Anytime Fitness & Uberall Turn Franchisees Into Marketing Rockstars

Anytime Fitness is a health and fitness club where facilities are open 24 hours a day, seven days per week. In 2014 and 2015, the company won the number one spot on Entrepreneur's top global franchises list, based on size, growth, and financial stability. Anytime Fitness franchisees are tasked with providing a consistent brand experience both online and in-store.

However, it can be hard for franchisees to find the time to do it all. What this company needed was a platform to allow franchisees to increase their marketing, social media, and customer experience efforts and drive more business as a result.

Using Uberall's platform, Anytime Fitness was able to increase membership sign-ups and brand awareness of its gyms nationwide. It achieved this by increasing organic social reach by more than 200%, impressions from paid ads by 170%, and managing customer reviews – in one place.

Anytime Fitness, together with Uberall, uses a unique blend of corporate and local content, a pre-vetted content library, and a content calendar to keep social media easy for their owners. With this help and guidance readily available, franchisees can take their social media, paid ads, and review management to the next level. The result? Anytime Fitness maintains a strong and cohesive corporate brand while giving franchisees the ability to cater to their local environment.

Rather than trying to manage each of their social media pages one at a time, in addition to running a business, Uberall turns fitness entrepreneurs into marketing and customer experience experts.

The Unique Model of Franchisee Independence

Contrary to most corporate brands, ask an Anytime Fitness owner who it is that manages their social media, you'll find the most common answer is "Me." They are no strangers to managing a million tasks at once. But, they're entrepreneurs, fitness enthusiasts, and business owners, not marketing specialists.

The Anytime Fitness model makes every owner a social media rockstar with its optimal blend of oversight and ownership.

All new franchisees with Anytime Fitness attend training at corporate headquarters. After training, Anytime Fitness is unique in the latitude it gives its franchisees. With the exception of one corporate post per day, it's up to the owners and managers to tailor their social accounts to their local audiences (with a few guidelines to keep things consistent). Of course, every franchise is different – this inherent variety is what makes this strategy work so well.

How Anytime Fitness Balances Autonomy with Authority

Anytime Fitness uses a few specific strategies to empower its franchisees to do more. With only so many hours in the day, Uberall and Anytime Fitness allow franchisees to handle reviews, paid ads, and social media with ease. Here's how:

• Corporate Content: Every day, Anytime Fitness will post one update from corporate to each franchise location. From there, each location has the latitude to post anything that fits its local community. Whether it's memes, inspirational quotes, member birthdays, or club events. Each Anytime Fitness social feed has local content to make it unique.

• 5 Pillars: The corporate team follows the '5 Pillars' to guide them in their content creation. These pillars are Fitness, Coaching, Nutrition, Connection (local events), and Community. They then encourage franchisees to include content at the local level with similar, but more targeted daily themes. For example Monday: Work out of the week, Tuesday: Highlight a member's progress.

• Content Library: If owners are ever looking for ideas of what to post, Anytime Fitness offers a curated content library of pre-vetted images and text that can be used on any social media platform.

• Review Management: Together with Uberall, Anytime Fitness allows managers the ability to oversee reviews from Yelp, Facebook, or Google, bulk-respond, and watch star ratings improve all in one place. Positive reviews are a gym's lifeblood.

• Paid Social Ads: Franchisees can manage their paid ads and boosted posts directly through Uberall. Anytime Fitness lets owners create specific target audiences, geo-filter with precision, and measure ROI without leaving their dashboard.

• Drive In-store Traffic: Uberall allows users to correlate people who are nearby their stores with actual visits and memberships. Owners can see the ROI of their digital marketing efforts even while campaigns are in effect.

Uberall Helps Franchises Achieve More

The Uberall platform helps franchisees get more done, without hiring any additional staff and without having to routinely pull 60-hour weeks.

A Low-Risk Strategy with High Reward

The Anytime Fitness approach has led to amazing results.

In nine months, social organic reach increased by 210% due to franchisees being more active and posting more engaging community-driven content. This activity also translated into more engagement in the form of shares, comments, and likes across all channels. For franchisees, the ease of creating Facebook paid ads on Uberall has lead to an increase of 625% in dollars spent promoting their location and services on the platform. As a result, impressions increased 170% over the previous 9 months to 229 million impressions.

In turn, this had led to 297% more traffic to the Anytime Fitness website originating from Facebook.

These impressive results prove that this strategy is worth learning from. Franchise owners and corporate brands take heed – there's a new paradigm in town.

A Best Practice for Franchise Marketing

The model of franchise independence has seen such success that it should be considered among the upper echelon of digital marketing best practices. What other strategy allows business owners to reclaim time while transforming into marketing superstars?

Above all, this method delivers standout marketing results with less time and less money invested. The Uberall platform provides all that franchisees need to succeed as marketers – and still have time to run a profitable gym. From a corporate standpoint, Anytime Fitness achieves a unified brand voice while each location can cater to its unique audience.

When does your marketing strategy mean you can reach more people, bring more consumers in-store, and convert more shoppers into paying customers, what's not to love?

Do you have questions about how to manage social media with your franchises? Uberall has solutions that can help where you need them most. Contact us to find out how.