Fitness First Partners With Yext to Increase Visibility From One Central Source of Truth

The fitness industry is booming. More than 10 million people in Germany are members of a gym and this number grows each year. Competition between gym operators is tough and online discoverability is essential to attract customers. To remain competitive in this landscape, Fitness First partnered with Yext for increased visibility in search, optimal customer service online, and the ability to synchronize location and employee information across multiple digital touch points.

Yext provides the fitness chain with a powerful package that measurably increases its visibility in the digital space. In addition, the solution can ensure that essential brand data — such as opening hours and addresses — is up to date, error-free and consistent across all connected platforms. Custom Yext APIs allow Fitness First to easily store location data from its respective stores — something that did not work with the previous infrastructure.

With Yext, Fitness First also keeps track of all reviews that appear on various online channels. The customer feedback is answered by the respective digital managers at each location. They are also responsible for maintaining location information through Yext. There are various custom user roles, so Fitness First employees can only access the data that is relevant to them. In addition, Yext also enables Fitness First to monitor local competition. "Maintaining an optimal online presence for all of our locations is very important to us," says Christophe Collinet, Director of Marketing & Strategy at Fitness First. "We want to reach as many people as possible with our offerings. An optimized presence for Fitness First in the digital space is absolutely necessary for this. With the help of Yext, we now have an accurate view of our digital information and an easy way to update our location data directly from the stores at any time. Yext's user roles also allow our employees to independently respond to online reviews. Yext has also significantly increased our visibility on Google. I have a very good feeling when working together."

With Yext, key brand information is uniformly fed into discovery services like search engines and voice assistants, driving increased engagement. In the first year since launch, Fitness First experienced 31% year-over-year growth in clicks to their listings — this included 25% year-over-year growth in direction clicks and 51% year-over-year growth in website clicks. Since launching with Yext Reviews, Fitness First has increased its online response rate from 32% to 60%. The average rating across branches has increased by 0.1 stars.

"Fitness First has recognized the need for correct brand information — especially in the highly competitive fitness market. Yext provides Fitness First with an individualized package to cover all areas where action was needed," says Michael Hartwig, Managing Partner at Yext. "As our numbers show, we've made significant progress in fitness visibility and customer feedback within months."