​12RND Fitness knows what it’s fighting for

For a franchise business operating in a highly competitive environment, marketing consistency is key.

12RND Fitness is a fast-growing boxing and strength training provider, establishing over 60 operating locations in Australia since 2016. But as many franchised businesses will know, having self-managed locations means brand messaging and marketing consistency can be lost, confusing the message and leading to poor customer experience (CX).

To combat this, 12RND uses data analysis, custom content and personalisation in an integrated marketing approach to ensure no customer is lost in the funnel. And this is what head of marketing and PR for 12RND Fitness, Edrianne Javier, has been concentrating on since her appointment in February this year.

Javier told CMO her marketing strategy is focused on achieving a genuine connection with the audience and creating long-term impact. She breaks up marketing to three areas of importance within the business and as a fitness provider and franchisor: Get members; keep members; and optimise your business.

“Since I've come on-board, we've amplified the marketing elements already there, by adding what I call ‘layers’ to the brand,” Javier explained to CMO. “The ‘What Are You Fighting For?’ message was something developed by the executive team last year, and since then, we've developed the meaning behind it of why we call our members fighters and increased the volume of messaging around this idea of the fighter."

Prior to commencing with 12RND, the team had been relying predominantly on agencies to execute marketing across social media content, design and advertising.

"Coming from an agency background myself, I was responsible for reviewing these existing relationships to determine what we would bring back in-house," Javier said. "I personally like to keep as much in-house as possible or work with external parties that operate like as if they're part of your business, to ensure every single person fully embodies the brand values behind the marketing to effectively inject them into everything we do.

Audience is the word

For Javier, messaging is then led by asking the audience. "We aim to communicate with our audience in a way that will resonate with them not just on the surface. but emotionally too. It's very important to me that our marketing messages have substance, " she said.

“In ‘Get Members’, we consider the typical pathways of a prospective member and ask questions like: Where would they first hear about us? What features of our product will resonate with them most? How do we attract them into our clubs? When will they convert throughout the marketing funnel? Why will they be motivated to join 12RND after their first workout?"

Initial touchpoints for customers are local area marketing, word-of-mouth and social media. So marketing creates content suited to each, and create avenues to drive new audiences into a funnel wherever possible.

“We drive word-of-mouth through member referral campaigns and encourage members to bring in their friends for a workout, at which point they provide their details at the club and immediately begin to receive email marketing," Javier said. "Another example is we always re-target people who visit our website with social media advertising via Facebook and Instagram.

“We put a lot of emphasis on our franchisees to nurture these people as soon as they reach a local-level within the funnel and the club has their contact information, again being very genuine and authentic throughout their sales approach."

But while social media is the most cost-effective form of advertising for results, and 12RND's website generates a significant amount of traffic, serving as a primary source of education for new prospects, there's no one particular channel identified as being more important than the other. The importance lies in an integrated approach and utilising all of the different platforms, channels and referrals to ensure that every path leads to conversion and no one is lost throughout the funnel, Javier said.

“As a result, data analysis is very important for us. We look at the behaviours of website users, social media engagers, email newsletter subscribers and members and draw observations and findings to fuel our ongoing marketing implementation,” she explained.

“To keep members, we work closely with our franchisees to identify the ways in which we can promote member satisfaction and high engagement to ensure they are getting the most value out of their membership to maintain retention."

‘Business optimisation’ meanwhile, is about equipping franchisees with the necessary tools and resources to ensure they can effectively implement the campaigns rolled out at a national level in a way that will be most effective for their local area.”

Building customer journeys

EDMs are something 12RND only recently implemented at a national level, due to the clubs having their own CRM and member management system (MMS) to maintain ongoing communication with both leads and members.

At the club level, Javier's team has developed a series of funnels for various customer journeys for both CRM and MMS, and supplies recommended copy and creative to clubs to customise to suit their local audience. At a national level, the business aims to remain educational, informative and brand-centric, with minimal sales messages.

Javier sees this as the way to best achieve personalisation. "There's a lot more responsibility on the franchisee to implement effectively, and so I also provide video tutorials and online walkthroughs to assist them as much as possible, while our BDMs work with them one-on-one," she continued.

“As a franchisor, we take the initiative to do testing with the national budget to provide our franchisees with tried and tested methods for their own club digital advertising. So there are a lot of various campaigns we run across Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube to determine the best audiences, placements, copy and creative prior to briefing the franchisees.

"This also informs future content creation - if we see a particular style of imagery or video getting high engagement or conversion, we capture more of the same content in new ways under new themes.”

In terms of data analysis, Javier analyses data manually from Google Analytics and Facebook Business Manager, and she said the process allows her to take the time to better absorb information and identify correlations between data. Marketing technology is used for ease of implementation, such as social media scheduling, email marketing and content creation for franchisees, throughout sales and in-club experience, such as Myzone heart-rate belts.

“We are determined to find a way to capture the 12RND workout and experience as clearly as possible through our marketing messaging and content, and also reach a point where we are simply known as the most convenient and effective boxing and strength workout in the world," Javier said.

Since the beginning of the year, 12RND has seen a massive surge of growth in membership sales, and has been opening a new club every other week.

"It's always challenging to accurately measure the direct impact marketing has on growth, but we recognise the significant differences in the consistency of how our brand is now communicated internally across the franchise group and even with members," Javier said. "Given we have made massive strides in our brand evolution and marketing implementation since the start of the year, I feel we are still in the process of an ongoing assessment of ROI.

“We can justify our efforts knowing our franchisees are seeing success locally and we are providing them with the necessary tools and resources they need to succeed. At a national and local level, we have a combined aim to continually improve the quantity and quality of leads coming through to clubs each month to drive member sales across the group." 

Important stats for Javier include average monthly leads continuing to improve, and data shows PR exercises are driving over 10 per cent of traffic to the 12RND website, which translate into leads.

"Overall, although difficult to measure, we can clearly see the holistic impact our marketing efforts have made in brand awareness, recognition and consistency through increasing social media engagement, user-generated content, use of brand messaging both internally and externally, and growing interest in our brand from other businesses for collaboration," Javier said. "That in itself demonstrates that value of what we're doing.”

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