By
Sarah Harris
Whether you’re a fitness or health coach, trainer, influencer, clothing brand, gym, or exercise studio, this article will act as a guide for building a brand in the busy fitness market.
What is a Fitness Brand?
Building a “fitness brand” simply means building a recognizable image that promotes health, fitness, and overall wellness.
Reasons to Build a Fitness Brand
For gyms, studios, trainers, and the like, building a fitness brand is what sets you apart in an incredibly busy space.
Without a recognizable brand, you’re just another person or workout facility in a sea of similarity. However, when you have a brand, you’re not only able to define your target audience with more clarity, but your target audience (read: customers) will be able to find you much more easily.
And if they happen to lose track of you for a moment, a recognizable brand will allow them to easily find you again, which is a major key for repeat customers!
Getting Started
If you’ve been searching “how to build a brand,” then you might be having difficulty figuring out what your starting point really is.
For fitness and health coaches, you’ll want to focus on personal branding. However, if you’re growing your studio or gym, you’ll want to focus more on the branding of your business as a whole.
While the process for both is similar, a personal brand is centralized around the individual, while a studio or gym’s brand is more focused on the company culture and the type of people who train in their space.
Questions to Ask Yourself While Creating Your Brand
As you get started on developing this cohesive image of yourself or your business, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions to narrow your focus.
What Products or Services Do I Provide to My Customer?
This is a major consideration. Is your value to a potential client purely your personal training? Does your gym have its own supplement line? Do you sell t-shirts for club members? Maybe you’ve used your expertise to self-publish a cookbook or health guide. Whatever it is, define it!
What is My Mission or Goal?
This is your “why.” Why do you do what you do? How does it strike a personal chord with you, and how does it connect with your target audience?
For example, perhaps you achieved a significant weight loss goal, and now, you help others to do the same through exciting dance classes. Maybe yoga assisted in your recovery after a career-changing injury, and now, you help others find their flow through stretching and meditation.
Whatever you choose, your mission needs to align with your passions and the values of your followers.
What Are My Plans for Growth?
While you certainly can rebrand yourself or your business, it can be a tedious process. Instead, thinking about your future course of action while you’re in the process of building a brand can be helpful.
For example, do you want to add more trainers to your team down the road? Are you interested in starting your own clothing line? Are you going to be adding new locations? These are all things to keep in mind when you’re preparing your business plan.
What is My Brand’s Personality?
When you’re learning how to build a brand, you’re also discovering the ways to create an image that your followers and customers can feel a sense of loyalty toward. What type of audience you will attract — as well as how well you retain that audience — will depend on the personality of your business.
For example, if you’re looking to gain a following of serious bodybuilders, you shouldn’t sell items with yoga-related fitness slogans. Instead, you would shoot for a business “personality” that more closely matches an idea that your target audience will bond with.
Steps to Building a Fitness Brand That’s Marketable
Successful fitness brands maintain a consistent feel across all of their platforms and spaces. There are a few ways to help you find this consistency and communication style.
Determine Your Niche
It’s really hard to break into the “fitness” world if you don’t have a specialty. In particular, you want to look at what you’re best at (or what you’re known for) and narrow in on that while thinking about your future audience.
Really nailing down your niche can be done by creating a “character,” a fictional representation of your whole audience. Think about your perfect customer, follower, or member. What do they do? What content and products are most valuable to them?
Keep this single character in mind when you’re deciding on a communication style. This makes it easier than trying to appeal to the masses. If you can appeal to this ideal character, then you’ll find real customers with similar traits knocking at your door.
Build a Top-Notch Website
Your website needs to be easy to use, nice to look at, and capable of tracking data. There are a collection of great, easy-to-use site-building tools out there. If it’s not your thing, it might be worth investing in someone else’s help.
Bottom line: If you don’t have a great website, no one will stick around on your eCommerce site long enough to buy your products or services.
Develop a Social Media Game Plan
This is where social media savvy comes in – especially when you’re learning how to build a fitness brand on Instagram. Implementing marketing campaigns, offering freebies, and selling on Instagram are easy processes with Print Bind Ship fulfillment. And getting the word out about your site is simple through the power of influencers.
When you’re choosing an influencer to approach, you want to go with someone who is in your niche. Asking an influencer who focuses heavily on weight loss and slimming to support your business is not a great choice when your main product is a bulking protein powder. However, a bodybuilder influencer might be perfect.
You’ll also want to reach out to people who have a large enough following to have some sway, but not so large that they won’t work with you. For example, you wouldn’t want to reach out to a celebrity unless you were ready to compete with the likes of Nike and Adidas.
Influencers are a great way to market because you can benefit from a fairly simple process. You can choose to pay for their recommendation or you can simply send them some of your products and ask them for a review on their profile.
Build Your Inventory
You need to be able to fill orders quickly. That usually happens in one of two ways: You can either order your products and store them yourself, or you can have them printed and shipped through a third-party logistics company like Print Bind Ship.
Keeping inventory is a great way to sell products in-person (if you have a small shop set up at your gym), while third-party partners can be a helpful option for people who have limited capital, space, or time.
Tips to Building a Successful Fitness Brand
Building a brand calls for a fair amount of content creation and planning. However, without understanding the best ways to promote yourself and or your business, you cannot truly grow in your personal branding. Here’s a quick rundown on what to focus on as you build your audience.
Building an Audience One Person at a Time
Building a brand is (usually) not a lightning-fast process. In fact, finding an audience for your brand often calls for focusing on one person at a time. Reaching out to people and showing that you care leads to lifelong fans that will, in turn, care about you.
Promoting Yourself as the Authority
When people see you as the expert in your niche, they’re much more inclined to follow you or be interested in what you have to say. Followers may even reach out to you, and other people will want to work with you.
How do you show you’re the go-to person? By providing free, valuable content. If you’re teaching your audience something for free, they’ll be sure to wonder about what is in your training, course, or eBook that could help them even more. It’ll also suggest that you have more to offer than other fitness brands that keep every secret under lock and key.
Form Strategic Partnerships
Some of the best partnerships you’ll make while working on your personal branding are with your suppliers and distributors. For many fitness influencers and brands, a supportive 3PL (third-party logistics) company is their number-one partner.
A 3PL like Print Bind Ship can handle all of the physical pieces of an eCommerce store, including; orders, returns, product printing, inventory, packaging, shipping, and more.
Consider Affiliate Programs
Affiliate marketing is another form of partnership with a financial incentive. An “affiliate,” or someone you believe will promote your brand, will be incentivized to get people to visit your shop because you will give them a cut of whatever their customers order.
While this means that you are giving up some of the money your store makes, you’ll also be getting new eyes on your products; which can be more valuable than the profit you miss.
Where to Go from Here
One of the biggest roadblocks for new fitness brands is fulfilling orders while money is still tight.
That’s where we come in. As part of our goal to help entrepreneurs build their dream businesses, Print Bind Ship is offering new businesses a $500 Startup Fulfillment Voucher, as well as a free consultation with our brand-building expert.
Questions? We have answers. Contact us online to learn more!