As a gym owner, no doubt you’d much rather be in the gym talking to existing clients and helping people with their workouts. But marketing is as much a part of owning a successful gym as delivering an amazing service to your members.
If you want to be sure that you keep consistently attracting new members and keep the existing ones engaged, then you need to be providing top-quality content on your website and social platforms.
While that may not be your favorite thing to do, you can make it far easier on yourself if you use a content calendar and plan out what you’re going to post.
Here at Surefire Local, we’re expert marketers and we’ve laid out our content calendar tips for gyms to get you up and running and creating targeted, quality content quickly.
Why is creating content so important to your online visibility?
Content is a huge part of any marketing plan. Not only can it attract and bring in new gym members, but it can also help you keep more of your existing members.
In addition, it’s highly important if you want to be found in the search engine rankings. Google uses several different ranking factors to determine visibility and content is one of the most important ones.
Great content shows that you’re an expert in your field. It shows your audience that you know what you’re talking about, and it also does the same for Google and other search engines. It makes you look like the authority you are and builds trust. Not only does this encourage new members to sign up, but it also means that Google is more likely to show your content to their searchers.
The search engines are concerned with offering a great experience to their users. They aim to show the best answer to people’s searches that they possibly can. They do this by evaluating each piece of content and determining which one will give the closest, highest-quality answer to the search term.
Creating that kind of content helps you stand out from your competitors and rank highly in search engines.
A content calendar helps you save time and get there more quickly.
Quick content calendar tips for gyms
1) Define your audiences
If you run a gym, all of your customers will be at different levels. You might have complete beginners, moms trying to lose weight after having a baby, people focusing mainly on strength training, yet others trying to lose weight and tone up, and even professional athletes focusing on specific training for their careers.
Each one of these audience types needs its own content. But before you can do that, you need to know who they are and what they want.
The best way to do that is to do your research and build a buyer persona for each type. Look at what each part of your audience wants and in what sort of depth. Beginners might simply want an introduction to the equipment and some help with what they need to do for the results they want. Professional athletes may well want specialist training and detailed content on nutrition down to a macro level.
While research is necessary, you can also simply ask your existing members and social media followers what they want to see. Run polls and surveys to get to know your people and learn what content works for them.
2) Take note of your messaging
The content you create needs to resonate with your audience and engage them. It needs to give them what they want in a way that they can appreciate and understand. This goes back to getting to know your audience, all the different types of members, and both the content they want and how they prefer to hear it.
But your messaging is also about you. How do you want your gym to be seen online and in the minds of your future and present members? Think about your own personality because that will inform your business personality and how you want to appear. Look at your brand voice too, and work out the tone of your posts. You may want to be completely professional and serious, or you may want to incorporate humor, depending both on your business personality and on the types of members you want to attract.
Once you have all this down, it’s important to be consistent on all platforms and in your marketing materials, whether you’re filming a video, writing a blog, or creating a leaflet for offline marketing.
3) Share your content across platforms
If you can, try to do your research before you start posting to social media. You need to know where your audience hangs out and when they’re likely to be around so that your content reaches the highest number of people and has the most impact.
If you’re already up and running on social media, check your statistics to see when you get the most engagement. Then try to post most of your content around the same days and times.
Obviously, you can also post content to your website and blog. That creates excellent content for social media too, as you can share your blog posts and updates to your social platforms and hopefully bring people back to your site to browse.
You should also claim your Google Business Profile and post on other business directories. You can add posts and quality images to many business directories to show off your gym and the results you are getting for your members.
In fact, the more places you can share your content, the higher your visibility.
4) Plan ahead with a content calendar
You can see that if you’re going to post the right content for different audience types and post it on multiple platforms, you can’t just guess at this and do it at random. This is exactly why you need a content calendar so that you can keep track of all your posts and plan ahead.
It’s helpful to look three months ahead and make a content plan for each quarter. Start by looking at the next quarter and see what time of year it is, and what big events are coming up, such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day, so that you can plan content that fits in with those events too. A plan also allows you to avoid posting on days when you’re unlikely to get many views. It’s quite unlikely that anyone will be looking at a gym’s social media on Christmas Day or Thanksgiving, for example.
Plan any promotions you want to do, and look at possible themes for either the quarter or each month.
Add in any standard holidays, like Thanksgiving too, and add your own vacation time so that you can create and schedule your content ahead before you finish for the holidays.
Next, look more closely at each month and start to plan specific content for each audience type over the month. This allows you to clearly see what you’ve already covered and fill in any gaps. It’s also helpful to see what sort of content you want to create and make sure you’ve allowed enough time for it. Content isn’t just written. Video content is extremely popular and it’s perfect for marketing a gym. You can demonstrate correct form, show people how to use your equipment, demonstrate healthy recipes, give away some free exercise routines to show what’s possible, and so much more.
In addition, you may want to look at any national holidays, such as National Fitness Day or International Dance Day. You can create themed content around these days, which can help with idea generation, and get attention by using any existing hashtags.
5 Steps to Easily Create Your Own Monthly Content Calendar
Step 1: Understand your clients
Now that you have your buyer personas, and you understand the audience types you want to attract to your gym, it’s time to do more research and delve even deeper into what makes them tick.
You need to understand what their pain points and struggles are so that you can create content around them and show how your gym can help.
Find out what questions they are asking too and what their search behaviors and patterns are.
All of this helps you to generate more content ideas, understand how your audience likes to consume content, and have more success with your content marketing.
Step 2: Determine the frequency
Every social media platform is different, and each platform expects different posting frequencies. With Twitter, for example, you’d expect to be posting more frequently than you would on Instagram or Facebook. Facebook and Instagram tend to want quality posts more than a higher quantity of lesser-quality posts.
Again, do your research. Look at what other gyms in your area are doing on social media and their blogs. You’ll see when they tend to post and that will help you decide when and how much you should post.
Check your social platform statistics too. This can tell you the best times to post and also which of your posts are the most popular.
There is a lot of effort involved in doing social media and content marketing well, but don’t promise to do too many posts on too many different platforms. For one, you won’t stick to it and consistency really is key to social success, but you also might risk burnout or neglecting other parts of your gym business if you plan too much on your content calendar. Start small, you can always build up later, if you want to.
Think about using scheduling software, such as that on Surefire’s business intelligence marketing software. You can set up content in advance to automatically post it for you. This gives you flexibility and the chance to create more content when you’re less busy.
Step 3: Identify Content Categories
Split your content down into content categories. This helps you generate content ideas under each category and also ensures that you’re posting enough of each type of content.
Your categories will be specific to you and your audience, but here are some suggestions for content categories:
- We’ve touched on national themed days and events already, but you could also look at themes around the changing seasons, perhaps tying in with local and national sports events.
- Limited-time promotions and special offers are great to encourage more sign-ups, especially when you really need them.
- For gyms, general educational content and how-to guides can be a great way to engage audiences.
- Keep people informed with company updates, such as new personal trainers or added exercise classes.
- Talk about any local community and charity events you’re involved with.
Step 4: Brainstorm topics
Now that you have your categories, it’s far easier to brainstorm content ideas that fit them. Don’t expect that you’ll have the same number of ideas for each category, though. It doesn’t matter if you have more ideas for some than for others.
Try to balance out any selling posts with plenty of educational and entertaining posts so that your feed doesn’t come across as too “salesy.”
You can also search sites, such as Quora and Answer the Public to see what questions people have about fitness, health, and nutrition.
And don’t forget to check your competitors’ websites, comments, and social media to see what people are asking them.
Step 5: Create your calendar
Now it’s time to mark up your content calendar. Look at each quarter as a whole first and fill in any big events and promotions, then look at each month and plan your content.
Make sure that you cover your topics and categories enough and that you’re not posting too much on some subjects or missing any topics.
A content calendar ensures that you cover every area you need to so that you satisfy and engage your audience. It’s also a time saver, as you no longer waste any time wondering what you’re going to write about.
It’s still a lot of work, but you can save yourself even more time and effort by using the right software for the job.
Why not attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo and see how we can make a difference to your content creation efforts?
Bonus Step: Use business intelligence marketing software to create and schedule your content in one place saves you time and you also get analytics and reports to help you brainstorm future content ideas and to determine how well your campaigns are working.
Demo the Leading Marketing Software for Gyms & Fitness Centers
With Surefire’s business intelligence marketing software, you can manage your content creation workflow from start to finish all from one place, including saving ideas, writing and scheduling your content, along with managing your email marketing, and your social posting.
You can manage your content calendar from anywhere with one login that takes you to an easy-to-use dashboard where you can control every aspect of your marketing, on any device or browsers. It doesn’t matter if you get an idea in the middle of the gym, in your office, or at home. You can still make a note of it and implement it when you’re ready.
And, if you don’t want to do your own content creation, or your marketing, you can hand it over to one of our marketing specialists who would be delighted to do it for you, while you keep an eye on things from your dashboard and stay completely in control.