A Guide To Branding For Gym Owners

So you want your gym to stand out? You want potential customers to know your gym is the right one the moment they step in the door — or even before.

That ain’t gonna happen by magic.

In today’s world, you aren’t the only gym in town. If you want the flocks to come your way, you need to make it clear that your gym is where they belong. This requires branding. As Seth Godin (a member of the Marketing Hall of Fame) says:

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another.” (1)

Especially if you run a boutique gym, you aren’t just selling access to exercise equipment, you are selling a whole experience, a lifestyle, and a community. Knowing and effectively communicating who you are to your customers through every step of the experience — from first contact to participating in workouts — is key to building a thriving business.

Your vision for your gym

Branding goes much deeper than just defining what type of gym you are: cycling, yoga, etc. Yes, a potential customer wants to know that, but it hardly makes you unique. That tells about the setting. What about the story your customers are going to experience?

Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. What story do you want to create? Start at the beginning. Where do you want to meet people? Next, how are you going to grow together? What experiences, battles, and victories are you going to face together? Finally, what’s the end goal?

Here’s an example.

Beginning: I want to help people who lack confidence.

Middle: I’m going to bring my trainees through physically demanding challenges, pushing them one step at a time to break personal barriers. I’ll instill a positive, can-do attitude by coaching them at low points and encouraging them at high points. Trainees are going to work together as a team, each with personal goals as well as the collective goal of ensuring that they all gain greater confidence.

End: Confident, happy people capable of working with others and solving problems with a positive attitude.

Here we see that your vision for your gym can be about both physical and mental change in people. Really, your vision can be whatever you want it to be. The key is clearly communicating your vision to others. We’ll talk more about this later.

Who you are

Imagine for the sake of argument that you’re an ex-marine with three hundred pounds of pure muscle and a booming voice that sounds like a truck horn. You’re bending bars of metal for fun one day when your newest clients walk in the door. They’re a group of young women from the rich part of town who saw your advertisement at the local health food store.

Now imagine that you’re a health nerd foodie with a head made out of locally grown broccoli and you’re coaching a set of muscle conscious athletes. As you chat with them, you find out that most of them are drinking the newest protein drink loaded with artificial sweeteners and preservatives. Now, this cannot be born. You blow your top and start ranting off science facts about how bad that stuff is and when your students roll their eyes you only start to spout out more facts.

In both of these situations, you’re a total mismatch for your audience. Chances are, you pretended to be something you weren't and attracted the wrong crowd. Sooner or later, they’re going to leave you and go find someone they really connect with.

Birds of a feather flock together. You want to make your personality front and center in your branding because it’s better to connect strongly with a few people than to reach a vast audience and connect with none of them. Be yourself and be yourself loudly.

Your ideal customer

To attract the ideal customer, you must first know what makes them ideal. As a silly but workable example, if your gym is painted pink but your ideal customer wears black, you’ve got a problem.

Maybe your ideal client is wealthy, maybe they are experienced, maybe they are trying to lose weight. Each of these clients wants something different. The wealthy client wants a slick, clean atmosphere. The experienced client wants fitness magazines lying around to pick up at any moment. The client trying to lose weight cares a lot whether or not you have a good figure.

Go ahead and write down all the qualities of your ideal client, then you can move on to brainstorming how to be a magnet for those type of customers.

Standing out

If you know your vision for your gym, who you are, and who your ideal client is, you’re set up to get results when you communicate your brand to others. One more area you might like to consider though is what makes you cool, weird, or exceptional.

One saying that is counterintuitive, but generally very accurate is that “different is better than better.” Yes, you want to offer a great product — you have to. At the same time, lots of people offer quality. But not everyone offers a sushi bar at their gym, or live music, or free pet turtles with a yearlong membership.

If you already have an attractive offer, being just a bit weird may create just enough curiosity to get that potential client through the door.

Implementing the branding

After a little thinking, you now have a good grasp of what makes your gym awesome. It’s almost time to celebrate.

These ideas do you no good though if they only stay in your head. A brand must be communicated. You do this through visuals, text or speech, and the experience you give your customers.

Visuals. You have two visuals to worry about: marketing graphics and how your gym looks. The same principle applies to both. What atmosphere do you want to set and who do you want to attract. For high-intensity workout gyms that are more about power than refinement, you don’t want elegant fonts in your ads or light-wood floors and pastel-colored walls. You want that rough, unbreakable atmosphere that will help your ideal clients feel right at home.

Text/speech. Whether on social media or when talking with a trainee, your words matter. Words are your best opportunity to clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and who you are for. Since you now know the answers to these questions, you’re set to make the perfect sales pitch for your gym. Even when you’re not talking directly about your gym, you know what vibe you want others to get from you, so you’ll be able to attract people who would like you no matter the topic of discussion.

Experience. This is the most important part. A gym can only operate if its customers like coming back. If you run a boutique gym, the experience is everything. The key here is not whether you’re giving an experience, but how quality the experience is you’re giving. There’s a difference between a world-class resort and a Best Western — it’s the quality of the experience. If your goal is to inspire trainees to be more confident and positive, maybe you’re reflecting that in your tone of voice, but what about the background music? The depth of experience you instill in your gym is up to you. Put the effort and creativity in (or get a smart friend to help you with it), and then reap the sweet rewards.

Good branding may take some effort, but it will only make people love your gym more.

That’s not so bad, is it?

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(1) Godin, Seth. (2009, December 13th) define:Brand. Retrieved from https://seths.blog/2009/12/define-brand/