Why You need a Marketing Calendar For Your Fitness Or Wellness Gym in 2022

Every business needs to market itself to grow its customer base. You’re budding with ideas and visions on how you want your wellness or fitness business to grow. This is a great start, but we need to put these ideas into practice.

Take the example of a workout plan. Sticking to a healthy achievable workout plan is vital to improving your fitness. Similarly, creating and sticking to a marketing plan is crucial if you want to achieve your marketing goals.

A marketing calendar will help you to streamline and centralize your marketing campaign efforts. When you record all of your marketing efforts in one place, you can work on marketing goals, track progress and gather results more efficiently, with less room for error.

What is a marketing calendar

Put simply, a marketing calendar is a schedule of all the marketing activities you plan to carry out in the foreseeable future. Giving yourself goals with deadlines will help keep you honest. Without this it’s really easy to keep saying tomorrow, but with a strict self-imposed deadline it’s easier to force yourself to remain on track. It will also help you to prioritize your efforts in an order which makes sense for your business as it grows.

Your marketing calendar should include all high level information required for you to remember what you had planned at the time of writing – remember this could be 6-12 months later when you start working on each part of the plan, so it’s important to include titles, clear notes and a due date on each campaign element.

You can have multiple calendars for social media, email, editorial work, and more. However, unless your company is growing really quickly, we’d recommend having one calendar, and perhaps color coding the different campaign types to keep all information in one neat place. Just like ClassFit is your one stop shop as a studio and gym reservation system, we’d recommend you keep your marketing calendar in one place too.

Why do we emphasize the need for a marketing calendar?

Running a long term marketing campaign, especially if this is on top of teaching classes and running the rest of your business can be a huge effort – even if you have a studio or gym reservation system in place like ClassFit. Forgetting to complete tasks, or putting things off until you have “a bit more time” is going to be a risk unless you have something to keep you vigilant and organized. Beyond this, you want to be able to track not only whether you have completed your marketing goals, but also if your actions have had the desired effect so you can tweak them in the future to work even better.

Set marketing goals – These can be goals which you can control, such as committing to posting every day on your social media outlets, or goals which you hope your marketing efforts which help you achieve such as having 10 full classes per week by the end of the year.

Organize & Plan – Once you have your goals set, decide how much time you can spend on achieving them each week, and plan your actions accordingly.

Remain on brand – A marketing calendar will also help you to plan campaigns which work together. This in turn will help you to ensure your brand speaks with one voice while interacting with your audience.

Track your progress – Keeping all of your plans, in one neat place, with due dates for completion is the best way to ensure that you keep on track with your marketing campaign for your fitness or wellness studio.

Monitor Your Budget – Plan your budget at the start of the year, and keep track of this on your marketing calendar. You may need to make changes to this throughout the year, but at least you can track your spend against your results.

Continual learning – Completing your actions is a big part of your marketing campaign, but so is refinement. It’s important to check that your actions are having the desired results, and if they aren’t, constantly tweak future campaigns until you see the results you want.

What tools can I use to get started?

There are lots of options here. If you’re old-school, you may want to jot everything down on a calendar which you hang on your wall, but we’d recommend using a tool which allows you to write more details down for each campaign. This could be as simple as using your Gmail or Outlook calendar, and creating meetings as your deadlines, and using the meeting itself to write all the notes, content and feedback required in there.

However, as you know, we’re all about using technology to make our customer’s lives easier. We built a great gym reservation system to help you manage your classes easier, and there are some great tools out there to help you manage your marketing calendar too. We’d recommend something like Trello. Trello is amazing, and we use the free version of Trello for a lot of our projects within ClassFit. It’s a really simply tool where you can create piles to show the status of a project for example, Ideas, to do, doing, and done. And in each pile you can create cards with titles, and deadlines (as below).

What’s great about Trello is within each card you can do really useful things like add checklists, notes, pictures, links, and even invite other people to collaborate with.

We also prefer it to a traditional calendar, because if you miss a task on a traditional calendar, it’s really easy to ignore it and leave it in the past. Whereas on Trello you can see that this task is still incomplete, and it’s on you to take the plunge and complete it, or admit you missed that one and delete it. What’s also great about Trello is the gratification of moving your tasks to the complete or done pile, and marveling at all you’ve achieved!

So much of marketing is just about being organized and following through so we hope you found these tips helpful to kickstart your marketing goals in 2022.