My Fitness Park

GROWTH HACKING INFLUENCE

Digital transformation ● Digitalisation ● Web marketing
Influence marketing ● Influence ● Engagement ● Mobile application

INSIGHT

Digitalisation of an indoor sports brand

Every brand has now understood the importance of animating its community and above all making it more influential. This report explains how Fitness Park, the leading network of gyms in France (450,000 customers, 200 gyms), uses growth hacking to mobilise 400 micro-influencers without paying them and to actively animate 2/3 of its customer base without paying large sums. At the beginning of 2017, the brand embarked on a real digital transformation, entrusting the agency, among other things, with the creation of its mobile application, making it possible to offer content and practical services (class diary, gym contacts, customer account access and some home-made training programmes). The brand modernised its CRM and e-commerce site at the same time, but it quickly realised that the digitalisation it had just started was part of the \”basic contract\” and was therefore no longer significantly differentiating.

IDEA

Hacking the principles of influence marketing

Looking for a truly differentiating factor, My Fitness Park and the Agency decided to initiate the following mechanism:
Based on insights and data analysis, the agency proposes a system that allows the content and animations of sports clubs to be generated by their so-called \”enthusiastic\” members, i.e. people who train regularly, who naturally influence those around them and are sometimes solicited within their gym. These people have one thing in common: their social accounts are important to them and each post is neat, informative and motivating.
The main technique is to automate the content creation and the interactions it generates, i.e. to create a system where the fruit of a collaboration between an influencer and the brand is calibrated to work without the need for remuneration or major operational follow-up efforts on the agency and brand sides.
A tool for capturing exercises via the mobile phone has been set up, where everyone can record their workouts in the gym but also outside, to publish them on the network shared by the 400 K members. We simply validate the relevance of the content and it becomes visible to the entire network via the My Fitness Park mobile application, the weekly customer newsletters and the brand’s Facebook/Instagram posts.
A single button to capture your movements, a simple interface to assemble your sessions. Nearly 10,000 workouts and 400 profiles created by micro-influencers are now available on the application.
The most popular workouts – those done in the gym by more than 1,000 people – are featured on all the TV screens of the 200 clubs in the form of self-generated clips with their creators as the headline.
Based on the workout programme, our algorithm produces a 16-second video clip that is pushed to the group’s retail TV network and ready-to-use newsletter photo thumbnails. The top 10 workouts exceeding 10,000 users are then integrated into the front page of several organic or media campaigns (social pages, outdoor advertising, TV). Several local sponsored campaigns highlight the content creators, some of whom have become brand ambassadors. This mechanism is based on the principle of \”give get given\”, where the more the training is followed by other members, the more the brand will put forward, all automated.

IMPACT

Customer engagement for brand experience

Thomas Mendonca, CDO of Fitness Park, shares several KPI’s: \”Ambassadors quickly noticed that their workout shares were really promoted by the brand in a consistent way across all touch points (mobile app, retail, social media). Their commitment benefits the members and moments of sharing are spontaneously created in the club. The \”give get given\” principle is respected and offers us many more horizons than if we had simply paid influencers for content. There are several indicators that make us want to continue to adopt this approach and make it evolve. – Highlighting their programmes has brought many new followers to their personal Insta/Facebook accounts and gives them a recognised ambassadorial role within their local club. – In just under a year, we have seen a number of developments in our customer experience: the reception staff, for example, are promoting the My Fitness Park programme as a selling point and coaching new members much better.
Advice, instructions and customisable programmes are available to the sales force, which sends the member personalised programmes on their smartphone as soon as they join the club, with notifications of session reminders and automatic motivation monitoring.
– In order to harmonise the coaching speeches and train our sales force, we have also set up a common base of advice and video instructions based on the data and content generated by My Fitness Park, thus digitalising the way we work together within the national network. – Animated by the influencers, in-room activities via training days are taking place; the whole local event dimension is expanding. – Our CRM emailing segments are being refined and are gradually allowing us to automate the push of contextual training sessions according to the level and motivation of a member. – Lastly, we are receiving very good feedback from our members in terms of sales, sponsorships and renewals…
I would say that apart from some (legitimate) difficulties in automating many processes, we haven’t really had any failures or reticence from the network or influencers to date.\” For 2019, we are testing several evolutions including a live collaboration mode via the app where each person will be able to ask for help on the spot and notify the influencers present to better practice. THOMAS MENDONCA, CDO FITNESS PARK