From starting up in a residential garage to a £1.5 billion multi-national business, there’s no denying that Gymshark is the most successful online athleisure wear brand today and it’s only going to get bigger and better with extensive growth plans in the next five years.  

Sitting here writing this article in my favourite Gymshark leggings, it’s clear that Gymshark has successfully made a name for itself, becoming the number one fitness clothing brand. How? Because they have a fully integrated effective marketing strategy. 

In this blog, we’re going to break down the three fundamental pillars of Gymshark’s marketing strategy which has been the key driver of growth.  

Data and Insight 

Every successful marketing strategy begins with data and insight. Without a thorough understanding of your market landscape, who you’re targeting and what matters to them, it’s impossible to create meaningful communications that resonate.   

Gymshark has identified their business objectives and has successfully focused their tactics around them. One of Gymshark’s main objectives is to ‘enhance visibility’ and create a ‘Gymshark community’ that shares the same passion for fitness. They have done this by developing an in-depth content marketing strategy. Focusing on this business objective, they’ve inbuilt trust in their consumers and made them feel valuable.  

They have clearly researched and identified their competitors, finding their businesses weaknesses and made sure they do it better. It explains why their online community is the biggest out of all the other fitness brands. They have successfully managed to stand out from the crowd and made their brand the most noticeable name in the fitness industry. 

Gymshark have their buyer personas on point. They know exactly who they want to target and which channels to target them on. This has allowed them to create a killer social strategy plan to follow with every piece of content they put out there. By knowing exactly who their audience is, they can tailor their marketing tactics and campaigns to that specific consumer.  

Gymshark Campaign 

Knowing that their audience are predominately young males, they managed to tap into their ideal customer. With suicide being the leading killer of men under 45 – Gymshark knew they had to create a campaign that acted on this.  

The brand identified which channels their customers were most active on and in turn, only focused their online marketing on brand awareness and offline for their experiential marketing. With this in mind, they spread across socials that they were partnering up with the mental health charity, Calm and opened up a Barbour Shop in Shoreditch, London for a week-long event offering free trims and a free mental health chat to all males who came in.  

Gymshark athletes also ran talks encouraging men to share their feelings. This is a core part of Gymshark’s customer strategy and is one of the key reasons they’ve been able to grow so quickly and continue to do so. 

Ultimately, they are engaging with their target consumer whilst increasing their brand visibility outside of the online world – with their business objectives identified at the very start to increase visibility, they have managed to think strategically about how they can achieve this objective. 

Communicating their Marketing Strategy 

Today, what your brand stands for is everything. Having an authentic purpose and brand values defined will allow you to build a better connection with your audience. 

Gymshark have a clearly defined their strong and determined brand tone of voice that resonates with the audience of motivated fitness lovers. With their brand values and purpose identified, this will form the basis of their content marketing strategy. 

From pillar one, identifying where their target customer is online, Gymshark focuses on creating content for their blog, motivational video content for Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and creating captivating newsletters with new product launches, collaborations and discount codes to promote their brand in a very uplifting and powerful way.  

Having a detailed content strategy in place, the brand manages to tap into their ideal customer, building a trusting loyal customer base that keeps on coming back for more.  

Gymshark’s Influencer Marketing 

Identifying that most of their community are being influenced on YouTube who are following their favourite fitness influencers or looking for new fitness routines, they have focused their marketing efforts on influencer marketing. 

Influencer marketing is THE success-driver feature of Gymshark’s marketing strategy. They connect and engage the biggest fitness influencers and make them a part of the community – now known as ‘Gymshark athletes’.  

This has allowed the brand’s name to be seen by so many people online. From fitness influencers wearing Gymshark in their fitness videos and promoting their new sets on Instagram and TikTok – their brand is visible EVERYWHERE, creating an element of FOMO to drive sales. 

Delivery and Measurement 

Gymshark also constantly measure the impact of their marketing efforts, ensuring they are having the desired effect and helping to achieve the overall business objectives. This monitoring allows Gymshark to refine and adjust future marketing to suit the needs of the consumer and continue to achieve marketing goals.

Tracking the performance of their marketing strategy has enabled Gymshark to continuously rise as a business and maintain its status as the leader of the online fitness brand with a community of Gymshark athletes and aspiring Gymshark athletes.

The future of Gymshark 

Now we know Ben Francis and Lewis Morgan didn’t just start selling clothes online and hope for the best, they had a detailed marketing strategy in place to reach the brands overarching objectives and business goals.  

With plans to open their first ever store in London this year tapping into the offline world, Gymshark will continue to grow and succeed in building an even bigger community of Gymshark lovers. 

So, where to start?

If you want to learn and build your own marketing strategy for an organisation you work for or for your own business, our online marketing strategy course covers every pillar in detail including all the tools and templates you need to create out your own. 

We also have a FREE marketing strategy toolkit which takes you through every step it takes to build an effective marketing strategy that gets results every time. 

If you haven’t yet, we recommend watching Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett’s podcast featuring the Founder of Gymshark, Ben Francis where they dive in deep to how he built his £1.5 billion business at the age of 19.