The challenge
Virgin Active is the Virgin group’s chain of fitness centres: gyms and fitness clubs built around a new idea of well-being. From clubs with 4,500 classes a week to Revolution, its at-home training service, Virgin positions itself as the first choice for training.
With a service available both online and offline, Virgin Active’s goal is to work over the long term (year by year) to consolidate the reputation of its clubs, announce new openings across Italy and raise awareness of the online service, Virgin Active Revolution.
To do so, it used Roundabout to activate and manage its collaborations with micro influencers: 94 micro influencers in a year, seven times as many as the year before.
The strategy
Local influencers and experience management
Virgin Active has 40 clubs in Italy. To promote them it needed national coverage, but still tied to the specific cities where the clubs are.
This was both to reach a wide enough audience and because the influencers involved needed to try the clubs, the workouts and the dedicated training service first-hand.
The Virgin Active marketing team used Roundabout to find local micro influencers, who actually live in the clubs’ cities, and to verify that their audience was from the same city.
It could also organise and schedule each individual experience.
A mix of niches
Virgin Active’s fitness service speaks not only to wellness enthusiasts but also to all the disciplines that match the workouts available in the clubs and on the Revolution platform: yoga, pilates, running or dance, for example. So Virgin Active needed to identify relevant niches that would give its promotions credibility.
The marketing team built the right mix of niches for each activity, always with profiles in the right cities.
After its first tests with influencers, Virgin Active found its formula for campaigns: the mix of creator tiers, the number of content pieces for each engagement and the expected results.
Planning each campaign this way made it possible to spread communication over time and, above all, to produce content the brand could reuse.
The solution
Virgin Active ran an entire influencer programme, built around brand activations both offline and online. Knowing that the real impact of this channel comes over the long term, the strategy relied on constant activations to keep awareness of its services high.
With Roundabout, Virgin Active’s marketing team runs campaigns every month, with benefits across the whole funnel. In particular, Roundabout made it possible to:
- find influencers in specific cities and niches;
- analyse their real, up-to-date performance;
- manage creator outreach, agreements and payments;
- manage offline experiences;
- plan the creators’ content calendar, aligned with the brand’s;
- report on and analyse the results;
- get the original content, ready to reuse.
The results
With Roundabout, Virgin Active activated 94 micro influencers in one year, across offline and online activities, achieving +2.4M impressions.
With at least 8 influencers active each month, the marketing team could run the activity while staying a small group of people.
Thanks to control over the brief, the campaign produced +664 content pieces (photos and videos) that the brand could use across all its online channels, including as social proof.
