Developing a brand for a gym is pivotal to standing out in a crowded market. In the modern-era fitness marketplace, emotional branding has become even more influential when marketing your facility. In this blog, we will dive into gym brand building for target audience, leveraging your brand, and making adjustments to keep your business fresh and relevant.
What is Branding
So, what is branding, and how do you build a gym brand? HubSpot concisely defines branding as “the identity and story of a company that makes it stand out from competitors that sell similar products or services.” Building on HubSpot’s definition, branding is not just the presentation of your studio’s space, the name of your fitness business, or even your logo. Branding a gym is built from the foundation up – starting with your core values, target audience, and strategic points of distinction in your fitness facility.
But when and how do you start building a brand for your gym? The best time to start is right away. So, let’s get ready to dive in with the first foundation point: establishing and understanding your fitness facility’s target audience.
Understanding Your Gym’s Target Audience and Their Values
Knowing who these people might be is essential when defining your gym or personal training studio’s target audience. It’s common to break the target audience down by sociological or physical features, such as age, location, income, job title, or gender. Other topics gym owners should include are interests, especially regarding niche offerings within the market. This niche interest is where a gym’s point of distinction should overlap specifically with this segment of customers in the market.
But how do we know who these people are? There are a few ways to establish your audience; however, the two we will quickly cover here should cover two main category types of owners. The first applies to fitness facility owners already established with members but don’t know their ideal client type. We recommend looking at your members for this category and trying to quantify similarities, overlapping values, and commonalities. Additionally, factoring in details about what type of clients naturally jive well with your facility compared to those you feel you have to work hard to “sell” them on the benefits of your gym can be a critical detail to look for.
The other method would be for trainers looking to open a gym in the near future or someone who recently opened a training studio. For this, we recommend looking at what you or your facility offers or does that differs from other competitors in your area. As we mentioned earlier, this requires knowing how you plan to establish yourself by establishing strategic points of differentiation. With this information at your mind’s forefront, build your ideal client or member who would benefit from your service or space. As you begin to note these data points, you will slowly start to narrow down the variables of the general population to hone in on your target audience profile.
Gym Brand Building for Target Audience
Once your target audience is appropriately defined and understood, the “fun” part of design begins. When gym brand building for target audiences, you need to take into account the customers’ points of view, values, perspectives, and interests. By this, we mean you need to align your business in a way that fits their natural interests and needs based on your research. That said, when considering things like space design, equipment, colors, logo design, and even amenities & services, structuring these elements to work with your target audience can go a long way in terms of building a comfortable space that they enjoy and makes them feel specifically welcomed.
Further, expanding on other parts of your business besides the facility’s physical space and core functions or services to establish a brand that best aligns with your audience can be a tremendous individualizing tactic. Genuinely incorporating events, structuring your language and messaging, and even integrating causes into your gym brand-building process for your target audience can be great opportunities to solidify your space in the market.
Leveraging the Power of Emotion in Your Gym’s Brand Building
As you establish your gym’s brand-building for the target audience, you may notice more ideal client profile types joining your gym. The goal is to continue this momentum while growing and establishing roots with the current ones to improve retention rates. To do that, owners must focus on regular quality contact points or interaction with members or clients. Fitness facility owners must build these into their gym’s processes so staff naturally engage with clients at specific, high-impact times, places, or situations.
Additionally, being true to the brand style you’ve developed is critical for growing trust. Consistency, care, and listening to your clients can go a long way in earning trust and building loyalty. Finally, cultivating a community around your gym can also do wonders for engagement, retention, and referrals. When emotions like trust and community are built into your brand by design and are appropriately cared for and maintained, success tends to follow.
Testing, Tweaking, and Talking About Your Gym’s Brand
As with anything we do, we always like to approach it systematically. When building a brand for your gym’s target audience, running tests early in the process is a great way to quickly find what works (or doesn’t). However, continually checking back on various elements to ensure you are still in line with your audience’s values, interests, and needs is critical.
If you start to see a change in audience profile, culture, or retention rates, reviewing your branding and target audience profiles can be a good starting point to know if you’ve gone astray. Additionally, by continuously monitoring your business, you can make minor improvements based on your information and testing to help keep your business top-of-mind and heart with your audience.
Finally, don’t stop talking about your brand. Stay passionate about your fitness business. That will shine not only on your client base but also on your employees and business operations. By living your brand and engaging with your company and audience, you give yourself an excellent opportunity to experience things first-hand and lead your staff by example.
Making A Splash
For some, gym brand building for target audiences is a marketing buzzphrase. However, modern times allow customers to access information readily. Depending on how owners position and brand their gyms online, this information review can make or break conversions, especially in the fitness market. By strategically mapping out your ideal client type and building a brand that aligns with their values and interests, you open yourself up for more opportunities to grow an emotionally tied community. This emotional branding and loyalty sparked from understanding and leveraging your target audience can, in turn, help to promote better retention rates, allow for more straightforward sales propositions, and build a foundation for a robust, long-term, sustainable growth plan.
