Learn how we helped a nationwide franchise fitness brand with hundreds of locations boost in-store customer acquisition that aligns with corporate strategy & fulfills local, franchisee growth goals.
About Crunch Fitness
Crunch Fitness is one of America’s leading brands in fitness & gym membership, with more than 300 locations nationwide. Crunch helps everyday, busy people stay active and get healthy with ‘no judgments’ by creating a fun, inclusive and stress-free environment. Crunch’s target audience is urban and suburban professionals who are looking to stay physically active while juggling jobs, families and hectic daily responsibilities. They offer low-cost monthly memberships and a wide range of classes led by expert trainers, including Zumba, Pilates, Yoga, Cycling and many more.
A Quick Look
85%
Increase in Qualified Leads
41%
Increase in CTR
9%
Reduction in CPL
TL;DR: Crunch needed to cultivate a national brand while crafting local strategies that meet the needs of each market and each franchise owner, who may be looking to invest differently from gym-to-gym. Pantelope helped Crunch solve this challenge, and in the process helped the company achieve key business objectives: 1) increase gym memberships for the everyday person; 2) grow customer acquisition for 300+ locations across the U.S.; 3) customize performance-driven PPC campaigns based on local market demand (e.g. NYC may have different demand than Cerritos, CA); and 4) promote multiple gyms types that offer different classes, equipment, hours and profile to different audiences and demographics
The Challenge
Crunch needed to cultivate a national brand while crafting local strategies that meet the needs of each market and each franchise owner, who may be looking to invest differently from gym-to-gym.
The company had three main digital marketing challenges: 1) maximize local franchise dollars to drive direct response & corporate brand awareness; 2) hit aggressive performance goals for revenue, lead generation and CPA; and 2) manage unique local budgets, campaigns, and reporting based on specific markets.
The Strategy
Pantelope partnered the corporate marketing team with hundreds of local franchise owners on a synchronized PPC lead gen strategy.
Through this work we standardized & scaled Google Paid Search campaign structure, messaging, and audiences to align with a corporate strategy, yet customized our budget & bid strategies to take advantage of market demand & investment at each location. This allowed us to promote cross-franchise learnings that we could leverage across the network while still customizing fully at the local level.
We built a paid search strategy that emphasized customer discovery & brand awareness by focusing on non-branded search queries for classes & gyms that the target audience might actually use. Scaling non-brand search traffic resulted in more impressions, clicks and new leads, but it also helped increase brand search query growth and national brand awareness over time.
The Results
We successfully scaled lead gen via Google Paid Search in 2018 – qualified leads increased 85% year over year while cost per lead was reduced by 9%.
Moreover, ad and traffic quality significantly improved – which is why click-through-rate spiked 41% YoY despite average cost per clicks going down slightly.
We were able to increase lead volume significantly while improving spending efficiency by better optimizing campaigns at the local level – including better allocating budget according to each gym’s needs – while also aligning audience & messaging with the broader corporate branding strategies. As a result, we reduced the investment in low performing ads and keywords and increased spend on top converting keywords.
The Data
You can literally turn a week’s worth of work into minutes, just by running a script. And the best thing is that it is repeatable.
