Boosting Fitness Studio Traffic and Revenue through the Holiday Season to Stay Ahead of Competitors
The client is a pilates studio based in Washington DC offering in-person mat and reformer pilates classes, as well as class livestreams over Zoom. The client is a community-driven business, looking to extend its target customer base to local undergraduate and graduate students in the area.
Situation
As pilates studios and customers alike have adapted to COVID-19 safety precautions, their habits around exercise have changed. The COVID-19 crisis has kept the studio’s regular clientele at home and has posed an obstacle to maintaining a reliable customer base and revenue flow. To mitigate the impacts of the pandemic, the studio began offering online livestream classes, which temporarily relieved pressure on the business. Engagement within the community faltered, however, in the longer term, once the studio reopened for in-person classes.
Without a foundational social media marketing strategy or promotion scheme in place, the studio lost momentum and new traffic to its website and social media pages.
Challenge
In a COVID-19 environment, the client faced several key obstacles. In order to combat decreasing revenues, our client hoped to divert foot traffic from competitors, so they tasked the team with increasing brand awareness and new customer retention.
Approach
Our approach was to develop a sales performance review, a competitive market analysis across the pilates industry, a guide to a customized social media revamp, and a new promotion scheme framework focused on attracting a new, younger target market. We then applied market research to identify the best way to go about illustrating these business upgrades on the studio website, so that customers - both new and existing - could see the post-COVID changes.
Engagement with the brand was ascertained with a deep dive competitor analysis, to determine the client’s positioning against other players in the market. With various current market sources showing overall fitness studio growth projections to have decreased from mid-2020 to 2021, our clear path to success was to connect with customer segments that would start growing again post-pandemic – young people such as undergraduate and graduate students.
Impact
The impact will not only be to reverse and recuperate lost revenues, but to set a foundational process for marketing the business in the future. By establishing a clear outreach strategy, messaging content priority and media recommendation, our client will focus resources towards efficient customer acquisition tactics post-pandemic.
Team Breakdown
Team Lead: Aarushi Shah
Strategist: Andrew Peters
Strategist: Claire McKeon
Strategist: Grace Flanagan
Relevant Background Information
Business Type: Small Business, Pilates Studio
Industry: Fitness
Location: Washington, D.C.
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