Anytime Fitness to take influencer marketing route to expand base in India

Popular gym chain Anytime Fitness will expand its footprint in India on the back of influencer marketing on social media channels. The brand doesn’t have any celebrity brand ambassador and believes in the power of influencer videos in Instagram, YouTube and Facebook to make inroads.

Vikas Jain

Vikas Jain, Managing Director, Anytime Fitness, told BestMediaInfo.com in an interaction that the company believes influencer and content marketing is the best delivery mechanism in terms of ROI. Jain said the phenomenal rise in influencer marketing has forced each marketer and business to explore its high potential to reach their target audience.

“In this FY, we are concentrating more on content marketing and influencer marketing. To start with, we have associated with two influencers and are planning to associate with more in the future. Last year, we created ads that talked about the USPs of our fitness chain and this year, we will continue to make more ads,” said Jain.

The fitness industry is growing at the rate of 6.6% annually in India and giving an exciting opportunity to organised brands such as Anytime Fitness to grow.

Jain said that in the gym and fitness studio industry, franchising is emerging as a popular option for scaling up business.

“Franchisers who simultaneously update their offerings in sync with regional tastes, creating their own market niches, can position themselves in the rapidly growing and aspirational consumer market of India,” said Jain.

The brand operates over 4,400+ franchised locations and 34+ countries. Seeing the immense growth opportunity in India, it plans to open 100 outlets/ franchise by the end of 2019.

Due to illnesses caused by a sedentary lifestyle, people have started taking their health seriously and hence, this industry is booming at a great pace.

The brand is in the competition with players such as Cult, Fitness First, CrossFit, Gold’s Gym and more.

Commenting on the competition, Jain said, “The kind of business model we have, our key objective and roadmap is to adopt the latest technologies along with keeping quality, customer satisfaction and performance as our primary focus areas.”

The brand provides facilities and work-outs according to international standards 24x7.With a single membership, one can get access to all their gyms across the globe.

To a question whether the booming craze for traditional exercises such as yoga would replace something like the western concept of gymming in India, Jain said yoga does not provide cardiovascular benefits, which is vital. Fat loss and weight loss can only be achieved via exercises done in fitness centres.

“In traditional exercises, people do one set of exercises and rest for a while but in circuit training, there is no space for rest. If a person has recommended doing six different exercises in circuit training, he/ she can only rest after all the exercises are done. Recovery from one exercise in this training pattern is changing by exercise,” he added.

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