3 Ways to Make Your Fitness Business Stand Out In a Crowd

By Tim Mauk, Special FBA Contributor

What makes a brand break through the noise of the market and hold a place in the minds of its audience? Is it its branding elements? Slogans? Marketing tactics?

In this blog, we will break down what makes your fitness facility stand out and uncover the factors to consider when building a note-worthy brand.

Defining Your Facility and Audience

First and foremost, you need to know what you specifically do and who you are doing it for. Generalities are not your friend when it comes to standing out. We will discuss two critical points: establishing your target audience and defining your studio’s points of distinction in the market.

Let’s start with the facility side since most enterprisers start their quest with a rough vision for a business there. When establishing your business, you must understand what type of gym, studio, or fitness facility you intend to operate. While this isn’t just good business sense, it’s essential for understanding market viability, competition, and saturation. Once you settle on the type, the next step requires narrowing the focus.

Honing in on a niche, specialty, category, or area of expertise can influence your business’s ability to penetrate various market conditions. Further, this specificity enables you to leverage these defining features in your advertising, branding, and overall marketing efforts. While others within your market may sell on price, size, hours, etc., you can catch the right people's attention by leveraging the proper messages, which brings up the next point – the people.

Defining your target audience is a non-negotiable from a marketing standpoint. However, getting your brand to shine requires a properly defined client and a thorough understanding of their interests, behaviors, values, pain points, and needs. With this information, you can begin highlighting the intersections of audience needs and values to your facility’s offering. Understanding and acknowledging this overlap is vital to successfully freeing your studio of the land of the forgotten.

Leveraging Your Knowledge

Once you know the key variables you are working with (target audience and unique selling proposition), it’s time to use that information. Collecting as much information as you can about the current landscape of your market will be helpful in the following steps as it will give you an idea of the tactics your competition/general market is implementing. It can also be beneficial to establish specific growth goals and budgets for your facility, as these will also help guide some of your decisions later.

When reviewing what types of fitness businesses are running in your service area, look for places where your facility can outshine others’ claims or find gaps you can seize. With these focal points in mind, you can begin the strategy side.

From a facility standpoint, equipping your site with amenities, equipment, supplements, or services that align with your distinction points and audience overlap is monumental. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have top-tier items, it does emphasize that you fulfill the needs of whatever focus you lean into. Additionally, building your branding pieces like color scheme, logo, and overall aesthetic around your target audience can also help drive interest, feelings of belonging, and comfort.

Marketing and advertising come next once you establish your business's foundation. Depending on your facility’s life stage (pre-launch, newly launched, or established), reviewing the collateral that supports your business is necessary.

The next critical step is understanding where to reach your audience. Again, this knowledge will require you to understand your target audience, especially where they typically spend their time, and then figure out how to get in front of them. The easy answer is generally advertisements.

Ads will typically be on social media, Google, or specific opportunities (like event sponsorships, local partnerships, etc.). Designing, running, and testing various ads for these opportunities is critical to maximizing campaign success.

Capturing and Quantifying Your Greatness

Building on the point above, capturing, quantifying, and analyzing your results is critical for your marketing campaign and resources. These actions will not only help you gauge success or failure but also allow you to adjust your programs to help increase optimal performance quickly.

Capturing information and data points is typically a standard feature in digital marketing programs for online ads; however, developing your website to capture data is also crucial. Ensuring that you have established linked campaign tags, forms, and general website analytics will help you get a better picture of your ads' UX (user experience) side as the lead enters and interacts with your website material.

Running multiple variations of your ad art, language, and landing pages can be a great way to quickly and effectively A/B test your materials. These mini-tests can help you efficiently find the materials that work (or don't) to make the best combinations that meet the campaign goals (awareness, engagement, or conversion).

Outside of running advertisements and marketing campaigns, you can also run surveys on your client base, leads, or even the general local market to assess the overall effectiveness of your branding and marketing. Depending on your business growth goals and business structure, different data points will be considered key performance indicators (KPIs) for you. Ultimately, it’s critical to understand these key data points and then set and track your goals around them. Further, sampling your brand's effectiveness at standing out from your competition through surveys can also give you a better idea of how well your branding, messaging, ads, or even location stand up to real-world testing of customer recall and mind-space penetration.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are running a brick-and-mortar fitness facility or an online coaching business, breaking your company out of the noise within your market is essential for success. Embracing your differences in the industry and leveraging those as a competitive advantage to your established target audience is a game changer for success. These factors should serve as the guiding base of your marketing efforts and can help drive future business and growth-based decisions within your operations.