The necessity of building your brand does not vary whether you are just starting out in the fitness industry or have been doing it for years. Your brand is what distinguishes your firm from the competition, enables customers to connect with it, and informs the world what your brand is all about.
It can be steadfast in certain aspects while also being flexible in others, expressing the constants of your business but also developing with the times or as your brand grows. So, how do you go about establishing this crucial and diverse aspect of your company?
By implementing brand strategy, values, mission, vision, styles, and brand building online, you may establish an authentic and distinctive fitness brand. Continue reading to learn more about how to start a fitness brand.
What is the most popular fitness brand?
👉🏻 Nike. Without a doubt, Nike is one of the most well-known workout and athletic clothing brands.
What Is Fitness Branding
A fitness brand is just how the rest of the world perceives you. It’s the message you give out to the rest of the world, particularly to your customers, workers, and associates. Your fitness brand is an extension of yourself. Besides, there are many factors to consider on how to start a fitness brand. So, building a fitness brand as an entrepreneur entails more than just developing a social media or marketing plan. Having a brand establishes trustworthiness, credibility, and success.
One of the most competitive and profitable sectors is fitness. If you like to stand out, you must cut through the chaos and build a memorable image. Generating an authentic fitness brand, on the other hand, is a multi-step process. Various revolving mechanisms join together to create the kind that deserves your support.
It is worthwhile to devote time and resources to fitness branding. Besides, no matter what is going on in the industry, a strong brand is necessary for growth.
Why Should You Create a Fitness Brand
So, why should you bother creating a fitness brand in the first place? The difference between scraping by and being incredibly successful as a fitness entrepreneur has a positive brand. Your fitness studio will become a commodity, just another fitness studio if you don’t have a brand, and you’ll have to struggle every day to attract and keep consumers.
Clients will flock to you through word-of-mouth referrals if you are successful in developing a fitness brand. Your acquisition costs will drop, and your members will stick with you for longer. All of this implies that you will be more lucrative or able to invest in future expansion.
Compare this to a fitness studio or club that hasn’t invested in developing a brand. Maybe you’ve spotted these gyms or studios in your neighborhood. The name or the value proposition is gone. They presumably go there since it’s close by, but they’ll change if a new gym or studio opens up on the same road.
In today’s hyper-competitive fitness environment, the only thing keeping your gym or fitness studio from becoming a commodity is the brand you create.
What steps do people take to become fitness influencers?
To become a successful fitness influencer, create a distinct niche and use high-quality images. Develop your audience through consistent posting and genuine engagement. Set objectives for how you intend to monetize your fitness influencer efforts.
What Is the Best Way to Determine Your Fitness Brand Positioning
Begin by identifying some of your rivals. If you haven’t yet begun your operations, identify some other fitness firms that you believe will be your competitors once you do.
Then, determine the characteristics that distinguish rivals in the sector. Similarly, use the brand positioning table to determine the brand positioning of your significant competitors. After you’ve determined your brand’s positioning, the next step is to incorporate it into your marketing.
What Is Your Fitness Brand’s Style
Your fitness brand’s design, colors, name, and aesthetics define its style. The tone could be warm, feminine, competitive, or aggressive.
- Naming
The name of your fitness brand is an essential aspect of your overall brand, and you’ll think about it alongside the logo and general design.
- Logo
Your logo is an important part of your brand’s aesthetic. The logo plays an integral part in brand identity and memory, especially for a fitness brand.
- Design
Your overall style is reflected in your design. The design will tell the world if your company is quirky, welcoming, fierce, and so on. Include the chosen design in all customer-facing assets, such as your website, fitness studio booking software, and social media.
How Do I Start Fitness Marketing
Are you thinking about how to start a fitness brand? Well, you first need to develop your fitness marketing strategy. It is one of the most crucial aspects of running your business, whether you’re a small gym or a big chain of gyms. In some cases, word-of-mouth marketing can account for the majority of your new member acquisition. In more competitive areas, though, word-of-mouth isn’t always enough.
Fitness clubs are small businesses, which means they must fight for clients in a highly competitive local market. So, how do fitness companies compete in such a competitive market? In this article, we’ll go through 11 fitness marketing methods and how to properly promote your fitness services to attract new customers.
- Establish a user-friendly site
It’s no secret that around 54% of consumers use the internet as their first or second point of contact when looking for a business. That’s more than half of your target audience! This is where your site can be of use. You’ll need a website that meets the following criteria to attract customers online:
- Available in search engines;
- Instructive about the club’s location, hours, and facilities, among other things;
- Easy to navigate.
Creating a website from the ground up may appear to be a difficult task, and finding somebody to do it for you can be expensive. Fortunately, digital solutions like Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace can help you develop a version of your site that can serve as your gym’s digital advertising touchpoint.
Once you’ve established and developed a functional website., you can integrate or connect an API to an existing customer portal for your gym to allow new and existing members to sign up, transfer money, and book training sessions, classes, or amenities.
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You can lead customers here immediately with a link or from your site for a quick sign-up to bring them into your club fast and easily while you’re promoting fitness programs through promotional advertising campaigns. After that, you’ll need to get people to visit your website. This is where search engines come in handy.
- Determine your target market
It is unrealistic to expect to appeal to everyone, and if you attempt, you may wind up failing to reach anyone at all. If you have a little bit of everything and don’t specialize, your brand will be easy to forget.
Now attempt to think about who you want to target and what they anticipate from you. Knowing your specialization when it comes to branding can really help you figure out what techniques will work best for you. Because the fitness business is so crowded, being very explicit about who you are as a brand and who you serve might help you stand out.
For instance, you might wish to cater to powerlifters and bodybuilders. Alternatively, you may target women who want to keep active and fit. You may even cater to new parents who want to lose weight and feel more invigorated after having a baby. Whatever it is, if you can identify your specialty, you’ll be well on your way to identifying your consumer personas.
If you’re trying to cater to multiple niches, just make sure you create personas for each one. You may focus on the language and visuals that will help you connect with them once you’ve determined who you want to be able to serve.
A fictional representation of the individuals in each of these niches can be created with the use of a consumer persona. As many diverse details as possible should be included in your personas. The age of the customer, their workout habits, their gender, and other factors should all be considered.
Knowing all of this information can assist you in determining how effectively to invest the funds you have set aside for your brand building and marketing initiatives.
- Local SEO for fitness and gyms
Local SEO is among the most cost-effective kinds of fitness marketing because it is free and can result in significant returns on investment if you rank well for local searches. Whether you have one or numerous fitness businesses, consumers need to be able to find them quickly, and the majority of the time, they use local searches.
“Gyms around me,” “fitness clubs near me,” and “gyms in [city name]” are all words they’ll utilize.
These are extremely competitive terms, so no matter what you do, you won’t immediately rank highly for them. To appear in Local Packs, you’ll need to focus on your local SEO to score highly for the keywords.
This is the approach to gaining more gym customers if you’re also thinking about how to get more fitness members. To get your site to rank locally, you’ll need to do the following:
- Establish many local citations;
- Apply local keywords;
- Ensure that your NAP (name, address, and phone number) is consistent across your website and citations;
- Create a “Google My Business Page” for your company.
Increase your brand awareness with gym SEO here!
- Stay updated on your fitness marketing campaigns
As previously mentioned, a large portion of client acquisition takes place online. It’s critical to understand which marketing methods are most successful for your club or fitness center when seeking to drive customers to your website or client portal.
That’s why, in order to track the effectiveness of every fitness advertising campaign, you must always set up goal monitoring in Google Analytics. You might need some help from a developer to do this, but knowing which campaigns are delivering you the most leads is well worth it.
After you’ve set up your goals, you’ll need to add UTM tags to every link you share on social media, in emails, and so on. By just naming every campaign, the media, and the source, you may create UTM tags. It will be displayed in Google Analytics whenever you give out the link and somebody hits it and reaches the target you’ve put up on your site.
This can come in handy whenever you want to understand what the return on investment (ROI) is on a link you put out or any other digital advertising campaign plans you have for your gym. So, if you really want to take things further, you can combine your Google Analytics monitoring with a fitness CRM in your club’s management system so you can see which leads have turned into paying members right away. Try Sparkmembership club’s management software at $1!
Even if the majority of fitness club marketing results are managed in person, understanding the success or shortcomings of any marketing campaign will always be beneficial when deciding how to invest your gym’s advertising budget next time around.
- Create fitness content marketing
While content marketing is usually a smart idea for gyms, you must be aware that fitness-related terms are quite competitive in the realm of search engine advertising for fitness firms and the wellness industry. Ranking for a keyword such as “how to do a warm-up” isn’t going to offer you a lot of targeted traffic because folks searching for that phrase aren’t going to be local 99 percent of the time.
Ranking for fitness and local-oriented keywords, on the other hand, can be beneficial. Local targeting is incorporated into locally-oriented content like the ones listed below:
- best outdoor gyms in [city name]
- where to purchase affordable supplements in [city name]
Simply start blogging about fitness in your neighborhood on a fitness blog.
- Create video content marketing to remain competitive
With so many social media platforms encouraging video content, joining the frenzy to advertise your fitness facility is a no-brainer. Video content enables potential customers to see what it’s like to work out in your fitness center, how great your club is, and how much pleasure your members are having!
You can promote your gym by using Facebook’s live stream to tell those who like your page what’s going on in your gym in real-time. Instagram is also a terrific way to promote your gym’s video content in terms of fitness marketing. It might be useful when individuals look for fitness regimens, classes, or personal trainers in their region using location and/or hashtags.
It’s a terrific method to keep in touch with current members while also advertising your gym to potential customers who are on social media.
- Post on different social media sites to attract more clients
After analyzing the social media profiles of over 100 fitness firms, we discovered that 82 percent of them post on Facebook or Instagram on a daily basis. That isn’t by chance. Fitness social media marketing campaigns have been around since online platforms became widely utilized, as they have the additional benefit of interacting with your present customers and exhibiting to future clients what your gym is like in general.
In any fitness marketing strategy, social media has been one of the most extensively used channels. Just ensure to use UTM tags if you would like to track how many individuals signed up for your group. You can use a free application like Buffer to schedule posts in advance, cross-post between several social media sites, evaluate engagement, and track your results if you want to simplify your social media postings. It’s an excellent tool for maintaining your gym’s online marketing on track.
- Consider gym promotions to attract new customers
Getting in shape is probably the most overhyped New Year’s resolution “New Year, new me.” Gyms’ standard fitness marketing technique in reaction to this fitness-related new year’s resolution is to provide substantial membership discounts to customers who sign up within a certain time frame after the new year begins.
There’s never a terrible moment to run a campaign, but make sure you use the “scarcity” factor, which means people are more likely to buy something if it’s only available for a short time. As a result, it’s critical not to run your fitness marketing campaign all year long, or the value of the scarcity will be vastly reduced, and customers will begin to mistake the discounted price for the regular price.
But how do you reach out to a new audience and inform them about your club’s promotion? Here are some helpful tips for marketing your gym’s special offers:
- print advertising;
- increase the rewards for users who recommend friends;
- billboards;
- use Facebook or Google to run sponsored digital marketing initiatives.
Because the last two are hard to assess, make sure your front desk worker or sales staff are inquiring about new leads and how they heard about the promotion explicitly.
- Start a referral program and delegate the work to your existing members
Your gym’s members might sometimes be the best source of gym advertising. You can build a gym referral program to attract your members to recommend their family and friends if you give them good services and facilities and reward them.
When one of your members refers a friend or family member to your club and that new prospect joins, you can reward both of them so that they’re more inclined to keep recommending others to your gym. A referral program can be implemented in a number of ways:
- include it in your club’s mobile app;
- emails;
- referral cards.
The most crucial aspect of launching a referral program for your club is ensuring that your members are aware of it.
You can use social media, submit emails, place banners in your club, or have a device in your mobile app, as discussed above. The second most critical factor is to make it simple for your users to claim ownership of a recommendation. This is why it is best to do it digitally with your app so that the referral number may be linked to an existing member when a prospect or lead uses a guest pass.
Then you may thank your member (and the prospect, if they become a new client) however you want. Any fitness marketing strategy for clubs should include a club referral program as a standard feature.
- Take advantage of affiliate marketing
If you’re still looking for a way to increase gym membership, affiliate marketing is the way to go. When you set up an affiliate marketing program, you allow people within your gym to recommend other people who are intrigued by joining your gym.
It can be an excellent marketing approach for your gym in terms of bringing in clients from people they respect. You can receive payments for new subscriptions while you sleep if you have a client portal setup. Even in the most remote locations, a variety of businesses can send their customers to your club, including:
- personal trainers;
- doctors;
- supplement providers;
- physical therapists;
- fitness stores.
You can entice these companies by offering them discounted subscriptions or a flat fee for each member they suggest, such as 20% of their contract value.
You can provide a space for personal trainers to train their customers commission-free as long as the members have a current membership. Clients will then connect their trainers with your club, allowing you to keep them for extended periods of time.
- Create a weekly newsletter and send it out weekly
You could believe that gym newsletters are reserved for current members. That is incorrect. Yes, they should include the most recent club news, but they can also be utilized to market to churned members or previous leads who haven’t purchased a membership.
Your churned members may have canceled their membership, but they are almost always still registered to your emails, allowing you to contact them with club news, specials, and fitness tips.
You may, for example, present a “Member of the Week” every week, highlighting their accomplishments at the gym. This type of recognition honors people who have worked hard to achieve their goals while also motivating churned members to return to the gym.
You’ll be able to stimulate the curiosity of current and past members in any case. Just remember to provide an unsubscribe link to avoid invading your subscribers’ privacy. If they don’t opt out, you can still email them as long as you have their permission.
- Increased visibility through remarketing
When somebody visits your site but does not make a transaction, you place adverts elsewhere on the internet in the hopes that they will notice them and return to your site to make a purchase. When it comes to fitness remarketing, you have a significantly reduced chance of determining whether or not someone was converted as a result of your remarketing advertising because they will more than likely come into your facility to sign up.
However, this does not negate the fact that it has validity. Visitors who are remarketed to on a website are 70% more likely to convert. For those who viewed your pricing page, you can build remarketing ads with information that offers an online-only promotion. They’ll be able to take advantage of a cheap subscription, and you’ll be able to track the success of these campaigns more simply.
The following are instances of common remarketing platforms:
- Instagram;
- Facebook;
- Twitter;
- LinkedIn;
- Google Display Network.
💡 To start a successful remarketing campaign, you must first get consumers to visit your website or client portal. You can then track which pages they visit in order to gain a better understanding of their objectives and serve them advertisements based on which pages they visited.
- Organize an event at your fitness center
You should rejoice in all the success, kindness, and healthy lifestyle that your club is assisting members in enjoying! Ask your members to a social gathering at your club or another location, and advise them to bring their friends. It’s a great chance for them to network and meet some of their peers while also getting a taste of the positive environment that your staff and members enjoy.
The following are some good gym marketing concepts for events:
- Holiday events;
- Club anniversaries;
- Staff birthdays;
- Membership milestones;
- Workers birthdays.
A healthy body and mind are always a reason for celebration, no matter what the occasion! It just so happens that you’ll meet some new people and possibly gain some new clients as a result of it. Your members will be your best marketers if you promote your gym as a place for change, community, and progressive impact.
What Is the Best Way to Create a Fitness Brand
The focus of this section will be on the measures you may take to begin developing your fitness brand. We’ll go over high-level strategies as well as some fundamental strategies to help you build your fitness brand.
Branding for the fitness industry
Do not be put off by the business conditions if you are a solo fitness instructor or personal trainer. Even if you’re just starting out, believe that you can think and execute. Consider your fitness brand strategy to be your north star, the compass that guides all of your business’s operations.
Your brand strategy will outline the path you’ll take, and you’ll devise ways to carry it out. We’ll go over three important aspects of your fitness brand strategy in this article: your niche, target market, and brand positioning.
Identifying your fitness specialization
Identifying your niche is the first step in creating a unified fitness brand. The majority of you will already have a general concept of the fitness niche in which you will work. You’ll know whether you’re going to open a fitness studio or a Yoga center, for example.
Your knowledge and objectives will help you find a niche. To find a niche, you must also consider the competition, geography, and demand. The fitness specialty you choose will have a big impact on your branding.
Identifying your fitness market
The sustainability of your fitness business will be determined by your ability to identify your target market. It is frequently recommended that you test your brand proposition with multiple groups of customers to determine which group gives you the most business. This group will represent your target market. This way of identifying your target market is a continuous testing process.
You can, however, address this difficulty backward as you begin to design your brand. You might begin by identifying the people and groups of people with whom your brand will collaborate, as well as the groups with whom it will not collaborate. This thought experiment will influence your marketing and branding in the short term and possibly for the rest of your fitness business’s life.
Branding your fitness business
The type of clients you get will be determined by how you position your fitness brand. Your brand positioning determines where your fitness brand fits in relation to the other fitness brands on the market.
3 Qualities of a Successful Fitness Brand
When you talk about some of the world’s top brands, it often seems like you’re describing a person. Genuine, honest, and confident are frequently used to describe some of the most powerful companies. The following are three characteristics of top fitness brands.
- Consistent and relevant
Building brand recognition is important because people are more inclined to buy a brand they are familiar with. Companies with uneven branding risk misleading potential customers and giving the impression of being untrustworthy and low-quality.
Mixed messages obstruct the delivery of value and the development of brand awareness. In order to build a distinctive and effective brand, consistency is essential. Brands that make themselves relevant to their target client on a regular basis build stronger emotional bonds.
- Excellent planning
A strong brand strategy is essential for a successful brand. They have all of the characteristics of a successful brand, but it’s how they use those elements that separate them from the competition. The most successful businesses understand how to establish a true and emotional bond with their clients. They have the same morals and values as their target market.
Your brand strategy leads your marketing approach as well as getting your brand in front of consumers. As a result, there is a genuine connection, increased brand awareness, and increased client loyalty.
- Strong visual identity
For the customer, visual branding generates an experience. The visual appearance of your brand is critical to its overall success. It’s a tool for communicating with your target audience while also aesthetically reflecting your brand.
Visual branding is typically one of the most powerful techniques in catching attention, regardless of how good your messaging or business is. In today’s marketing environment, appearance is everything, and the look of your brand will help you achieve long-term success.
You need a great brand, whether you’re just starting out as a fitness entrepreneur or want to rebrand an existing business. In a crowded market, your branding is what enables you to stand out. It’s what will set you apart and help you improve. You can build a loyal following as a result of this, allowing your company to grow significantly.
