Plan Your Fitness Content Calendar [Template & Guide]

Planning your fitness content calendar ahead of time is crucial to achieving your objectives. Creating a schedule or overview is a great way to plan and organise your activities, from social media to blog content. It’ll help ensure that everything you post is strategic and contributes to your business goals.

In this article – learn how to create a content calendar for your fitness business, including practical ideas for what to post about and downloadable templates.

Planning ahead will also help you post more consistently (which is something many of us struggle with). This can ensure that your leads are generated steadily and avoid quiet sales periods.

A fitness marketing plan can be as simple or detailed as you need it to be. It doesn’t matter whether you sketch it on the back of an envelope or prepare a thorough spreadsheet. The important thing is that you have a plan…

The important thing is that you have a plan.

Without one, your content marketing will just be a series of blog articles and social media posts that don’t tie together or lead anywhere. And all marketing needs to lead somewhere eventually, whether it’s signing up to your email list or purchasing your service.

Fitness Business Templates

How To Create a Fitness Content Calendar

1. Plan – define your objective (this is your end goal or WHY you’re doing it)
2. Brainstorm – this is where you come up with lots of different strategies and tactics (or exactly WHAT you’ll do)
3. Schedule – the last step is to organise your best brainstorm ideas into a calendar or planning template

Once you’ve scheduled all your content into a calendar, you can begin to create and share it with the world! But in this article, we’re just going to focus on coming up with fitness marketing content and developing the calendar so you have an outline plan to work from.

⇒ If you want to learn about the next steps of actually creating and promoting your content, then check out our other articles on post ideas and this promo checklist.

In the meantime, let’s look at each of these three stages in more detail…

Step #1 – Plan

The very first thing to do is define your objective… What are you trying to achieve? Why are you bothering with marketing at all? Like most goal setting situations, the more specific you are, the better results you’ll get (think SMART goals here).

For most of us, the end goal is to generate more revenue. But this can mean different things to different companies so it’s important to be clear on what you want to achieve. Examples include…

• Getting 300 new email subscribers this quarter.
• Having 200 ebook downloads this week.
• Selling 100 training programs this month.
• Generating 50 membership leads this week.

Step #2 – Brainstorm

Once you’re clear on your marketing objective, you can decide what you need to do to achieve that goal. When thinking about this, it’s sometimes helpful to consider these questions…

• What’s the starting point? What is your audience thinking now?
• What’s the end goal? What do you want to get them to do?

Once you’ve identified your start and end points, you can then brainstorm ideas about how to help them bridge that gap…

• What are the common problems that you can solve?
• Are some common misconceptions that you can clarify?
• What are their barriers to taking action that you can help them overcome?

Which questions might they have that you can answer? Potential clients might want to know…

• What they’ll get for their money
• What’s involved on their part
• Whether they’ll need previous experience or fitness levels
• Why your solution will work
• What scientific evidence it’s based on
• If you get stuck, then look at past email enquiries or social media comments for frequently asked questions

The possibilities are almost endless so it’s important to set yourself a time limit. Write down as many ideas as you can in 10mins (use the timer on your phone). Some ideas might be suitable for blog articles, whilst other ideas may only warrant a social media post.

Don’t forget to include the fundamentals like launch dates for new courses, programs, and classes. You might also want to include relevant fitness days like Stress Awareness Month (April) or World International Yoga Day (21st June). Once you’ve got all your ideas, then it’s time to input them into a schedule or content calendar…

Step #3 – Schedule

Now that you have lots of content ideas, it’s time to organise them. It can be helpful to categorise ideas by type or theme and schedule them consistently. Eventually, your audience will come to expect certain types of content on certain days.

You can also take advantage of recurring trends like #motivationmonday and #workoutwednesday.

1. Begin by inputting any activities that aren’t flexible, like global fitness events and product launch deadlines
2. Then add content that builds excitement for, or supports these activities
3. Lastly, add the content that doesn’t have fixed dates, organised by type or theme

Below are examples of how you might organise your calendar ideas by theme, along with some for sourcing content…

Mondays – Motivational Quotes

• Bookmark or highlight phrases that stand out to you in online articles or books
• Lift quotes from your own blog posts
• Perform a Google search for ‘motivational quotes’ to get new ideas
• Align them with fears or barriers that are likely to be holding your ideal client back (e.g. a busy mother who feels guilty about ‘me-time’ might need reassurance that it’s actually ok to look after herself)
• Use hashtags like #motivationmonday or #quotestoliveby

Tuesday – Tips & Tricks

• Summarise one actionable tip from a previous blog article into a social media post
• Pull out a statistic and expand on what it means for your customers
• Answer a frequently asked question
• Make your tips and tricks posts more visual by turning them into an image (Canva is great for this)
• Can you use the #transformationtuesday hashtag?

 
Social Media Kit – 365+ Ready-Made Fitness Posts

Wednesday – Promote

• Publish a blog article on your website that promotes your product or service
• Share customer testimonials highlighting why your offering is great
• Include a short teaser sentence about what someone will learn from your blog post (i.e. why should they read it?)
• Use the hashtag #workoutwednesday if it’s relevant

Thursday – Network

• Share a relevant post from a complimentary Facebook page – your audience will appreciate that you’re opening them up to new sources of info instead of only talking about your own content
• The pages you promote will appreciate you expanding their reach, which opens up networking opportunities for future collaborations (or they might share your content in return)
• To share on Facebook, click on the image so that it appears with a black background, then copy the hyperlink, paste into your timeline and schedule it.

Friday – Interact

• Ask a question that encourages interaction, and builds your community
• Request advice or ask your audience about their weekend plans related to fitness, training, food etc
• Try to make the topic relevant to upcoming blog articles, so you can include their suggestions where appropriate

Saturday – Educate

• Remind them about a previous blog post, but not your most recent one (perhaps a post from the week before last)
• Pull out a stat, quote, or write a different intro – don’t just repeat whatever you said when you originally shared it
• The majority of your audience won’t have seen your original post, so you can re-share it several times with a different twist without sounding repetitive

Sunday – Entertain

• Share a funny GIF or meme that’s related to health, fitness, nutrition, positive thinking etc
• You can find content from Facebook pages like this one and this one
• Or search for content using the hashtags ‪#‎FunnyFitnessMemes and ‪#‎FunnyFitnessGifs

Now you have your fitness marketing calendar outlined, you know exactly what you need to create and share.

Planning Your Fitness Marketing Calendar – Overview

So, now you have a 3 step plan to create your fitness social media calendar or content plan…

1. Plan – define your objective
2. Brainstorm – come up with strategies and tactics
3. Schedule – organise your best ideas into a calendar

By following your fitness marketing calendar, everything you create will be aligned with your business goals.

You’ll have a huge advantage over 99% of your competitors who don’t have a content plan. And your lead generation funnel will produce results more consistently.

Fitness Business Templates

Take a look at our Fitness Business Bundle for ready-made sales templates. They take the time, hassle, and guesswork out of marketing and promotions… 
Fitness Business Templates

Our ready-made templates make it quicker, cheaper, and easier to promote your fitness business. They can improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing campaigns. If you aren’t an experienced marketer, then templates also provide a useful guide for you to follow.

Whether you run a gym club, fitness studio, or personal training business, these templates will save you time and effort. They’ll help you to plan and organize your promotional activities so that you generate more revenue. You’ll get 40+ templates covering sales, marketing, and business start-up resources.