Shifting Strategy for Fitter Business Growth
How Reshaping the CrossFit Open Registration for a Remote Audience Fueled the Fitness Brand’s Comeback.
Key Takeaways
- CrossFit, a fitness brand with millions of members worldwide, needed help increasing participation in its flagship competition, the CrossFit Games Open.
- The early days of the pandemic posed new challenges around engaging members, but held potential to increase the brand’s reach.
- CrossFit partnered with MAVAN on a plan that optimized paid acquisition, email, and conversion rates.
- The project resulted in achieving its acquisition goal by 125%, with a Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost over 3.0.
- To build on the success of the 2020 CrossFit Games campaign, the company retained MAVAN to explore long-term growth opportunities.
Galvanizing an Exercise-conscious Audience During Lockdown
Where some see adversity, others create opportunities. What separates difficulty from success can come down to not only recognizing the moment, but also taking swift action. For the top fitness brand CrossFit, the start of the pandemic required a rethinking of how it was promoting its flagship event. But it ended up jumpstarting a long-term growth strategy.
Lockdown was generally thought to have brought a heightened interest in fitness to a population looking to make the most of unprecedented free time. But, registering active participation for a competition like the 2020 CrossFit Games Open would prove challenging. Since fewer CrossFit gyms were open due to mandated and precautionary health measures, members were less engaged than previous years. Member registrations to compete for the “Fittest on Earth” were well below targets.
The company’s leadership found itself in a pivotal situation. With interest in exercise on the rise, the potential for expanding membership was too great to be left alone. CrossFit needed to scale its performance marketing efforts. Yet with so many locations closed, it needed to execute with the utmost efficiency. A few false steps, and the registration campaign could become too costly to make business sense. The brand built on a proven formula for improving health and performance needed to find a new accelerated formula for its 2020 CrossFit Games campaign.
CrossFit partnered with MAVAN, a provider of turnkey strategies and execution for rapid growth, to create a record-breaking formula. The partnership launched in a compressed fashion. MAVAN’s engagements usually begin with a rigorous qualitative and quantitative analysis, followed by a 90-day tactical execution sprint. But the 2020 CrossFit Games were approaching fast, giving a shorter runway to the project team. There was no time for a full-growth audit. Speed of execution around increasing event registrations became the entire focus.
This Fitness Revolution Must Be Optimized
In the first two weeks, MAVAN assembled a launch plan based around optimization of CrossFit’s lead-capture strategies. First, MAVAN developed an automated email series, purpose-built to convert past registrants and activate new ones. MAVAN segmented audiences to help personalize communications. Heavy reengagement activated prior CrossFit Games attendees. If not receptive to emails, MAVAN retargeted past registrants via optimized paid media campaigns across social and search.
Monitoring performance in these channels, MAVAN quickly double downed on the Facebook campaign, which was far outperforming Google spend. In fact, worldwide Facebook targeting delivered cost-effective acquisition across a diverse set of countries. The MAVAN team also fine-tuned conversion, A/B testing user paths, and landing pages over a six week period to optimize the conversion funnel. Through such tactics as increasing the prominence of lead information and revising calls to action, the campaign surpassed its goal.
Through the combination of these efforts, CrossFit shifted its event registration growth from a flat line into a hockey-stick curve. Coming from behind, it blew past the acquisition goal – generating a record number of registrations for the 2021 CrossFit games. By continually refining its methods, MAVAN also helped CrossFit achieve this success under budget, managing to reduce cost per registration (CPR) to well under target. MAVAN presented CrossFit with an action plan for how it could further measure conversion rates for the next year and still reduce cost.
Unlocking Long-term Growth
Impressed by the rapid turnaround and positive outcome, CrossFit retained MAVAN to lead its broader strategic planning cycle for the following year. Rather than basing planning on marketing funnels, MAVAN analyzed growth loops that created value to reinvest in the loops’ input. Through this approach, MAVAN helped CrossFit capture more quick wins. These included improving CrossFit’s existing social viral loop, adding a referral loop, and establishing a sales loop to ease affiliate conversion.
MAVAN and CrossFit's plans capture fast growth opportunities and analyze the results and the impact on their business objectives. CrossFit is no longer engaged in mere growth marketing campaigns. Rather, the company has a system for growth that fortifies its brand – and the fitness of its bottom line.
Batting 1.000: How to Hit Digital Advertising Home Runs
- Break down your ad creative into components and iterate on the weakest areas quickly
- Understand the channel’s algorithm to guide decisions in getting your product to the right people at the right time
- Craft a testing cadence that works for your team and budget
- Develop internal processes to help close the feedback loop across teams
If you want to find success with digital advertising, you need to understand how to optimize your creative. In a previous post, I outlined how to build a creative advertising engine. In this post, I’ll break down what your teams should focus on to optimize every piece of creative’s success.
Identify Your Audience and Put the Algorithm to Work
Wherever you’re advertising, the audiences you’ll be targeting are largely pre-defined based on interest demographics, app usage data, and more. If your ad doesn’t drive engagement, it doesn’t reach many people. An underperforming ad implies you’re not conveying the most accurate value proposition and/or your content is reaching the wrong audience.
At Digit, we worked closely with our creative and brand marketing teams to build ads that could be delivered to the right audience at the right time. To optimize the content, we identified and iterated on value proposition, messaging, hook, testing/distribution strategy, and performance data.
Make the First Three Seconds Count
What your account reps are telling you is true. The hook and first three seconds are the most important aspects of your creative. Find a balance between eye-catching hooks without making your creative feel flashy and cheap.
At Digit, we spent a lot of time testing and understanding how certain colors and placements evoke emotion and capture mindshare. The goal was to develop compelling ads that stood out. We found that text treatments and copy placement drove meaningful differences in performance early on, while allowing us to tell similar stories in ways that felt fresh across new iterations.
We learned invaluable qualitative insights, like:
- Color choice impacts emotion and should be carefully chosen
- Big and bold text treatments speak loudly
- Lightness beats lecture. Lighten up the tone
- Readability is everything
We used these learnings to make an impression on our users within three seconds across static and video ads. Once we found a winning combination, we rapidly developed and tested new ads by incorporating some of our best-performing creatives after the hook. For example, we found that showing someone on vacation in Europe was a great way to get people interested in watching longer to find out how to save money for a trip. This testing informed all future iterations, ultimately allowing us to find new home runs while extending the half-life of our existing ads.
Identify a Problem – then Solve it
Your copy and messaging are primary levers for effectively messaging your brand, product, and value propositions. Your ad is a condensed elevator pitch for whatever you’re selling: brand, feature, product, etc. Most users will make a decision in the first 3-5 seconds of any video or static ad.
To craft the best messaging strategy, you need to understand your users' pain points and needs. Work closely with your product and customer support teams; they understand your customers best. From there we began strategizing on ways to deliver solutions paired with positive emotions. In short: address a problem and then get customers excited about your ability to solve it.
You Have Multiple Value Propositions – Use Them All
Our initial testing showed that our users have various needs—and we needed to match the right hooks, messaging, and value propositions for the right audience. For example, we found ads that summarized our entire product value propositions regardless of ad format produced below-average performance metrics compared to ads purely focused on a particular value proposition.
To help us prioritize, we invested in the value propositions that offered the largest audiences. We used quantitative and qualitative data to estimate the total addressable market for each. Below is a diagram of how we thought about Digit’s primary value propositions:
As we expanded on this strategy, we collaborated and communicated more with our product, customer support, and product marketing peers. This enabled us to learn more about our audiences and personas to bolster customer insights that could be leveraged across all of our efforts moving forward.
Test, Refresh, and Test Again
To optimize your ad’s creative using your insights, you need to think about both ends of the user journey—building awareness and conversion. An ad generating a lot of clicks but not converting indicates you’ve created viral content that is reaching an audience not relevant to your product. Creative is a home run when it satisfies both ends of the user journey.
After new ad concepts launch and are successful, you’ll likely face rapid performance deterioration as you continue to scale and get in front of more users. This is called creative fatigue and is a very common problem. Below is one of my favorite creative lifecycle visuals from Eric Seufert’s Mobile ad creative: how to produce and deploy advertising creative at scale.
Creative fatigue is an ongoing battle. Our goal is to constantly test to find new winners before rapid performance deterioration. To do so, we ran a deep-dive analysis of our home run creatives and had the following takeaways:
- Top-of-funnel metrics are substantially higher than the last 30-day average at the start of the ad creative lifecycle and have above average bottom-of-funnel metrics. Over time, the top-of-funnel metrics will decline while bottom-of-funnel metrics remain flat.
- Poor early performance means the ad won’t pick up later and should be paused.
- Re-running older creatives with a new hook can create stronger ads with a longer life cycle. We’ve seen old creatives do significantly better after being paired with a high-performing hook.
- Refreshing your creative concepts with new messaging styles, text treatments, and color schemes can yield a big lift in performance and surface new winners.
Turn Results into Actionable Insights
The final important step to the creative flywheel we built was the delivery of actionable results from the outcomes of our experiments back to the team. Our media buyer played a very cross-functional role by working with product, marketing, and finance. On a weekly and monthly weekly basis, a media buyer would evaluate ad creative performance by Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). We aimed to better understand which iterations to the messaging and hook most impacted ROAS to help us inform future iterations.
By using our quantitative and qualitative data, we spent more time on things that mattered — like the hook and messaging. It’s easy to get distracted when thinking about creatives but focusing and going deeper on these critical components were a major key to Digit’s success.
