A self-made millionaire, Ben Francis at the age of 19 founded Gym Shark in his parents’ house in 2012. Fast forward 6 years to today, the fitness apparel is raking in 128M in revenue and is growing 200% almost every year.
To put that into perspective, in just 6 years, their revenue increased from $500k (2013) to $128M (2018). Gym Shark is a prime example of how an awesome product and a great marketing strategy can propel your business to millions in revenue in a short period of time.
In this post, I’ll be breaking down how Gym Shark became so successful and how we can employ their successes in our own business.
Much of Gym Shark’s success can be accredited to their social media marketing strategy.
A core part of that strategy, was to use fitness influencers with a large following to promote their products in exchange for gear/money.
For any new products or events, Gym Shark would leverage the influencers pre-existing following to advertise their products
This was a great strategy for Gym Shark for 3 reasons:
For the reasons above, this strategy was a great way of building the Gym Shark Brand and a cost-effective means of selling fitness gear.
N.B. Using influencer marketing nowadays is much more competitive and is predicted to be a $5-10 billion dollar industry in 2020. In fact, 80% of marketers feel that influencer marketing is more effective at driving quality traffic and leads. As such, it’s becoming more costly to use this strategy.
In addition, Gym Shark wanted to build a family of influencers that loved Gym Shark products and wanted to help others through fitness.
Lex the first fitness influencer said:
I think what brought us together was a like-minded vision. The Gym Shark family is no gimmick, once you’re part of this family, it will change your life…
As a result, any promotions or reviews from influencers would come across as genuine. Take a look at this review by Whitney Simmons, a Gym Shark fitness athlete. Her enthusiasm and love for the product makes you want to buy it.
Using Instagram influencers acted as a spark to Gym Shark’s success. However, a range of other marketing strategies were used in parallel to continue to fuel the Gym Shark blaze.
In order for Gym Shark to earn $128M in just 6 years, they had to create a following of loyal customers that would always choose their products over competitors.
It’s similar to the Apple brand; even though the product may be bad and overpriced, we still continue to buy MacBooks because of the brand reputation (I say this as I’m typing on my new MacBook Pro 😭).
.png)
However, that brand didn’t appear out of anywhere, it was the result of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort.
Meting the Gym Shark customers was the first step to building a loyal following. They did this through several events like fitness expos, pop up stores and two world tours that spanned over several continents.
.png)
Through these events, Gym Shark athletes would meet and interact with their customers. This was a great way to both inspire customers and also fitness influencers for the positive difference they were making.
This also acted as a gateway for understanding Gym Shark customers allowing them to build better products in the future.
In addition, all these events were documented online giving viewers around the world, access to behind-the-scene footage. This leads to a range of benefits such as increased exposure and trust in the brand.
Gym Shark also used challenges as a way to interact with their customers.
Take for example the "[66 Days | Change your Life]” Challenge. Followers were asked to choose a goal and upload a photo of themselves now and 66 days later.
If the GymShark crew were impressed, they then had a chance to win a year’s supply of Gym Shark goods.
Only a few weeks after running the campaign, the #gymshark66 hashtag flooded Instagram, twitter and Facebook, expanding Gym Sharks’ presence and reach even further.
.png)
In addition, the challenge drives user-generated content for Gym Shark, with Bloggers and Vloggers wanting to document their progress on their sites and channels.
.png)
Challenges are great for outreach strategy as they are easy to share and to get involved in. I would highly recommend this for any B2C businesses as a way to interact with your customers.
Gym-shark also created a YouTube channel aimed at providing value to others in the form of workouts, motivational stories and exclusive behind-the-scene footage.
With 220k subscribers and 29M total views, The YouTube channel worked well in promoting recognition and trust in the brand - everything that symbolises good marketing
.png)
Ben also saw an opportunity to make a vlogging channel where he would answer Q&As, give business advice and show behind-the-scenes footage in Gym Shark.
All of this made you feel included in the Gym Shark Crew, helping to build trust with the brand and furthering outreach.
With 120k subscribers and 6M total views, I think he made the right choice 🤓
.png)
The strategies mentioned above are one of the many social media channels used to fuel Gym Shark’s growth.
Other channels used were:
.png)
If we take a look at Gym Shark’s traffic breakdown on Desktop:
.png)
From their marketing efforts, we can see 54% of Gym Shark traffic comes from search and 30% coming from direct. This means 84% of their traffic comes from people searching for Gym Shark in their browser or by directly typing the Gym Shark URL.
If we break this down even further:
.png)
We can see that 82% of their search is organic with the rest being paid keywords that are Gym Shark related (this prevents competitors from using these keywords) i.e. almost all of their search traffic is organic 😲
Marketing is only part of the equation for the huge growth experienced by Gym Shark. When Ben first started Gym Shark, fitness clothing was expensive and didn’t make you look you good.
This is what Gym Shark back then and today focuses on, creating figure complementing fitness clothing at an affordable price.
Having a great product is core to any marketing strategy. By having a great product, Fitness Influencers wanted to continue working with Gym Shark. And customers continued to come back time after time, buying every new product released.
Without a great product, it’s hard to imagine Gym Shark having the same successes they have today.
Gym Shark had a killer marketing strategy that revolved around creating a team of fitness influencers. They took this a step further by creating a family of influencers that loved Gym Shark products and wanted to help others through fitness.
They also fuelled the fire by exploring many outreach channels such as world tours and more social media channels. With their marketing, the primarily took the approach of providing value to others, resulting in 84% of their traffic being organic 😲.
With a problem in the fitness apparel industry, a great solution to that problem, and an innovative marketing strategy, Gym Shark was able to achieve explosive growth from 0 to $128M in 6 years.
What do you think made Gym Shark so successful? Comment down below ☺
A community of founders learning together. We analyse successful businesses so that you can apply their lessons to your own business