How to Make Your Gym Stand Out Online in 2026

This episode contains several visual examples. For the best experience, head to our YouTube channel "Run a Profitable Gym."

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If you stripped your gym’s name and logo from your website and social media, would anyone know what makes you different? For most gym owners, the honest answer is no.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain CEO John Franklin lays out the five steps gym owners need to take to become the obvious choice online in 2026

He walks through real-world examples of gyms that have nailed their online positioning, including a gym serving underrepresented women in fitness, a bodybuilding facility that hunts down and restores rare equipment, a performance center that built its reputation entirely around baseball players with shoulder injuries and a personal training gym that targets exclusively the 50-plus crowd.

Each example illustrates the same core principle: a specific promise to a specific type of person beats generic messaging every time.

John also explains why simplifying your service offering is just as important as clarifying who you serve, and he outlines how your Google Business Profile, website and Instagram should all tell the same consistent story to turn curious searchers into booked consultations.

Tune in to learn how to make your gym impossible to ignore online.

Links

AI Gym Instagram Audit

Gym Owners United

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0:00 - Intro

0:38 - Be the "obvious choice" online

1:00 - Real gym example—underrepresented women

2:19 - Real gym example—world-class equipment

4:35 - Real gym example—baseball niche

6:04 - Real gym example—personal training

7:51 - Get clear on who you serve

9:55 - Simplify your service offering

11:50 - GBP, website and Instagram consistency

13:49 - Show undeniable proof

Transcript

0:02

If I removed your gym name and your logo from your online presence, would I instantly know what makes it stand out over the competition? If you're like most gym owners, the answer is no. And they tend to blame the algorithm, SEO, or their website. But in reality, their online presence just looks like everybody else's. And in 2026, generic is invisible. And today I'm going to show you how to become the obvious choice in your market. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of Two Brain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship company, working with over 3,500 gym owners to help them generate over six figures in profit, because yes, it's possible. And today. I'm going to show you the five steps to stand out online. Before I give you the exact steps, I want to show you what becoming the obvious choice actually looks like. Everybody gives you generic advice and says stuff like, you need to niche down. But what does that actually look like in practice? What separates the best gyms from the sea of sameness? Let's get into it. The gyms that become an obvious choice for a prospect deliver a specific promise to a specific type of person. Let's take a look at our first example. This is Cassie Day over at All Day Fit, and we want to get clear on what does she do, who does she serve, and what's the result that she's promising. Her service is geared toward underrepresented women in fitness. So you can see when you go to her Instagram, you're seeing women of different color, different shapes, different sizes, and what she offers is strength. She wants them to feel empowered and confident, and she does that through personal training. If you look at some of the reviews for Cassie's site, people literally say, what initially brought me in was seeing people of all ages, shapes, and sizes on the website. Another one said, I joined and this was my first time coming back to a gym two years postpartum. It's such a welcoming and positive environment. So if you're a woman who's scared of going back to the gym, maybe intimidated by a traditional environment. And you see Cassie's website, you see these reviews of all these women saying, Hey, it was my first time in a gym in a while. And it blew my mind away. And you compare that to a bunch of other gyms in the area that aren't that dialed in with their messaging or specific Cassie's is going to stand out. She's going to get those type of customers over and over again, which allows her to charge a premium over the competition. And it makes her sales process so much smoother than another gym that's trying to target a bunch of other demographics. Our next example is Ray. Fennell over at iron revolution and iron revolution is a bodybuilding and powerlifting gym in New. Jersey. And Ray's entire thing is hunting the world for the best gym equipment, bringing it into the gym, completely reconditioning it and making it look on brand. If you look at this video of Ray's gym in the first 60 seconds, well, actually let's just watch it in action. Check this video out. What's up guys. Today we have a new addition to the gym. Here we have an original Nautilus explode compound rope. So this machine here, it's an old school piece. It's getting harder and harder to find these days, but luckily we were able to seek it out and get it in. My brother, Dan did what he always does. He took it completely apart and did a full refurbishment on it. And he brought this back to perfect condition. I mean, look at this, these handles spin, no problem, super smooth. This thing doesn't make a sound. When he put it together and I first used it, I was just really blown away because there is no friction in there. It doesn't make any noise. And he really did a phenomenal job. So shout out to him. He always kills it. And this row is gonna complement very well with our Nautilus Explode pull-down. So as you guys know, this right here has been in the gym probably for a little bit over a year now. And I think it's our most used back piece in the entire gym. Again, super simple. They have similar styles of handles here. They rotate throughout the range of motion, nice and easy. Both of these pieces are really phenomenal. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this new edition and you guys could come check them both out here at Iron Revolution. In that short period of time, you can tell that he cares so much about the equipment and the client experience that if you're someone who cares about the type of lap machine or leg press that you train on, you're going to drive past four or five other gyms to go to race. And that's why there's videos on the internet of YouTubers who are actually traveling from all over the country to go work out and make videos talking about how great the gym is. And it creates this loop because if he has the best equipment, he's going to get the best bodybuilders and powerlifters driving to train there, which is going to make the environment better, which is going to allow him to buy even more equipment. And the gym keeps growing off of that one fundamental promise. Our third example of a gym that is just the obvious choice for a certain type of prospect is Cressy Sports Performance run by Eric Cressy. And if you don't know Eric Cressy's background, he actually got his start being the nichest of the niches. So he just would publish stuff on shoulder injuries for baseball players. That was it. And then baseball players with shoulder injuries would seek them out and train with him. And then after a certain period of time, he started talking about the elbow and he created this. The reputation for himself amongst the community that if you were an injured baseball player, if you're a baseball player that wanted to prevent injury, you would travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to go train with Eric. He got so big that the town next to mine actually offered him a deal where they gave him baseball fields and this massive custom facility because he was bringing in so many professional baseball players to train that they thought it would be an economic benefit. This is obviously an extreme example, but it just shows that self-perpetuating wheel where if you focus on a certain type of person, it draws in that type of person, which makes you the right choice for that type of person, which grows your business, which creates more opportunities in a way where you just couldn't do that if you were a gym targeting every single person on the planet. And while rehabbing shoulder injuries for baseball players is super niche, we can go a little broader. All of you want to rank number one for personal trainer near me. It's a super hard keyword to rank for, but let me show you an example of an excellent gym. That is the obvious choice for personal training in their markets. This is ultimate performance and their headline says they are the global benchmark in personal training. This is the type of gym you train at if you absolutely need results. So if you're an actor who wants to get shredded for a role, or you're a busy executive with more money than time, and you don't want to bounce around trying to find the wrong personal trainer, you come to a gym like this. And the reason you come to a gym like this is the sheer amount of social proof that they have. If you go to their website, you're going to see insane before and after photos, just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. You can break them down by age, the amount of time they put into the gym, gender, what they were training for. And you can go and read these detailed client stories on how these people were able to get incredible transformations. And if you're someone who doesn't want to mess around, you're going to be willing to pay more and go to ultimate performance, especially if the other options you're considering in that market, say they offer personal training with some other service. Or if you go look at their results and there may be static images from clients with no before and after, or even worse, a photo from a Google review, you're obviously going to choose the one with undeniable proof. And while a gym like this isn't the right choice for everyone, that's okay because it's the right choice for the people they want to attract. And that's why gyms like this win. And by the way, my team put together a free custom GPT that audits your gym's online presence and identifies gaps that may be costing you leads to grab a copy, click the link below or scan this QR code and keep watching as we show you the other things you need to do to make your gym stand out online. So we just showed you what the best of the best are doing to stand out online. And you might be asking yourself, John, I don't serve baseball players with bad shoulders. How do I apply this to my gym? And I'm glad you asked. The easiest thing you can do is just get crystal clear on who it is you serve. A common mistake we see amongst the gym owners that we work with is that they try and be for everybody. You ask, who is your key client? And it's like anybody in our town between the ages of 16 and 65 who wants to lose weight, get stronger, feel better, and avoid injury. And by being for everybody, you're for nobody. If we can just get more specific on who it is we're speaking to, we can get a lot more deliberate in the type of messaging we do. And that doesn't mean you have to stop serving everybody else outside of your key audience. It's just we speak to one persona despite serving others. Think about it. The imagery and messaging that's most compelling to a 20-year-old is different than that of a 40-year-old and that of a 60-year-old. Let me show you an example. So this is Core Principles Personal Training. It's a gym run by Halen Alpert, and they only target people who are over 50 years old who want a personal trainer. Now, imagine you're someone who's 60 years old and is shopping on the internet for a personal trainer, and you see a bunch of gyms that have photos of 30-year-olds doing crazy movements, and then you go over to Halen's gym, and all his messaging is geared around making 50-plus-year-old people healthier and stronger. Who are you going to choose? Now let's look at the Instagram presence of another gym. We can see here, this gym, it's hard to tell exactly what it is they do and who they serve. If we look at four of the six pictures, they just seem to be from like an open ballroom. And then the first two show one individual. It's unclear whether it's the owner or a member working out. When we read their headline here, it says they empower our athletes one rep at a time to achieve their fitness goals. What does that mean? Does athletes mean someone training for a sport or is that what they call their members? Is that somebody young? Is that somebody old? What type of training do they do? Is it group training? Is it personal training? We can't tell. And that is the core of the issue for a lot of gyms online presence. Once we're clear on who we serve and who we're targeting with our messaging, we need to simplify down our offering. Imagine you're traveling to a new city. You want to go get dinner and you pull up your phone and you search best sushi near me. And two restaurants show up. They both have 4.8 stars and 200 reviews. One is just a sushi restaurant and the other one says it's the best sushi and pizza in town. Which one are you going to choose? Chances are you're going to go just to the sushi only restaurant because they're focused on one thing. And the same goes for fitness. When we reviewed Ultimate Performance, the only stuff they talked about on their website and their messaging was personal training. That was it. And so if you were seeking a personal trainer, you're going to be a lot more likely to work with them than somebody who does group training, small group training, personal training. It just shows that they're focused on that one offering. And as a consumer, we're wired to believe that because of that, the service is going to be better. Think of the type of food a restaurant serves as an analogy for the type of service a gym offers. Typically, less is more. Now, once we're actually in the restaurant, there's another indicator of quality. And that's usually the menu, right? Take In-N-Out Burger as an example. There's literally only three items on that menu and there's always a line around the block. Compare that to a restaurant like Sonic's where there's 80 or 90 different menu items. You know, for each thing they're adding, the food quality goes down. Simple is usually better because it allows the operator to focus. The same goes for your gym. If you're someone who's shopping around for. CrossFit, you want to do it inside of a CrossFit box that only offers CrossFit compared to a big box gym that may have affiliated and bolted CrossFit on after the fact. So the building blocks for standing out online is getting really clear on who you serve, how you serve them, and the result you're promising them. Once you have that narrowed down, you just need to be consistently talking about that on all your online platforms. There should be consistency amongst your GBP, which is your Google business page, your website, and your Instagram. Because let's talk about how people find you in this day and age. They're going to go into Google and they're going to type gym near me. From there, Google is going to show three results and they're going to click on all three. They'll look at the GBP to check out the images of the gym. So this is our first opportunity to show photos of who we're serving and the type of training we deliver. From there, they're going to go to your website. They want to see consistency across the GBP. So if you're someone who's serving women, there should be photos of women right on the website. If your GBP says you're the best personal trainer, the first thing they should see on your website is how great you are at personal training. And from there, they're going to go creep on your. Instagram. On your Instagram, that's a great place to showcase these things again, but also showcase some of your client results and create a little bit of a funnel to help people go from just finding out about you to scheduling a consultation. The easiest way to do that is to put together a pin post sequence, because if you've passed the first two tests of the GBP and the website, the pin post is an opportunity for them to hear from you as the owner for the first time. The first video you want to make is just explaining who you are. The second is the type of training you do and the result you're going to deliver them. And the third is how to get started. If you want to watch a full video on how to set this up, watch this video here. Now let's take a step back to talk about GBP. That's your Google business profile. It's the tool you set up when you first started your gym to show up on Google. Google maps. And in 2026, it matters so much more than it did five years ago because a lot of people are using AI to search. So I recommend you go look at your Google business profile to make sure you're showcasing images of the type of people you want to be serving. And you're talking about the services that you want to sell. Once you've tightened up your online profiles, gotten clear on who you're serving, how you're serving them and the result you deliver. The last piece is just showing undeniable proof that you are the best solution for that perspective client. We have a saying here in two brain, don't just say it, show it. What proof do you have that you are the obvious choice for the thing that you are trying to sell? So to use an example from two brain, we have a results page on our website. And on that results page, we have testimonials from over 1500 gym owners in the program. So if you're someone who's wondering, does two brain work for me, we just have undeniable proof that we work for just about any type of gym. Now on the internet, I'm sure your feed is bum barding you with business gurus who say we work with a thousand gym owners, but then there's no real like evidence of that. One of my favorite images to use when talking about two brain is this photo from our two brain summit, where you can see a thousand gym owners took off work to come to Rosemont and hang out and learn about business from the two brain business team. When you see something like that, there's undeniable proof that we've worked with a lot of gym owners. What is the equivalent photo in the equivalent story that you can tell in your gym? So to stand out online in 2026, you just need to make your gym the obvious choice for a specific type of prospect. Once you've identified who it is you're serving, how you're serving in them, and the result that you're delivering, you're going to be consistent in talking about that across your entire online presence. And you're just going to post undeniable proof that you can get your prospects the result that you are promising. Once you do that, it becomes unbelievably obvious that your gym is the right choice for that perspective, clientele. When they're searching around and they land on your socials, your GBP, your website, they know that they've found the one. If you found this video helpful, I want you to watch this one that goes over the three different content types to post on social media so you can stop overthinking your feed. I'll see you over there.