Basic-Fit's 10x marketing leap with Funnel

Executive summary:

Basic-Fit, a European fitness sector leader, streamlined its marketing through implementing Funnel, chosen for its efficiency, EU data compliance, and rapid deployment. Supported by the global consultancy and Funnel Solution partner, Artefact, this move quickened the data transfer setup by 10x and reduced implementation time by 8 weeks, aiding Basic-Fit's cost-efficiency goal. Funnel's user-friendly design and robust support further enhance Basic-Fit's marketing efficacy and cost management.

Key results:

• 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. 

Company profile:

Basic-Fit leads the European fitness sector with over 1,400 clubs and 3.75 million members across six markets. The company's mission emphasizes accessibility and inclusivity, offering a range of memberships and a comprehensive app featuring training programs, nutritional advice, and personal coaching. Basic-Fit's approach combines affordability and advanced technology to make fitness a part of everyday life.

Partner profile:

Artefact is a global consulting agency that specializes in data transformation and data marketing. With 19 offices across 16 countries, they work with some of the world’s largest brands, including Samsung, L’Oréal, and Sanofi. If you want to learn more about Artefact and its services, you can do that here.

The challenge: Lacking a single-source of truth

In 2022, Basic-Fit started to experience growing pains that are common for rapidly scaling organizations. 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 organization. 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 global consulting agency Artefact to start this digital transformation journey. 

The solution: One stand-out amongst alternatives

As part of this digital transformation project, Artefact and Basic-Fit started designing a solution for a centralized 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 they 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, Artefact & Basic-Fit used a number of requirements to help guide its 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, the Artefact team was 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.”