Local influencers and experience management

Virgin Active Clubs are 40 in Italy. For promotional purposes, it needs to get a national coverage, but still referred locally to the specific cities where the clubs are. This is both to achieve a sufficiently wide reach at the market level, and because it needs the influencers involved to experience first-hand the experience of the clubs, the training and the dedicated training service.

Roundabout was no problem! The Virgin Active Marketing team used Roundabout not only to find local Micro Influencers, so they actually reside in specific cities, but also could verify that their audience also belonged to the same city!

In addition, he was able to organize and schedule individual experiences thanks to the integrated calendar.

Mix of niches

Virgin Active is an online fitness service not only for wellness enthusiasts, but also of all those disciplines that find a perfect match with the workouts made available both in clubs and on the platform Revolution. For example yoga, pilates, running or dance. So the need for Virgin Active is to identify relevant niches to give credibility to promotions.

Using the Roundabout platform, the marketing team has managed to build the right mix of niches for each course, always making sure to identify profiles geographically in target.

After initial testing with influencers, Virgin Active found its perfect formula for campaigns. With the Budget Calculator they perfectly calibrated the mix of influencer team, the number of content for each engagement, the expected results and then the budget for each campaign.

This step was fundamental to be able to distribute the communication over time, but above all to produce content that can also be used by the same brand. In this way the cost of influencers marketing has been amortized for the creation of content. 

Virgin Active has executed a winning strategy managing to run an entire influencer program declined both on offline and online activation brands. Knowing that the real exponential impact with this channel is obtained in the long term, the strategy has provided constant activations to maintain high and growing awareness on services. 

Thanks to Roundabout, the marketing team of Virgin Active is able to activate monthly campaigns that have brought benefits on the entire funnel. In particular, with Roundabout, they were able to:

• Identify influencers in specific cities and niches
• Analyze real and updated performances
• Avoid negotiation effort
• Avoid outreach management, agreements and one to one payments
• Manage offline experiences
• Plan the influencer PED to align it with the brand's one
• Report and analyze the impact  
• Get the original content to be reused

Influencer Management

With Roundabout, Virgin Active was able to activate 94 Micro Influencers in one year, distributed on offline and online activities, achieving +2.4M of Impression.

Cost and time savings

Using Roundabout, the Virgin Active marketing team has achieved a significant economic impact on cost optimization, for a total of +50k € saved on the second year of continuous use of Roundabout.

In particular the savings on administrative costs necessary to scale the influencer activity, avoiding the manual search, analysis and execution processes. With at least 8 active influencers per month to be managed with the support of a tool, they have optimized the effort/man keeping a reduced team of people.

Lastly, the considerable savings on content production, optimized thanks to brief control, getting +664 content (foto+video) less than 1/3 of the price. Content that they could spend on all online channels with the additional benefit of being able to show high value social proof.