Building Your Brand

When discussing the concept of brand building with gym owners, it’s not uncommon to have the conversation jump quickly into logos or color schemes as the primary points of consideration. While these elements are for sure aspects that help with branding, the concept of brand building goes a bit deeper and typically involves more conceptualization of a feeling or experience. 

Where to Begin: Branding a Gym

If you are just starting off opening a facility or are looking to implement branding (or re-branding) initiatives into a current fitness business, you may be wondering where to start. Luckily, the branding process can work organically with strategic business planning. In that light, making sure your business plan is complete with a comprehensive business description that helps identify your unique sales proposition, an adequately identified (and aligned) target audience, financial projections, and a market analysis will set you up for success with branding.

These specific elements of the business plan serve as the primary consideration points to successfully match your business’s brand within your market segment and target audience.

• Business description - This serves as your niche within the market space and your unique points of distinction within the industry.
• Target audience - This gives you the ideal client profile(s) that you will be trying to reach and engage with.
• Financial projections - This helps you understand the budget you need to work with and the costs, run rates, and profits associated with your business.
• Market analysis - This enables you to understand the local competition, saturation, and specialities within your area to plan your business and calculate your chances for success strategically.

Once you have these keys to success for branding your facility from your business plan, the next step to starting your branding process is customer service focused. That’s right; start with your customers and the experiences you want them to have with your facility. By capturing the feelings you want to impart to your customers, you will have a more precise roadmap going forward in actualizing your branding vision.

Embodying Your ‘Why’

The business description was mentioned above, but one aspect of a description that is often neglected or overlooked completely is the “why” associated with your business. When you, the owner, have a clear and distinct reason for owning and operating your business, you have a fantastic opportunity to define your business as more than just a facility to do a specific workout. A strong and clear why statement can help differentiate, resonate, and motivate people to not only be interested or sign up with your facility, but it can also give them a reason to keep coming back, build customer loyalty, or even develop a strong community around.

Similar to the business plan, a why statement can play a large role in your branding process as it becomes the reason behind the business, the idea that is larger than just the facility, and the feelings that drive resonation and attachment. These ideas, feelings, and alignments are exactly what branding aspects can help embody and amplify to your target audience and long-term members.

The Customer Journey and Branding

Once the foundation for your branding is set within the business plan, the next phase tends to do with understanding your target audience and their buyer’s journey. This journey is essentially all the steps involved, from initially learning about your business to becoming a customer and all the touchpoints between. While we still aren’t necessarily talking logos just yet, these steps are really what help capture your audience’s eyes, ears, and interest.

One of the first points of the customer journey is the learning process - aka how a lead finds out about your business. This could happen from an internet search, flyers, physical location, etc. The branding comes into play with understanding how and where your ideal customers would look for your solution to their specific problem. Therefore, ensuring that your business has proper identification, can be searched online, and has a clear definition of what your business is about will help guide your aligned leads along their sales journey with your brand. 

Aside from the initial search and learning process, understand that all the interaction points with your business become part of your brand’s personality and feel. Things like how your website (or flyer) is designed, how the information is laid out, and the types of words or tone you use to describe it all matter in helping to support your brand’s why statement. Additionally, the in-person factors are also incredibly important like how forms and waivers are collected, how tours are booked and delivered, how they book their classes/memberships/consultations (as well as how they are delivered), and even how your follow-up post-sale with onboarding, check-ins, progress reports, or ongoing touch points all have a role in building a strong brand for your fitness business.

The Final Touch - Surface Level Marketing

Finally, now that we’ve discussed how to build the foundation and layers that make up the bulk of the branding cake, it’s time for the surface-level stuff that makes it shine. While we won't go into extensive details on the science behind colors, logos, and fonts used in branding (there is just way too much to unpack for each one of those elements), it’s important to think about what mood you want your brand to invoke. Whether it be passion, commitment, happiness, excitement, or any other specific emotion, searching and experimenting with combinations that help materialize that goal feeling into your brand is essential.

Additionally, supporting your brand’s ‘why’ with well-thought-out taglines, equipment selection, layouts, and even decorations can also help solidify a deeper connection with your customers and your brand when it properly resonates. These final pieces are the elements that help vocalize (in a sense) the non-tangible feelings or emotions you want your brand to invoke and help people develop a community structure around this shared interest and experience.