The Fitness Journey Project: A Mission Statement
Today we’re launching The Fitness Journey Project to provide four fitness businesses with high value customer research.
We have done a lot of work behind the scenes here at TeamUp lately. We have surveyed fitness business owners, interviewed customers, and examined our brand, asking “who are we?” and “why do we do what we do?” Getting philosophical about TeamUp has been great, and listening to customers has been incredibly rewarding.
Before all this, we knew that our customers often struggled with the usual business problems like cashflow, member retention, marketing, and hiring. But the fascinating thing we found was that a lot of marketing and growth issues came from not understanding customers in more detail. We realised that focusing on customer experience research could help a lot of business owners.
So, we decided to do something about it. At TeamUp, we realized that our top values are quality and customer happiness (one leads to the next). We decided to use these as guidance and get radical about customer success.
What is the Fitness Journey Project?
We are conducting in-depth customer research for four independent fitness businesses. Claire Atkin, our marketing expert, and I have designed the Fitness Journey Project to give independent fitness studios a new way of looking at their business operations.
This research will aim to understand the “fitness journey,” which is what we’re calling the experience that people go through after they first realize they are interested in exercising in a class setting.
Once the fitness journey is understood, business owners can use these insights to improve customers’ experiences during the sales process, class signup process, change rooms… anything! Finding new ways to delight members improves retention, which leads to more referrals - the gold standard of marketing.
It can also be used to drive marketing strategy. What are people going through when they decide to go to your fitness class? What are they choosing between? How can you stand out? These are exciting insights.
How does it work?
At the end of September, we will choose four businesses and set them up with a survey to email to their customers. After that, we will interview their top ten customers. Then, we’ll analyse the data, package it up, and make customer names anonymous.
Finally, in early 2019, we’ll share the results with the competition winners, and later, to the whole Fitness Journey community in a summarised form.
We want this campaign to boost the whole independent fitness industry and help all the amazing business owners out there. We’ll use the results of this research to produce training and educational materials for the industry as a whole, as well as teach businesses how to run similar research for their business.
Where can I sign up?
To sign up, go to https://goteamup.com/fitness-journey
You can submit your business for a chance to win this special customer research for your business, or you can simply sign up to the mailing list to receive the results after the research is complete.
Where do I learn more?
For discussion, questions and commentary, the Facebook group Up! Fitness Business Owners Collective is the place to be. Please join us at facebook.com/groups/fitnessbusinessowners, we would love to have you!
Join us for the Fitness Journey project at goteamup.com/fitness-journey
