Club Pilates Streamlines New Location Openings, Drives More Traffic With Yext

Founded in 2007, Club Pilates is a fitness studio that provides premium, Reformer-based group Pilates classes, true to the original Pilates Method. The brand, which now has 615 active locations across the U.S. and Canada, is part of the Xponential Brands umbrella.

"Our network of reformer-based Pilates studios are concentrated in the U.S., but we're now expanding rapidly into Canada and into other countries around the world," says Jessica Yarmey, Chief Marketing Officer at Club Pilates. "It's an exciting time."

Since its inception in 2007, Club Pilates has expanded to 615 locations — with 400 of those opening in just the last two years. This rapid growth presented a challenge. The brand needed to ensure that information about each new location was correct and consistent across dozens of platforms — from reviews sites and social networks, to key search channels like Google My Business. Additionally, with strong competition in the pilates space, Club Pilates knew they needed to show up and stand out in search results, ranking for both branded and unbranded queries.

Club Pilates sought a better way to manage all of their brand information and deliver answers across search experiences — all while making it easier to get that information for new locations up and running.

"When I started with Club Pilates in October of 2017, there were about 220 locations. We knew we had a pipeline of locations that were going to be opening, and that there would be about 20 studios a month that needed to be added to our website, to Google My Business, et cetera," Yarmey explains. "The process to onboard a new studio was about 30 different steps. I knew immediately that we needed to consolidate and bring the workload down — what we were doing was unsustainable. That's where Yext came into the equation."

Club Pilates partnered with Yext to solve for this challenge. With Yext, Club Pilates can manage their brand information across 150+ global search engines, maps, apps, and more — all from a single dashboard. Having the ability to seamlessly update this information for each individual Club Pilates location helps the company surface in local search results for key queries like "pilates near me" and "directions to Club Pilates."

Additionally, Club Pilates has gained greater insight into their customer reviews with Yext — and the brand can now monitor and respond to feedback all in one place. This helps them better understand their customers' needs by individual location, and ultimately, deliver a better customer experience.

With Yext, Club Pilates has set up 572 users (37 of those users are utilizing the Yext Knowledge Assistant). This process has empowered individual franchisees to take control of their information online and respond to reviews in their own markets. "We took the onboarding process from 30 steps down to five," Yarmey says. "Then, in terms of driving lead volume, we're always tracking — and we're consistently seeing amazing growth."

Since launching in February of 2018, Club Pilates has driven over 3.5 million clicks to their listings — a YoY growth rate of 23%. This includes a 14% YoY increase in direction clicks, a 21% YoY increase in website clicks, and a 56% YoY increase in clicks to call.

Club Pilates has also optimized for and sustained increased visibility in the Google SERP. The brand has received over 37 million listing impressions in the 21 months since launch — experiencing a YoY growth rate of 61%. And 58% of the search queries they surface for have been unbranded (for general queries like "pilates"), helping them win new business.

Additionally, Yext has pulled in more than 20 thousand reviews from Club Pilates listings, providing visibility into brand reputation across publishers over time.

Yext has been a core piece of the Club Pilates — and now Xponential Brands — technology stack since the very beginning, and the platform has become a standard part of the new studio opening process for all of Xponential's sub-brands, helping them to maintain continuity across diverse markets.

"The Yext team is actively helping us build our digital infrastructure, which is really a huge thing," Yarmey says.