Starting a Fitness YouTube channel
A 10K designers Design prompt for a BX-C1 program
This document is a case study on starting a YouTube channel focused on fitness. It covers the design process, research, reasoning, and learnings involved in the project.
Prompt brief: You are starting a YouTube channel in the fitness niche. You have the freedom to choose the creator(s) of the channel. You can either create a brand-new channel or find an existing YouTuber/creator in the fitness niche. However, the theme of the channel must be related to fitness.
Once I gained clarity on the brief, I decided to proceed with the ultra mode.
🆒 Ultra mode (recommended!): A short case study elucidating your process through this assignment to a completely new readerBrief: What was it? What was your interpretation of it? Research: What inspiration you looked for, a mood-board with collected examples of what might be a good visual style for your brand and its audience. Explorations + Iterations: Your explorations, the different ideas you tried, sketches if applicable. Final Direction: What? Why? How?
Problem statement:
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a major challenge for individuals struggling with obesity. Many have gained weight due to the pandemic, while obesity has emerged as a significant risk factor for severe disease and death from the virus. Obesity rates were already on the rise before COVID-19, with over 40% of adults in the United States fitting the definition of obesity, which is a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher.
India is still dealing with the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the country’s next health crisis may be closer than anticipated. The prevalence of obesity among adults is projected to triple between 2010 and 2040, with an estimated 30% of the population likely to be overweight by 2040.
The first and primary step to overcome the obesity situation is to stay fit with regular exercise and a balanced diet. There are numerous ways available online to explore “How to reduce belly fat in 7 days,” but it can be overwhelming with a surplus of information. To help people stay fit, we are introducing the YouTube channel with the vision of promoting fitness.
Why create a YouTube channel?
- Home fitness searches have surged on YouTube in the last year. By June 2020, the platform reported that daily views with titles including “home workout” had risen by 515%.
- YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google.
- Creating a YouTube channel can increase your reach and promote your digital fitness platform. With users all over the globe, digital fitness is not location-dependent, and YouTube can help you tap into that global audience.
Benefits of a YouTube Channel
- Provides the audience with more content
- Enables a closer personal connection
- Modernizes your brand
- Videos can be re-watched as often as needed
- Helps grow your brand reputation and expertise
What sets our channel apart from others?
Unlike other channels that primarily upload videos, “Be-fit” focuses on fitness awareness and transformation results. Here are some of the advantages of subscribing to our channel:
- Exercises for people who sit on chairs all day (this will be our breakthrough to get started on our channel)
- Meal plans for super fans who subscribe
- Daily workout videos and guidance
- Group live workout sessions
- Weekly Q&A’s
- Content uploaded every Sunday evening, covering workouts for the entire week
- Completely no-equipment workouts
Vision: To bring fitness awareness to people every day, everywhere.
Mission: To make fitness a part of people’s day-to-day lives and create a world where it’s a priority.
Values:
- Be strong and active.
- Strive to improve every day.
- Fitness should be accessible to all.
- We are the future of fitness.
- Be the change you wish to see.
Target Audience: Be-fit targets the fitness enthusiast community, with a specific focus on weight loss for individuals struggling with unusual weight gain.
Fitness & YouTube
How people discover our channel
After uploading videos, it’s important to promote and share them with your audience on social media platforms, send them to your email list, and embed the YouTube link in blogs to reach a wider audience. Ideally, aim to post at least once a week at the same time and day. Keeping an eye on the results will help you determine what works best for your channel. With time, this will help to improve your channel and produce top-quality content that engages your viewers.
Competitor Analysis
Here are three of the top fitness YouTube channels for content inspiration:
Yoga With Adriene — International yoga teacher, entrepreneur, writer, and actress with over nine million subscribers of all levels, abilities, genders, and bodies. Offers yoga for weight loss to yoga for climbers.
Blogilates — Casey Ho is an award-winning fitness instructor. In 2009, she posted her Pop Pilates workout on YouTube for the first time to share with her 40 students. With over five million subscribers, the Blogilates community continues to grow.
Tone it Up — Aims to inspire and empower their community to live a healthy and happy life. They want to make fitness and nutrition accessible to all. They use their YouTube channel to show minutes-long workouts, announce new features in the app, and share vlogs with the founders.
Learnings Got clarity from the competitor analysis and below are the takeaways:
- Numerous unique YouTube channels with separate fan bases are available.
- Providing meaningful content consistently is key to establishing a presence in the industry.
- Target the primary audience (Indians) first and expand globally later.
How We Will Do It?
- Align with the business and stick to the fitness niche.
- Create a list of fitness video topic ideas.
- Plan a video content schedule.
- Invest in video and sound equipment.
- Edit and upload videos, and promote and share them.
It’s time to level up the design aesthetic and visual language for the brand!
Brand Identity: To start a successful YouTube channel, we need a brand name that sticks in people’s minds and is both minimal and trustworthy.
Below are the few iterations tried for the brand name
Planned to go with name “Be-fit” as the channel name.
The color palette for the logo/ brand: Minimal Logo to go as the display image for the brand
Out of these colors, I planned to go with green for the brand.
Green represents motivation, approach, and focus.
TL;DR
Green is highly attuned to the physical world around them. Their profound attention to detail and outstanding orienting skills influence all aspects of what they do and when they do it.
Visual Design
Let’s imagine a scenario where we have completed the groundwork and set up the YouTube channel- Now need to explore how the channel looks and how people are able to understand its story of it without creating all the videos for the channel
Now We have the outline of how our channel will be.
But How we will reach our audience without creating all the videos on the channel, what brand elements would help show a complete enough story and experience for your channel?
It’s better to share on social media and that drives the target audience to our channel- Instagram posts.
… and that’s a wrap, folks! Thank you for reading. Let me know your thoughts about my process, any kind of feedback is appreciated!
