In this guide, we are going to show you how to build a branding guide for your personal training business. Before we start talking about your branding guide, let’s define what a brand is.
Your brand as the personality of your personal training business. It includes attributes such as the name of your business, the logo, the design, where it’s positioned in the market, what you’re promising the clients and who your target market is.
It’s important that this branding is congruent, coherent and consistent. One way to ensure that it is consistent is by designing a branding guide. This is a document that includes all the design styles for your visual content, along with some other important elements.
Here's an example brand guide we created for our sister site, the Institute of Personal Trainers:
Think of the brand style guide as a decision filter. Before creating any kind of content, you consult your brand guide to ensure the contents design, elements, text, message and imagery are consistent with your brand.
It is also advantageous to have this if you plan on hiring other team members or designers, as they will be able to make quick decisions to help support the brand experience.
It’s usually a PDF document that is typically presented as an eBook.
Does my personal training business need a branding guide?
The short answer is yes. Your branding communicates the entire personality of your business, and one of the most important factors of good branding is consistency.
Let’s say you’ve been targeting busy professionals in your PT business for months, and you’re building up a good client base. You have systems in place to train them and you know how to get results for them.
What happens if you hire someone to start building a website, and they make it generic. Or, even worse, the website targets someone completely different? Conversion rates will drop, and the relationship you had already built with potential customers could cause confusion and distrust, due to inconsistency.
Let’s say you’ve been targeting busy professionals in your PT business for months, and you’re building up a good client base. You have systems in place to train them and you know how to get results for them.
What happens if you hire someone to start building a website, and they make it generic. Or, even worse, the website targets someone completely different? Conversion rates will drop, and the relationship you had already built with potential customers could cause confusion and distrust, due to inconsistency.
What should your PT branding guide include?
Your brand identity will go through several variations of change as part of its natural progression from idea to reality. So it's quite normal to go from logo ideas, to colours, to shapes and back to logo ideas again.
It can take a few round trips to get it right but this is what you should end up with, on no particular order:
It can take a few round trips to get it right but this is what you should end up with, on no particular order:
- Logo - The first thing most personal trainers think about when starting a business is a logo and any variations of it. A good logo has inverted colour options and small variations for website favicons.
You may also need variations with your company name and one without. Make sure to include all variations to ensure that the logo is not altered in any way. here's one we made
- Colour Palette - Your color palette is the group of colors your business uses. Adding it to your branding guide will assist you when creating visual content. A good rule of thumb is to have two principal brand colours.
If your color scheme contains more than two colors, make sure to note what colors are used for what. E.g. the first two colors may be for the logo, and the next two colors may be used to support the website, blog design or flyers. Also, make sure to identify the RBG and/or HEX color codes within your branding guide.
- Typography - Typography is another visual element. It isn’t just the font that you use for your logo - it should also include the fonts you choose to use on your website, blog and other marketing materials.
- Design Elements - Finally, it's important to consider design elements when creating content. You may want your brand to look sleek and professionals, or alternatively you might want it to look fun and easy going.
Knowing your elements allow you to portray the “feel” of your branding. It may include photos you want to use for ads, iconography or photo filters. You may also want to think of the tone of text you want to use.
Check out this PT Welcome Pack front cover we did for It Fits. The design elements are sharp and edgy but the logo font is softer and more approachable.
All personal training businesses should be using a branding guide before creating any piece of content. It will help create more consistent and professional personal trainer branding to help build trust in your potential clients which can lead to longer relationships, more sales and more revenue.
