Steal this gym owner’s social media strategy

What’s up Gym World?

Most gym owners know they should be posting content. The problem is actually doing it consistently without it taking over your life.

This week we spoke with Isaac Morgado, owner of MVMT Strength in London, Ontario, who's figured out how to make it work. Isaac has been in the gym business since 2017, hit over $1M in annual revenue in 2022, and currently averages around 140 leads per month.

Here's what he's doing and how he's doing it.

Stop waiting until you're ready

Isaac thinks perfectionism is one of the biggest things holding gym owners back from posting content. Chances are they're watching other gyms and feel like they need to match some standard before putting anything out.

So they wait, and nothing goes up.

His view is that you just need something on your socials. Why?

Because when a prospect sees your ad and clicks over to your Instagram or website, they want to see that the gym is active. A few decent posts beat a perfectly curated page that hasn't been updated in months.

Build your page before you run ads

Before Isaac leaned into paid advertising, he spent years putting content out organically. He wanted to make their page feel like a place worth visiting, show what MVMT is about, who trains there, and what the coaches are like.

By the time he started running ads, there was already something worth landing on. A prospect clicking through from a Facebook ad would find Google review highlights, member photos, podcast clips, blog posts, and training tips all in one place. The idea is to make it easy for someone to decide they trust you before they ever reach out.

Isaac has been tracking his ad performance since 2018, and what he's found is that paid and organic support each other. When they pull back on organic, they see fewer paid leads come in. When they pull back on ads, the same thing happens on the organic side.

Long-form content builds trust faster than short-form

Isaac records one episode of The Movement Podcast per week, and he makes it for his members. His thinking is that if his current members want to hear something, his prospects probably do too.

And it shows up in his sales process. New clients regularly walk into their No-Sweat Intro and bring up the podcast. They've already spent time listening to Isaac and his coaches before ever setting foot in the gym, which is a different level of trust than a short reel can build.

The podcast has been running since 2019, so there's a lot of content that keeps working for them over time.

His content workflow from start to finish

Isaac uses AI for his content, but he's not having it write everything from scratch. He drafts something himself first, then runs it through an AI tool to tighten the grammar and fill any gaps. That way it still sounds like him and his team.

For video, here's how the whole thing works:

• He records the podcast with a two-camera setup and syncs the footage in Premiere Pro

• He runs it through AutoPod, which automatically cuts between speakers based on who's talking. What used to take hours of editing now takes about 30 seconds

• The full episode goes up on YouTube, where he uses Gemini to pull blog ideas and post concepts from the video

• He then uploads the YouTube link to Opus Clips, which cuts the episode into short-form clips, and uploads those on YouTube Shorts

• After a few days, he checks which clips performed best and reposts those to Instagram Stories

Start to finish, Isaac says the whole process takes about 30 minutes.

Everything is planned ahead of time

Nothing gets decided on the fly. Isaac plans content 7 to 10 days ahead and uses Meta's scheduler to get everything queued up.

Here's what a typical week looks like for MVMT Strength:

• 7 PM daily: Motivational quote

• Every second day at 6 PM: Fun or educational reel

• Mon, Wed, Fri at 10 AM: Google review highlights

• Mon and Wed at 1 PM: Blog story promotion

• Every second day at 6 AM: Podcast snippet

• Every second day at 12 PM: Member photo with training tip

• Every third day at 9 AM: Pop-up class promotions

That's not including his personal Instagram, where he posts 1 to 2 times per week and around 4 Stories per day. The volume is high, but because it's all planned ahead, he's not figuring out what to post each morning.

The one thing to do this week

If you're not sure where to start, Isaac's advice is to open a calendar, map out the week, and decide what goes out on which days and at what time.

And if you need somewhere to draw inspiration from, Cassie Day's content strategy is a great place to start.

You don't need a full strategy on day one. A schedule you can actually stick to is worth more than a perfect plan you never execute.

cheers,

j