Basic-Fit, founded in 2003, is now one of the leading companies in the European fitness industry. They found themselves in a surge of popularity after entering the market with their approach of keeping fitness affordable for everyone and using advanced technology to make fitness a part of everyday life. They aim to do so in their 1,400 clubs and for their 3.75 million members across 6 markets, by offering a wide range of memberships and a comprehensive app featuring training programs, nutritional advice, and personal coaching that emphasises accessibility and inclusivity.

The challenge: Lacking a single-source of truth

In 2022, Basic-Fit started to experience growing pains that are common for rapidly scaling organisations. Media buying and reporting was scattered across different marketing teams in different regions, meaning that the central marketing team at Basic-Fit had limited overview of activities across regions and most importantly, how these activities contributed to the overall growth and profitability goals of the organisation. One of Basic-Fit’s main value propositions to its customers is to offer a great and affordable service which means that efficient marketing and cost control is paramount.

In order to bring spending under control, Basic-Fit set out to upgrade its media buying and reporting stack, and contracted the services of Artefact to start this digital transformation journey.

The solution: One stand-out amongst alternatives

As part of this digital transformation project, we started designing a solution for a centralised media data platform that would be under Basic-Fit’s own control. One key requirement for this solution was getting reporting data from all its marketing platforms and ad accounts into Microsoft Azure, which the media data platform was built on top of. The data engineering teams at both Artefact and Basic-Fit quickly dismissed the option of building data pipelines in-house as a potential solution as we both had experienced the issues around scalability and maintenance of this approach before. Instead, it was decided that this need was best served by software with extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities.

With many potential vendors available to serve this need, we used a number of requirements to help guide the search:

  • Predictable pricing – Avoid row-based or storage-based pricing which could cause sticker shock costs as data volumes increase or fluctuate.

  • EU data storage – All data storage on EU based servers to future-proof setup.

  • Speed of implementation – With the wider digital transformation project already under way, a solution needed to be possible to start deploying in days, not months.

  • Wide connector library – In order to avoid having to build supplementary manual pipelines or create bottlenecks in the future.

With six different vendors having originally been considered, Funnel was selected as the most suitable solution for the project based on the set criteria.

The results: Having a foundation for continued success

Being familiar with Funnel from previous projects and our partnership, we were able to hit the ground running and get Basic-Fit set up in Funnel in a matter of weeks, with data from all Basic-fit’s marketing platforms smoothly flowing into Azure. Nawras Akroush, Data Consulting Manager at Artefact, notes that Funnel was able to execute perfectly based on the outlined scope and requirements of the project whilst also setting Basic-Fit up for success as the use case evolves in the future: “The platform’s user-friendly interface coupled with dedicated customer support not only facilitated a seamless deployment but also positioned Basic-Fit to easily implement any future changes.”

Thomas van Mastbergen, Digital Marketing Director at Basic-Fit, was also delighted to see how well Funnel met its expectations and how well it slots into their marketing data stack: “By offering a cost-efficient zero maintenance out-of-the-box solution to integrate a wide range of media, ad tech, and data platforms, Funnel has helped us to create a 360 view of our marketing effectiveness.”

Some of the key results we achieved:

  • Leveraging Funnel’s wide connector library allowed Basic-Fit to set up data transfers for all its marketing data 10x faster than competing alternatives.

  • Speed of implementation was accelerated by 8 weeks.

  • Centralizing marketing reporting has helped Basic-Fit stay true to its mission of being the best low cost/high value organization in the fitness industry.

The future is MMM & Incrementality testing

Our joint efforts have laid the foundation for accelerating the feed of more granular digital media data via Funnel.io towards Microsoft Azure. From here it can be used to build out a more granular (creatives/ad format) Marketing Mix Model (MMM) and run incrementality tests. Incrementality tests are used to validate the model outcomes, calibrate the MMM and understand the real impact of any new channel when no historical data is available. This will enable the marketing and performance teams to derive even more detailed insights through Microsoft Azure and the dashboard in PowerBI, and allow for continuous iteration. Ultimately, smarter insights leads to better decision making which directly impacts Basic-Fit’s media efficiency and bottom line results.

Want to know more about how we can help your business effectively leverage data and insights for smarter decision making? Reach out to our team.