Background
While many industries were forced to adopt an online marketing strategy years ago, others were given a longer runway. Medley, a nationwide fitness club, was one of them. Their way of interacting with customers changed a little over the last decade. People’s natural urge to work out was still enough to drive new members to the training facilities without additional marketing.
However, as the world suddenly stopped and the pandemic forced whole cities indoors, the opportunity for a slow-paced adoption of digital strategies revealed itself as a trap in disguise. Now more than ever, Medley needed to change how they reached new members — and they needed to do it fast.
”What the robot does in a day, we wouldn’t have been able to do in a month.”
Thomas Bjernudd, CEO
Solution
Digital marketing has come a long way since the rise of major platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram. And the good aspect of being late to the party was that Medley didn’t have to weed through a decade’s inefficient tools and strategies. Instead, they partnered with Amanda AI to access the best methods to establish a digital connection with their now at-home customers.
As fitness clubs are highly local businesses, we could safely assume that many potential customers would go online and actively look for one. This led to our first initiative: using our AI for extensive (we’re talking millions of optimizations daily) local keyword generation to find the optimal variations in terms of effectiveness and price. The reports showed a solid 100% increase in digital signups at the six-month mark.
After having secured the people actively looking for a fitness center, the next step was to attract those that might not even know they want to exercise in the first place. This is best achieved with attractive paid ads and a wide reach across multiple platforms. However, if they don’t know their potential customers – how on earth would we know?
The answer to that came as a beautiful partnership between our speedy algorithms and one of Facebook’s popular tools called lookalike audiences. We built a persona of our already-known target audience – those who somehow searched for a fitness center — and allowed for a 2% difference in characteristics. Then we put our AI to work, testing almost infinite combinations and continuously expanding the target audience. This led to a precise effort on Facebook, but better yet, we could now export this audience data to other platforms with a much broader reach (for example, Google Ads), confident that we knew our target and could expect a high conversion.
Result
Two years into our collaboration, Medley now has a solid digital strategy that’s completely automated. Moreover, it’s also a lot more accurate thanks to the fine-tuning of their keywords and an unprecedented understanding of the company’s target audience. And with more members signing up via digital channels than ever before, the different branches can worry less about future restrictions should the pandemic reenter our lives.
Download the case study with Medley here (pdf).
