Over the past few months, we have been working with two Snap Fitness locations in Surrey and Maple Ridge gym with the purpose of acquiring more gym members.
When the gym owner first came to The Coding Bull to inquire about our services, she had already spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in online marketing without any success.
In her own words, she would have had more fun lighting $100 bills on fire than spending so much time and money for nothing in return.
Because she was tied under the chains of big franchise that didn’t offer marketing support at the local level with sales and & marketing, she needed to find a local marketing strategy that can predictably generate new leads for her gyms.
At the same time, many marketing solutions are not viable because of the agreement with Snap Fitness corporate.
Hence, the first task we tackled was analyzing the previous marketing attempts:
Snap Fitness Marketing Version 1.0 Failures:
When the gym owner first launched Facebook advertisement for Snap Fitness in an attempt to generate leads, the campaigns were set up for failure for the following reasons:
1. Interest group chosen based on assumptions
Located in Surrey, BC and Maple Ridge, BC, the two SnapFitness gyms are conveniently located for local residents.
When setting the target audience for this demographic, the gym owner went ahead to make an assumption based on who she thinks will be interested in the service instead of testing the market to gather data about the audience.
With an already small audience group, adding in interest groups based on assumptions limited the estimated reach even more.
2. Insufficient information on Ad Copy + Poor image selection
The offer for the advertisement was “Free 1 Month Gym Membership”.
With the initial advertisement copy, there was nothing on the news feed link description to provide additional information on how to actually get this offer.
Image selected for the campaign was a cliché stock photo of a lady working out.
There was no differentiating factor from competitors with a standard image.
3. Inconsistency between advertisement and landing page
While the offer on the advertisement indicated “Free 30 Day Trial”, the destination url was set to the SnapFitness website that had “Join our Gym” as a call to action.
Additionally, side bar menus displayed that free offer is for 7 days instead of 30 days.
This inconsistency resulted in low Facebook relevancy score as well as poor conversion rate.
The Coding Bull Solution:
Because of the nature of franchise businesses, we had limited options for marketing initiatives to implement for our client.
We couldn’t rebuild the website nor get access to work on SEO to build up their website rankings.
Under this situation, we decided to completely revamp the existing Facebook campaign.
The main components of the new Facebook campaign was as follows:
1. Lead Generation Ads
We knew that lead generation ad was the most effective way of acquiring new members to the gym.
With our client’s great offer of “30 day free gym pass”, allowing the target audience to easily fill out their contact information without navigating away to a different page made the whole sign-up process easier.
Additionally, we added in a thank you page that outlined the necessary steps to take after signing up.
This instruction warmed up the leads and guided them to take predictable actions.
2. Clear Offer + Image
Going into this campaign, we realized that we are targeting a very small audience with a total population of 300k.
In order to prevent the audience from being bored of our ad, we created multiple images with clear offer message overlaid.
Testing image variations proved that some images work better than others.
We optimized the campaign based on winning images, which resulted in lowering the cost per lead.
3. Detailed Ad Copy Description
In order to guide the audience, the ad copy needed to be clear.
Under the newsfeed description, we put the message “Click Apply Now to get your free 30 days gym membership”.
4. Audience Data Gathering
Instead of guessing what our target demographic likes, we launched the initial campaign targeting the area without a specific interest group.
Soon, we were able to capture valuable information regarding our target audiences’ habits, age group, and interests.
By creating custom/lookalike audience groups, we now have an even clear understanding of what they like.
Google Adwords Campaign:
Although our client was willing to invest her own funds for promoting the gyms, the corporate set strict restrictions on marketing.
First, Snap Fitness corporate didn’t allow her to advertise a free 7 day trial on the website.
Second, our client wasn’t allowed to run Facebook & Google Ads to the Snap Fitness website.
Therefore, we decided to create a stand-alone landing page which had the “Free 30-Day Trial” as the offer.
Using this landing page, we created a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic.
In order to save costs and lower cost per click, we targeted audience with very specific keywords.
In fact, we only chose 4 keywords, which ensured that everyone coming to the landing page was a qualified group of individuals that specifically searched for Snap Fitness in their areas.
Results:
Before the campaign that The Coding Bull has executed for Snap Fitness, they had around 412 members with both clubs combined.
With the newly launched Facebook campaign, Snap Fitness has already acquired 171 sign ups in a span of just 1 month (June 19, 2017 – July 19, 2017).
In addition, Google Adwords campaign acquired 57 sign-ups during the same period.
As of the publication date of this case study (July 19, 2017), these two Snap Fitness locations received 103 additional sign-ups.
Of course, these numbers don’t include any word of mouth or referrals and foot traffic.
