Why Branding is Important to Staying Fresh and Successful

A Guide to branding your personal training business and why it’s necessary.

Staying fresh is difficult to do these days with so many different methods for marketing and new brands emerging every time you blink. So how do you stand out among the competition? Good branding. Branding is not only aesthetics, but it is the whole entire experience offered. Personal training is a field that is way over saturated with competition, so it is beyond important to have a brand that makes your business shine brighter than the rest. Look at your closest competitors. What makes them different from you? What resources are they tapping into that you’re not? How are they using these resources? Why are they using these resources? These are among the many questions you need to be asking yourself to begin the branding process.

Evaluate your own personal training business

Before taking the dive into branding your business, let’s evaluate where it stands. Ask this when just starting out: what is my brand identity, and what do I want it to be? It is important to first consider what your training philosophy is. Why are you in the business of personal training? A good philosophy is important to tailoring a personal experience with clients and making an impression on them that will keep them coming back. At its core, branding is about the impressive experience a business offers and can only be successful with a true, heartful philosophy behind it. This is essentially your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

Values and Feedback

According to Forbes, 64% of consumers say that having a common ground for values makes a brand much more trustworthy. For example, when thinking of Chick-fil-A, their brand revolves around that simple two-word phrase – “My Pleasure!” That positive experience is in the minds of thousands of people when they decide where to satisfy their chicken fix. What do you think your personal training experience is like?

Client feedback helps tremendously in self-evaluation. Listening is the key to learning how to improve the experience clients have with you. It also helps to better understand what kind of audience is attracted to your business. What kind of clients do you attract? Specifying a target audience for your business will help you figure out how to brand your business. Figure out which groups of people desire which groups of services your personal training business provides. Segment these groups of people by age, sex, marital status, fitness goals, fitness levels, and learning style, and figure out the ways in which they overlap.

Let’s think about budgeting now. Brand value and equity are deemed by the customer’s experience and how valuable they think the brand is. This is something that can be measured using key performance indicators. These metrics are things like brand awareness, brand engagement, brand sentiment, and many more. Here is an in-depth source for KPIs and metrics to use when measuring the value of your branding. Budgeting for the brand revolves around the cultivated brand value and how that will reflect your return on investing in branding. What is your budget for starting the branding process?

Explore options for designing a brand

Let’s talk about the least expensive options for cultivating a logo and branding colors. Design is unarguably an extremely powerful tool for establishing engagement and credibility and setting the tone for your personal training experience. If the budget does not allow for hiring a professional to generate a logo, color palette, and website, then there are some helpful alternatives. One of them is logo maker, which allows you to create a beautiful logo in minutes.

Web Design

First off, FitSW offers our clients the ability to create a webpage through the app for trainers to advertise their qualifications, specializations, and services. Built into the site is a comprehensive system for selling sessions, subscriptions, and packages. Trainers can choose free or paid templates to use and can even customize their own page addresses. Any premium member of FitSW has access to this feature! Our clients have the full function of managing their clients, building workouts, building nutrition plans, tracking their progress, and collecting and managing payments, and they also have the ability to host their own website through us. These web pages integrate all of the aforementioned features as well!

The benefit of using this web service is that it is connected to your client management system already. Any payments that occur through the webpage will be tracked in the app and can be easily managed. Instead of purchasing a second service for webpage hosting like through Wix or Webnode. FitSW is all-inclusive from client management and progress tracking to a business webpage.

Wix and Webnode and other web builders like them are initially free and can be really useful in their free versions, but it limits branding. Features like a custom domain, eCommerce, email gathering, membership sign up, etc. are upwards of $14 a month. These are important factors in cultivating a brand experience when clients visit a webpage.

Color Palettes

Extensive research exists on the effects of colors on consumer decision making. Building a color palette revolves around the marketed product or service. In this case, we are marketing a personal training business. What do you want your clients to feel when they see your webpage or logo? Blue in these applications has been proven to improve the viewers’ alertness and willingness to find a business credible and trustworthy. According to this article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, wearing the color red shows an increase in athletic performance.

So the take away here is just to wear a red jumpsuit for a whole training session and require the same for clients… Just Kidding! However, these concepts and others are very important in deciding on a color scheme. Web builders offer the ability to choose a color palette to apply to a website and have suggested schemes.

Here is a general overview of color functions in design:

Red is often associated with a call to action and increasing performance, so this color can be useful for a personal training website. However, use this color wisely and sparingly as it is a color that is harsh on the eye.

Blues and greys are useful for having a relaxed, professional brand persona, and can also be beneficial in stimulating focus for the viewer.

Pinks, purples, and yellows can elicit a warm, energetic, and comforting feeling that would well-suit a yoga studio.

Coolors is a helpful tool for better understanding the ins and outs of colors and all of its specifications. Users can endlessly generate color palettes and adjust them by their hue, temperature, tones, tints, and shades. Use this tool and see what catches your eye!

Logos

Once the colors are chosen, then comes the exciting part that everyone associates branding with – the logo. There are lots of avenues for creating a logo if attempting a DIY method. The first two tools that are extremely helpful are Wix and Canva. Wix has a logo generator that uses the client’s specifications to auto-generate a large number of logo options that the user can go on and edit. Canva has a vast amount of templates to choose from to start the process of creating a logo. Also, here is an example of a logo maker on the web. With all of these methods, users run the risk of creating a logo that is not completely unique and representative of the business.

If not confident in your design skills, then let us do it for you! Submit some information about your business and any design references you like. After that, give us a week or two to develop your logo and custom app! Wait… What is a custom app you say?

Well check this out:

FitSW offers trainers and gyms a feature to custom brand their apps when they use our software. Simply submit a logo and a design to apply to the app icon and the landing screen on mobile devices. We can customize the experience trainers and their clients have when they use the app. This is extremely helpful for trainers and gyms in both client acquisition and retention because it adds a level of credibility and professionalism. According to this Hubspot article, a 5% increase in customer retention shows a 25% increase in profits. Therefore, custom branding is another method in our holistic approach to helping trainers boost their business.

Slap your brand on everything!

Aside from the professional applications of branding an online presence, slap that brand on everything around your business. Get clients, friends, family, dogs, cats, lizards, birds – anything to wear your new brand material around. Creating merchandise with your brand is extremely helpful in spreading brand awareness. Get your clients to spread your brand! Refer to a previous blog post about how to get your clients to advertise for you. A Hubspot study shows that 81% of customers are more likely to trust the recommendations of friends and family. Credibility is key in the fitness business since it is dealing with the health and wellness of its clients. Merchandise with logos, social media handles, and similar color schemes generate your clients’ conversations with family and friends about your business.

Options for merchandise are endless, especially in the field of health and fitness. From sports bras to sweatbands to yoga mats, there are a lot of usable and versatile items that can be produced by personal trainers to sell and give to their clients. Moreover, stickers are an efficient way of slapping a brand on everything like gym equipment, water bottles, laptops – you name it.

Branding establishes a sense of professionalism and credibility like no other. Staying fresh in the minds of clients and prospective clients is important to the longevity of any business. In personal training, the competition makes standing out in the crowd difficult. Employ some of these tools and resources and do more research on how to develop your brand in relation to your client base.

If you have any questions or want some further information on how to brand your personal training business, please feel free to reach out. For other tips and tricks on running a personal training business, check out the rest of our blog!