Supporting partners to understand their local market, engage new participants and generate more income
The Fitness Division had an outstanding reputation and good following for delivering high quality park based boot camp sessions. However early in 2017 they embarked on a new venture and opened their own facility – a purpose build facility in Fleet Marston in rural Aylesbury Vale. The location was ideally placed as there is a gap in provision, and surrounding areas have a high risk of inactivity (as defined by DataHub).
The Fitness Division Gym created its own unique offer, a modern, high quality facility that offer the personal touch with fun but tough functional fitness that will guarantee results. At the same time, taking pride in ensuring members are valued and not a number, advertising as part of joining the Aylesbury Army – a massive family growing everyday! The facility has a range of group training, classes and the opportunity for 1:1 personal training.
Despite being in an ideal location, the demographic profile of the surrounding area is different to that of the established boot camps. The facility attracted the majority of its members, based on reputation, from existing boot camps and word of mouth in Aylesbury. The majority of members travel past other leisure facilities to get to the centre.
Like most facilities, the Fitness Division is always looking for ways to increase its membership and as a key delivery partner for Leap, currently as part of the Sport England funded Aylesbury Vale Girls Can Project, Leap are using local insight and market understanding to support their growth.
Through the Aylesbury Vale Girls Can project, Leap have supported the Fitness Division to set up and run new sessions to engage inactive women and girls in new sessions at the Fitness Division Gym, also sharing knowledge and expertise around key messages for the target audience. The sessions, Let’s do this together… were a huge success and attracted 25 inactive women, all who didn’t like the idea of going to a gym. When the participants asked why they took part and how they felt about arriving at the gym their feedback was extremely positive:
“Because I like the family feel, not just a member”
“Love it, and love the feeling afterwards”
20 of the participants have joined the facility and the group have also generated the Fitness Division Gym more than £17,000 from a combination of memberships, additional sessions and small group personal training. On the back of the success of Let’s do it together… Leap are now working with the Fitness Division to understand the population in the wards surrounding the Fitness Division Gym, to help them attract new members and generate more income. Leap used the DataHub Geo Impacts tool to identify deprivation (IMD), risk of inactivity and population density of the LSOAs (lower super output areas) surrounding the Fitness Division Gym.
Geo Impacts was also used to look at the age range and gender of people living in each of the LSOAs. This insight combined with the top 3 mosaic segments likely to be living in each LSOA has provided the foundations to start to develop a new range of classes and activities that are likely to attract participants from the surrounding LSAOs and extend the customer base of the Fitness Division Gym.
Leap have combined this insight with Sport England This Girl Can research to develop messaging for a new campaign for the Fitness Division Gym. The campaign will target Mums (Geo Impacts shows a high number of females aged 40 to 44 years, with a lower than national average conversion rate to activity, and a high number of young people aged less than 15 years), and work to break down stereotypes of traditional gym users. It will be rolled out as a series of calls to action from real life women who are already members. Placing ‘someone like me’ at the heart of the campaign will hopefully break down the fear of judgement and in time eliminate stereotypes of the shape and size that women need to be exercise. As well as attracting a more diverse type of member for the facility, it will also increase income (ie their profit) and support Leap with reducing the number of inactive women in Aylesbury Vale
Based on the local population Leap have also suggested that there is a target market for under 15s and 60+ and in time will support the Fitness Division Gym to widen its offer to meet these groups.
“ since first working with leap the dynamics of my business and customer base has changed dramatically. Not knowing the potential of a new target audience was something that changed when we set up our first project.
Now knowing how to target inactive people who want to change is now easier from the knowledge gained and the successful programs we have run in conjunction with Leap. The success from this has not only improved our income but also taught me how to market the business and what we offer in another way.
Working with Abbi on some of the projects has been brilliant and has pushed my business into some exciting positions for the future.
I look forward to future projects with Leap “
Luke Parkhouse, Fitness Division
More to follow on the development of programmes, engagement with the targeted LSOAs and target population and additional income generation!