistake is not really understanding the game of content you're playing. So like, there are five phases of content marketing, and the very first two phases is basically phase one is just post something. Literally, show up and just post something on Instagram or Facebook, whether it's a video, a reel, or whatever, just post it. The second phase is basically post something and then post it consistently. Whether that's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but stay consistent so people anticipate that. Those two phases it's really intentional for just the no-like trust factor; that's all it is. Those first two phases are not intended for you to get any clients. The next three phases, when you start opening up channels, you start getting more creative, innovative, posting more, all that stuff, that is meant to sit there and get your guys clients. You know, and it's like, then they end up hating it because they're not getting engagement.

Check Out The Podcast!

Chris and Eric have so much great information from their experience in B2B coaching and content marketing. Check out the podcast below to learn more about how you can build a strategy that works for your brand.

Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:

Every week we release a new podcast featuring guest's with so much knowledge about marketing, you don't want to miss one! How can you make sure you don't miss an episode? Click below to subscribe!