If you own a fitness business, it’s highly likely that you will be using content marketing to reach more prospects and build your client base. If you want to do this successfully, you'll have to find a way to stand out from the rest. But for content marketing to deliver the results that you want, you need to be continuously creating and posting engaging, interesting, informative and relevant content on various platforms.
And this is where a fitness content calendar comes in. A fitness content calendar will help to keep your content marketing strategies organized, thus increasing efficiency while saving you time. But, how do you come up with an effective fitness content calendar?
This guide has the answers. In this article, we will explore the benefits of creating a fitness content calendar for your fitness business. We will also give you tips on how to create an actionable fitness content calendar, which can transform your content marketing strategies.
1. Importance of a Fitness Content Calendar
Simply put, a fitness content calendar is an outline of the pieces of content that you intend to post on various platforms within a given time period. It will feature the day and time that each content piece will be published. Also, it will include an overview of the type of information that each content piece will feature.
It’s designed to coordinate content for publishing on various platforms like blogs, social media, newspapers and magazines, among others. Some of the benefits of creating a fitness content calendar include:
1.1 Have Time to Prepare Great Content
One of the main benefits of creating a fitness content calendar is that it will help to stay organized and plan ahead. And when you’ve planned your content ahead, you won’t be scrambling to come up with great topics or posts to cover, since you’ve already outlined them in advance. As a result, you will be left with ample time to focus on the core areas of your fitness business.
1.2 Reduce Mistakes
A fitness content calendar will also help to reduce the chances of mistakes with content marketing. For instance, if you don’t have a fitness social media content calendar, you may end up posting repetitive content on different social media channels. But when you have one in place, you will have a clear idea of the type of content that will feature on which channel, thus helping to minimize repetition or such errors.
1.3 Maintain Consistency
Consistency is vital when it comes to content marketing. If you want to keep your audience engaged, you need to be posting quality content consistently. Therefore, if your posting is inconsistent or irregular, you will struggle to keep your audience engaged. And if your engagement levels are low, your reach will also be low, thus minimizing your chances of attracting new prospects. Fortunately, a fitness content calendar will help you to maintain consistency in your posting, engage more with your audience and grow your following.
1.4 Post Timely Content
With a fitness content calendar, you can plan content for holidays, anniversaries, sporting events, or other specific events, which may be important to your target audience and your fitness business. And with this approach, you will not miss out on opportune times to get your content in front of your target audience.
2. Building a Fitness Content Calendar: Expert Tips
Without a doubt, having an effective fitness content calendar in place is vital to your fitness brand’s content marketing success. In short, it’s no longer an option. Here are some tips that will help you to come up with an actionable fitness content calendar.
2.1 Define Your Content Marketing Goals
Whether you are planning your future content for social media posts, blogs, newsletters, emails, or print releases, you will first need to define the main goal. With a clearly defined goal in mind, it will then be easier to determine the format it will adopt and the channel.
For instance, you may be planning future content for generating new leads, gaining visibility, growing your following on social media or redirecting readers to your fitness website. Defining your goals will also have an impact on how often you publish it.
Hence, defining what you intend to achieve with your content should be the first step when it comes to creating and implementing a fitness content calendar. Without a clearly defined set of goals, you will be pushing out content that may not benefit your fitness business. And this translates to wastage of resources.
2.2 Choose Your Fitness Calendar Format
Once you’ve outlined your goals, you will then need to settle on a format for your fitness content calendar. And you have numerous options to choose from when it comes to the calendar format.
For instance, you can simply download a ready-made fitness calendar template online, and then customize it to suit your fitness business. You can also opt to use a simple excel spreadsheet, create a table in MS Word or use an online project management tool. You can also create one using the Google Sheets tool.
But, regardless of the format that you choose, make sure it has the following sections and information.
- The type of content
- The platform where the content will be published
- The content topic
- The content’s publishing date and time
- Notes on whether the content is scheduled or published
2.3 Select Your Platforms
Your fitness content calendar should also feature all the channels or platforms, where you will be publishing your content. You will need to decide whether to publish articles on your fitness blog, post photos on Instagram or Facebook, or create videos for YouTube.
Whether you opt to choose two channels or several of them will depend on the resources at your disposal. If you have a big content marketing budget, then you afford to work with different channels and post content in different formats. On the other hand, if your content marketing budget is tight, it will be advisable to prioritize two or three channels and focus on creating high-quality content for them.
2.4 Add Different Content Pieces
Once you’ve selected the channels that you will be using to publish your fitness content, you should then go ahead and fill your fitness content calendar with different content pieces that you intend to publish in the future. Some of the content pieces that you can add to your fitness content calendar include social media posts, blog posts, infographics, podcasts and videos, just to name a few.
And for each content piece that you add to your fitness content calendar, make sure you include relevant details such as the topic you will cover, the target keywords, available resources, or any other information that will help you to create that piece.
Adding these details will make it easier for you to create that content piece when the time comes. They will also help to save time, minimize mistakes and help you to publish the content efficiently.
You can also add details of how you can repurpose each content piece in the future, making sure you leverage each content piece you create to the maximum. Repurposing each content piece that you create will help to boost your content marketing ROI.
2.5 Set the Publishing Frequency and Posting Dates
Your fitness content calendar also needs to include the posting frequency. It’s worth mentioning that creating quality content is a time-consuming process. Hence, when choosing a publishing frequency, make sure you choose a realistic schedule.
If the publishing frequency is too high, you may end up posting low-quality content, which may fail to deliver the expected results. On the other hand, if the frequency is too low, the engagement will suffer.
For instance, you can choose to be posting twice per week on your fitness blog and thrice per day on social media channels. However, regardless of the publishing frequency that you choose, make sure you are as consistent as possible.
If you decide to be posting one video a week, three blog posts and five social media posts in a week, then you should stick with this schedule week in, week out.
2.6 Review Your Fitness Content Calendar
At this point, your fitness calendar is almost complete. You’ve already listed the content pieces you will be publishing, the channels you will be using and the publishing frequency.
But, we are all prone to mistakes. Hence, it’s advisable to take a couple of minutes to go through your fitness content calendar once again, to check whether it has some mistakes and rectify them.
For instance, you may have selected a particular date for creating a blog post. But on the same date, you may be having a special event like a friend’s anniversary, and it may have slipped your mind. And when that date arrives, you may be forced to either miss your friend’s anniversary or fail to publish that blog post.
So, it will be important to review your fitness content calendar and confirm everything. And if you’ve checked and confirmed everything is accurate, then your fitness calendar is now ready for use.
3. Wrapping It Up
Your fitness business will considerably benefit from a fitness content calendar. It will help to keep your messaging consistent, publish content regularly, grow your audience, and increase engagement rates. A fitness content calendar will also help to refine, improve and streamline your content marketing campaigns. Hence, if your fitness business doesn’t have a fitness content calendar, it’s time to create one.