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building a fitness brand

How to BUILD a Fitness Brand

Fitness Branding 101

A few months ago we gave you some top tips on how to CREATE your fitness brand. That was very much aimed at the online coach that might just be starting out or perhaps having a bit of a revamp – it never hurts to go back to basics right?

This month, we wanted to take those 7 starting tips a little further and give you some real gritty insight into what it takes to BUILD a fitness brand.

So in this blog we want to cover storytelling tips, how to design your identity, how to build long-lasting relationships with your community and how to nurture those relationships.

Everything we’ll talk about is straight from our own experience, either with our own brand or when we help to build other fitness brands.

Buckle up, here we go.

Telling a Story: Connecting with your audience on a deeper level

Have you read the book ‘Building a Story Brand’ by Donald Miller? I’m currently halfway through so there are definitely no spoilers here… The crux of the book so far is about making your audience or your client the HERO of a STORY, and NOT making everything about your business.

Which we can all so easily do!

It’s easy to only talk about your fitness business and what services you offer, this is your baby, it’s the project you’ve been developing for (quite likely) years and years. So it’s natural to wax lyrical about your favourite child.

Try to think about things from a different angle, think less about your business as a whole and more about what your business brings and provides to your ideal client.

You should always be crafting your content and your brand story around these three elements:

  1. What your client/audience wants
  2. What challenges their facing in order to get what they want
  3. What their life will look like once they get what they want

If you’ve read our other fitness business blogs, you’ll know we wax lyrical about understanding your client avatar – so their demographics, interests, and location etc… but you also need to take time to understand your audience on a deeper level and craft your marketing and content around this.

To connect with your audience on a deeper level, you need to be able to continually add value, spark emotion, engage imagination and leave a lasting impression through your brand story. Making the audience the HERO of the story, NOT your fitness business.

Design Your Brand Identity: Your Voice and Your Visuals

Your brand should have a ‘look and feel’ to it that is uniquely linked to YOU. 

It’s hard to get this spot on when you’re starting out, so you might want to try a few different styles, imagery and communication methods until you find one that just fits and is just ‘you’.

You need to be able to replicate it, time and time again (consistency is key right?) so getting your visual branding boxed off is crucial before you begin to build your bigger, wider brand identity.

Your brand identity comes from both your visuals AND your voice. Once you’ve got the visuals nailed, you need to address your voice.

Your brand voice and tone gives you another angle to give a distinctive personality to your brand. Think of your brand as a person, what would they sound like, how would they talk to people and interact with them? Do they sound down to earth, are they a bit of a pri…

You get the idea?

Your written content (including video scripts) need to ooze your brand personality, so take a look at your existing content and give it an audit.

  • Does it sound like you want your brand to sound?
  • Is your voice consistent across your marketing channels?
  • Compare your best and worst-performing posts and see if your tone is different across the two?

From there, make changes to how you communicate.

Note: You might want to alter your tone of voice slightly depending on each channel you’re communicating through. For example, you might want to be more jovial and light-hearted on social media but more precise and direct across your email marketing.

Building an Engaged Online Community: Fostering Relationships & Encouraging Interaction

This one is NOT easy. You might be lucky and get a really engaging audience straight off the bat but creating a community that wants to be supportive and positive towards your business and each other is not an easy task.

So how can you encourage engagement with your online community? 

  1. Educate – teach your community something, give them a reason to want to say ‘cheers, that was useful’ or ‘errrm, that didn’t work for me, what are you on about?’

     

  2. Celebrate – highlight your weekly or monthly top performer. Tell the rest of your community why they are in your good books that week/month, this could encourage other members of your community to congratulate them or better yet, repeat the same favoured behaviours.

     

  3. Listen – VERY important, take the time to listen to what your community is saying. What are they having issues with, what problems are they facing? Are they looking for some help, support or guidance with something? Use these questions to craft content to provide an answer for your community. When people understand that they are listened too, they will quite likely keep communicating!

     

Making a bit of a strategy around those three points will help you to build a community that’s not only engaged with each other but with you as a brand.

Some words from our very own JLP on how he creates an engaging online community through the Asset Academy members area:

”Building a community is tough! Especially if you’re trying to create more engagement out of an already established community group. I have used a couple of tools with our own AA community group that have worked.

A great way of getting engagement is placing a 1-2 of your close members in the group and asking them to react and engage so that others will follow suit.

Incentivising engagement can also help. Offer members something that will make them want to engage. Ensure not to spam your community group and make sure what you are posting is adding value or this will switch off your members even more.”

community manager

Developing Exceptional Client Experiences: Nurturing Loyalty & Advocacy

The final piece of the brand-building puzzle (for this blog anyway!) is about creating the most incredible customer experience possible.

Now we’re not saying that you have to over-deliver on every promise and service that you offer, sometimes just doing what you said you’d do is enough to keep people happy.

Believe us, sometimes brands find it hard to deliver anything let alone a good service!

So ensure client experience is on your list of priorities when building your brand. A happy client will (hopefully!) advocate your brand. Client advocacy is not just free advertising, it’s the highest form of endorsement your brand can get.

That endorsement is worth its weight in gold ESPECIALLY when you haven’t had to send 50 messages to your clients begging them for a review.

Let your good client experience do all the talking, allowing you to focus your energies elsewhere in your business.

Key takeaways

  • It ALWAYS comes down to understanding your audience inside out, if you don’t know who you’re marketing to – what’s the point?
  • Your voice is just as important as your visuals so make sure you’re conveying the right kind of personality with your fitness brand
  • An engaged community is everything. You can learn from them and provide even more value than you thought possible
  • A happy client doesn’t have to tell all their mates about you, but it could stop them from telling them to avoid you…

what's next?

You’ve got a couple of options. 

  1. If you haven’t already, have a read of our 7 Tips to Create a Fitness Brand >
  2. Get a FREE slide deck template and level-up your next client presentation or use it as an effective lead magnet

keep up to date

Thanks for reading our blog, we hope it’s offered some help in your own fitness website build. If you’ve got any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them on here or drop us an email on [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

We’ve got more blogs for you here > Make sure you check back regularly to keep up to date with all things fitness branding. 

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