Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle - Content Repurposing Plan for Working Smarter

By Tim Mauk, Special FBA Contributor

In the modern marketing landscape, content is a primary driver of engagement, reach, and overall impressions for fitness facilities. That said, developing, creating, and consistently delivering high-quality content can be time-consuming for many studio owners. Because of this perceived burden of commitment, many just choose to refrain from participating or applying minimal effort to their content curation.

Today, we want to help fitness facility owners learn strategic methods they can quickly apply to their content strategy to help reduce many of the associated pain points when beginning this journey. Before jumping too far into this method, one of the primary prerequisites to implementing this process is to know how to produce quality content. You can learn more about this process in our other blog post, Creating Engaging Content for Your Fitness Facility's Blog - And More.

Reduce - Less Can Be More

Social media feeds and many overly genetic blogs will tell you more is the answer. From the quantity of posts you put out daily to the number of followers for your channels, “more, more, more!” is constantly being hammered into our minds. But what if that wasn’t the whole answer?

This blog isn’t going to discuss the specifics of when you should “go live” on your channel for Q&As or what TikTok trends to get on board with, but rather working smarter with the content you choose to create. With that, we recommend two points to remember: be strategic with the content you decide to create and start with the long-form content first.

Strategic Content

Similar to aligning your gym’s branding and offering to your target audience, your content should be no different. Creating content that resonates with people in your niche is critical for maximizing your efforts. Having an outline of your audience’s values, interests, and demographics readily available when considering content can be a great test before going too far into something. Additionally, having content that consistently feeds your audience's direct interests can positively affect overall engagement.

Long-Form Content First

Consider the concept of “eat the frog,” where you start by doing the most challenging thing first when it comes to content. Concentrating on the long-form version (like a blog, explanation video, or in-depth write-up) is a terrific place to begin. When you write the long-form version of a topic, you explore it thoroughly and discuss it at length. You can build on ideas, go in-depth on specifics, or even broaden a topic to introduce adjacent concepts. The key takeaway here is that by removing the need to produce many trivial pieces of content for the sake of “more,” you can focus your energy on a more robust and insightful perspective/coverage of a relevant topic for your niche.

Reuse - Put Your Work to Work

Once you have your strategically chosen long-form piece of content made up, it’s now time to start collecting on your efforts. Breaking down your continent into smaller pieces allows you to redistribute it as other pieces in more applicable places. Taking bit-sized pieces and converting them into easily digestible social media posts, you can efficiently turn a single portion of your long-form content piece into a week’s worth of consistent topical posts. Additionally, these posts can lead interested members to your website for more information, ultimately leveraging your posts into your overall marketing campaign and sales funnel efforts.

When you strike while the iron is hot and mass produce your small content pieces, you can quickly build a sizeable amount of marketing inventory. Leveraging automation into your system can provide additional time and energy savings. Whether you are converting the content into social media posts, emails, or even video segments, building technology into your process can allow you to distribute these individual pieces effectively in a parsed-out method. The removal of having to post content yourself on specific dates and times manually frees you to focus on other essential elements of growing your fitness business.

Recycle - More Doesn’t Always Mean New

A major pain point many fitness business owners face is always coming up with something new to post. Over time, almost every owner experiences a creativity drought, but that shouldn’t bring your marketing efforts to a halt. Recycling old content is a valid marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Pulling up an old piece that performed well and updating it with current or updated information can not only breathe new life into already well-made content but also remind your audience about it.

A powerful perspective to keep in mind as a gym owner/marketer is that just because you made something in the past doesn’t mean the audience or clients have seen it (or remember it). If the information is solid and hasn’t been posted in a while, there is no shame in resurrecting old pieces with fresh takes.

Snapshot Wrap-Up

If you own and operate a fitness business, you feel the pull for your time and energy in every direction. When it comes to your marketing content strategy, don’t let it bog you down manually with the weekly, daily, or hourly need for more. Emphasize creating high-quality, long-form content for your target audience within your niche. Then, you can simply break down and leverage these smaller content pieces into your other marketing channels, like email, social media, or videos. Finally, when your creativity runs low, find older pieces that perform well and breathe new life into them with updated perspectives, insights, and information. By working smarter with this type of content structure, you will free up some of your time and energy to allocate in a way that can better grow your business.