With Yext, The Search Experience Cloud, McFIT Strengthens Its Digital Fitness

With more than 250 branches and over 1.7 million registered members, McFIT Global Group GmbH is the largest fitness provider in Europe. In addition to other brands from the lifestyle, fashion, and fitness segment, the company comprises the three studio chains McFIT, High5, and JOHN REED. The brand now has locations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The secret behind its tremendous success lies in continuous innovation. As the first fitness studio chain, McFIT eliminated expensive additional services and fully focused on helping its members train successfully. Later on, the company also developed unique training concepts such as the digital course program known as CYBEROBICS®.

McFIT is also a pioneer in digital marketing. There is a huge amount of competition between fitness studios, especially in big cities. If they want to come out on top, prospective customers need to be able to find them quickly and easily. A high level of organic visibility for each location is therefore particularly important. However, given its large number of locations, it was a time-consuming challenge for McFIT to maintain and keep all of the information on the growing number of relevant third-party platforms up to date. Only the introduction of Yext has made it possible for the company to centrally manage all of the data from one source of truth.

At the beginning of the collaboration, McFIT wanted to update its listings. Furthermore, all the location data that had previously been separately managed, as well as attributes such as offered courses or social media links, were imported into Yext so that the McFIT marketing staff could centrally manage them. Through the Yext Publisher Network, they are synchronized with all of the important digital channels – from search engines, map services, and social media platforms through to rating portals, language assistants, and address directories. By integrating Yext into its website, McFIT also ensures that the data on its own location-specific subpages is always up to date and easy to process for visitors to the page. Additionally, the social media team uses Yext to carry out competition and rating analyses.

With Yext, McFIT can systematically monitor and evaluate this immense amount of data for the first time. Yext reveals the categories in which individual McFIT branches perform better or worse than their local competitors. The solution also provides content analyses. Using keyword lists, it identifies recurring topics in the reviews and compiles summaries. This makes it possible to quantify problems and support internal discussions (e.g., about the need for new course offerings) with data.

"These days, a consistent brand experience and streamlined search experience are key factors in positioning yourself against local competition at different locations," says Martin Meyer, Head of Marketing at JOHN REED.

After almost one and a half years, McFIT now has 9,500 managed listings. In addition, about 40% of the address entries listed online were incorrect and have already been corrected.

"Digital marketing was already important to us when many other fitness studio chains were still recruiting new members offline. That's why we have always seen ourselves as a pioneer in this field. When Yext approached us, we quickly realized the solution's added value — and went on to buy the full range of functions," says Hauke Hagen, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at McFIT. "During the initial check for false or misleading brand information inventory, we found that 40 percent of the addresses stored on third-party platforms were incorrect, and 12 percent of the entries didn't have a link to the website. Both could be corrected with very little effort. However, with its local search feature, Google remains the most important platform for us. Thanks to Yext, we were able to increase our visibility here." Since launching with Yext, they experienced 26% year-over-year growth in clicks on their listings, which includes direction clicks, website clicks, and phone calls clicks.

"We are very proud to have the European market leader in fitness as one of our customers," says Michael Hartwig, Managing Partner, Central Europe at Yext. "McFIT has long been outstanding in digital marketing and recognized the importance of managing and verifying their brand information at an early stage. Together, we have succeeded in making the management of the brand's information more efficient, ensuring consistency on all platforms and increasing the organic visibility of the company locations."

For the fitness studio market leader, however, it's not only about current challenges, but also about the future. Nico Hartwig, Head of International Marketing at McFIT, makes this clear. "We are now witnessing the rise of new technologies such as voice search," he says. "These will change marketing in many ways, and companies need to prepare for this."