Building a fitness audience on Facebook and Instagram

The problem

The Fit Studios publishes on workouts, wellness centres, fitness gadgets, events and expert advice, with the aim of keeping readers motivated rather than selling them something once.

The objective was brand awareness, engagement and leads through online channels. Awareness is the unglamorous half of that: it shortens the sales conversation later, which is hard to attribute and easy to underfund.

What we changed

Profiles were built across the relevant platforms and a Facebook plan written specifically, because Facebook was where the audience already was.

• Profiles created and set up properly across the platforms that mattered
• A Facebook marketing plan written for this audience rather than adapted from another
• Ongoing management of the profiles, with content planned rather than posted ad hoc
• Promotion targeted by location, age group, gender and interest
• A mix of organic and paid promotion, optimised against what was reaching people

The two things that made it hard

Closed Facebook groups are worth more than open ones, because the membership is filtered and the discussion is better. They are also work: the group has to stay active and posts have to actually publish rather than sit in the pending queue, which is where a lot of group strategies quietly die.

The second constraint is the one every organic social plan runs into. An organic Facebook post reaches roughly 10 to 15 percent of the people who already follow the page. Any plan that assumes otherwise is a plan to talk to nobody, which is why paid distribution was part of this from the start rather than bolted on later.

Why there are no numbers on this page

The campaign document we hold records its results as screenshots of platform dashboards rather than as exported data. We can read the strategy from it. We cannot read the figures back with enough confidence to publish them as fact.

So they are not published. An approximate number on a page like this is worth less than an honest gap, because a number invites you to check it and there is nothing behind this one to check.