ZŪM Fitness

It began with a new website…

The fitness industry is constantly evolving and by 2015, ZŪM Fitness was well into its second decade in business and second physical location. Their existing site was slow to load, looked dated, and was not mobile ready.

Noted Seattle-area designer Greg Quist, who had previously held lead creative roles at Tommy Bahama and The North Face completely rebranded the business, including a new site design layout, color scheme, and typography.

dDubdigital was then brought in to develop a new website that utilized this design with modern technologies, including moving to a mobile-first approach, and an emphasis on performance, good SEO, and security. The site design was later further refined and optimized by dDubdigital for sales conversions featuring prominent CTAs, social proof, and an optimized path to sales funnels.

But what good is a website if no one can find it?

Prior to this time, ZŪM relied on it’s stellar reputation and word-of-mouth for building business, but these were no longer sufficient as more competition and changes to the fitness sector provided consumers with more options for their fitness needs.

dDubdigital was retained to develop a social media marketing program, establishing new accounts on then-emerging platforms, and developing written content and media assets. We also initiated a program of inviting customer reviews through Yelp, Google, and others, and then optimizing, monitoring, and analyzing the social proof metrics. The results were a steady increase in brand awareness and positive reviews, which still continues.

To codify the strategy as team members were trained to take over content generation, dDubdigital also created a brand guide based on the original Quist designs, as well as a best practices and social media policy for the company.

dDubdigital built a 16% average year-over-year increase in social network site referrals, a 48% YOY increase in Instagram followers, 66% cumulative increase in Facebook engagement, and a nearly 256% cumulative increase in YouTube channel views.

An ongoing SEO campaign began to show tangible results with SERP rankings landing ZŪM on front page for general category searches and in number one position for some specific searches. The site was updated to make full use of Google Marketing Platform, and a full picture of site use analytics was analyzed and reported on a weekly basis to management. Throughout the period dDubdigital optimized for search, year-over-year average of website User Acquisition increased 35%.

A Full Marketing Program…

After two years of these improvements, the role dDubdigital was playing in the company’s marketing was becoming more involved and valuable and at that point David Halsell was named as Marketing Director. With this role, marketing efforts were expanded into a comprehensive marketing program and messaging was further refined to communicate the unique brand proposition of ZŪM.

Social and SEM advertising strategies were developed, and a streamlined sales funnel was enacted on the site.

Along with a simplified pricing structure, the sales optimized site was responsible for pre-pandemic membership numbers steadily rising and demonstrating a positive ROI.

A blogging program was introduced to showcase the depth and breadth of expertise of the trainers at ZŪM, and their unique approach to lifelong fitness.

Team members were taught best practices on blogging and regular “Member of the Month” features were popular and drove traffic to the site. Trainers provided actionable advice on fitness in monthly articles of short- and medium-form length.

Increasingly, dDubdigital produced a wide range of video assets, handling all aspects of the production process from pre- to post, all in-house. This included promotional and advertising content for delivery to the website, social media, as well as interior and street-facing digital signage and iPad-based informational kiosks. Multiple video products were produced for ongoing awareness building campaigns, promotional content for class offerings, and special events.

The below reel includes title sequences for exercise class explainer/promos, “Today & Tomorrow” promo campaign, and one of a series of spots on the price restructuring. These videos appeared in online advertising, the ZUM Fitness YouTube channel and other social media platforms, as well as internal & external digital signage from 2017-2020.

Highlights from the “I ZUM” promotional campaign with an aspirational message featuring actual members performing their favorite movements and explaining why they love the club by answering the question “Why do you ZŪM?” The videos appeared in various formats and lengths in social and SEM advertising, social media, the website, and internal and external digital signage through 2018-2019.

These efforts, along with providing the day-to-day operational needs of internal and external signage, keeping the Brightsign digital signage programming updated, and even the occasional IT technical support, all contributed to the success of the marketing program. Throughout the five-year period that dDubdigital worked with ZŪM Fitness, all marketing metrics rose significantly and brand awareness increased.