You’ve already seen the success stories of restaurants, hotels, and fashion brands collaborating with influencers, and now it is time to see how fitness brands do it! So, if you’d like to learn more about the most successful social media influencer campaigns concerning fitness brands and sports, we’ve rounded up a few stellar examples for your inspiration.
Daily Burn
Daily Burn, a fitness app providing quick high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts, chose to hyper target their audiences. By choosing this strategy, they made sure their content will be visible to those just thinking about exercising, those already active, and those aiming for a healthier life.
How did they manage to get their message across? Daily Burn chose to work with a diverse group of influencers – from mommy influencers to lifestyle bloggers – they made sure to target audiences with slightly different needs but same goals. Most importantly, they were tremendously successful in showing audiences that you don’t need loads of time to exercise, it can be done virtually anywhere, and absolutely anyone can do it!
Check, for instance one of their ads targeting mothers:
YogaClub
YogaClub, a yoga clothing brand, used to focus on working with just yogi influencers. However, they soon figured out that working with a diverse group of influencers means better outreach – simple enough, right?
So, YogaClub’s team did research and found various content pieces featuring different outfits from their collections, modelled by a very diverse group of women. Since they already knew that their audiences relate more to creators’ content than to the brand’s own, they’ve used it to promote their brand awareness. And this definitely upped their social media game as they soon found themselves relatable to and loved by women from varying paths of life.
Of course, they did not forget their partnerships with bona fide influencers, which furthered the brand’s stance on inclusivity and authenticity.
Lululemon
Now, even if you’re not that into activewear, you probably have at least a vague notion of Lululemon’s existence – they did so well on their influencer campaigns, that the name is basically a synonym for leggings.
To establish such a clear brand identity and almost a cult-like following by fitness instructors, athletes, and those wanting to live healthier, they’ve worked hard with their chosen influencers. By working hard we mean they gave their creators a full-on brand experience with participation in worldwide events, yoga classes, providing feedback on product design and, of course, Lululemon retreats.
These relationship-based and immersive collaborations with creators lead to Lululemon becoming one of the most famous activewear brands showing that it isn’t just leggings, it’s a lifestyle full of adventure.
Nike
Nike has always been the one to choose unconventional paths for their advertisements – just think of at least one of their campaigns speaking about their garments’ quality or durability. You won’t find any, because there are none! Rather, Nike chooses to incorporate their products into a bigger picture and supply them with a background story. And this is exactly where influencers, creators, and athletes step into their marketing strategy.
Another thing Nike does is mastering the art of Instagram hashtags; all of which seem to turn into viral phenomena taking over the social media and even reaching the news! So, their tactic is showing the human side of their products, adding in the extra value of a background story, and creating hashtags that spread like wildfire on social media.
LNDR
LDNR, an UK athleisure brand, was founded by three women who wanted to cut the cotton-candy phrasing of your regular activewear brands, to emphasise their garment’s impeccable quality and show women that quality always wins over fast fashion.
Their stance was this – no woman ever needs uninspiring motivational quotes to tell them they can, in fact, reach for whatever goals they aspire to. Also, LDNR is all about that perfect fit and cutting-edge materials and technologies in creating their garments. To emphasise this, LDNR launched a #nobllsht hashtag in Instagram, inviting women to participate in a new transparent and authentic fitness philosophy. The success of this hashtag launched a whole slew of similar ones, each of them proving to gain their audience’s trust and belief in the brand’s authentic values.
And, yeah, it worked! Voicing their values gained LNDR a significant amount of new followers while strengthening the bond with their already existing clients.
The Squad
The Squad is, in essence, your regular gym based in Cork, Ireland, that offers personal training and fitness groups. They too did suffer from Covid lockdowns, but not only managed to stay afloat, but also gained new and loyal followers during the pandemic.
How did they do it? First of all, their social media platforms, namely Instagram, offers highly personalized and a tiny bit controversial content that’s very inviting to both the followers and influencers. The Squad engages with their community and encourages them to share their experiences in the gym by using the #IAmWithTheSquad hashtag in their stories and posts. This user- and influencer-generated content worked so well that people from all over the world started to join in to their video classes, spreading the word even further.
So, the key to their success was engaging with their audiences and building a tight-knit community which later worked just as well as any paid for marketing campaign.
GymShark
And last, but definitely not the least on our list is the stellar and mind-blowing success of GymShark. The mastermind behind the brand is Ben Francis, who at nineteen decided to create an activewear brand offering clothes that he himself wanted to wear. Now, back in 2012 influencer marketing was still a thing of the future, but Francis thought this was exactly the answer to grow his brand.
The brand’s first collaborations included high-profile bodybuilders on YouTube to whom GymShark sent their clothes in hopes they would wear them in their workout videos. They did and it worked. GymShark soon added a significant number to their creators’ crew giving them the “GymShark Athletes” name. This long-term collaboration tactic and sponsored events where fans could meet their fitness idols is still working miracles for GymShark on social media and, of course, in revenues.
So much so, that there’s almost 12 million posts with the #gymshark hashtag on Instagram today!
And here’s your takeaway message – people love brands who stay true to their values, are authentic, and not afraid of voicing their opinion. In fact, one might think that fitness brands should be just as inspiring (without being too obvious) as the people using their products.
Now, if these examples of influencers in fitness campaigns seem interesting to you and you’re just about convinced to launch your own – give us a message and we’ll sort it all out for you!
