How Urban Sports Club energized local heroes to get Berlin moving

About Urban Sports Club

Urban Sports Club is on a mission to inspire a culture of wellbeing for organizations and individuals. How does it do it? By making sports — from swimming to yoga, bouldering, weightlifting, or CrossFit — accessible to members though one streamlined access point.

Urban Sports Club is a smartphone and desktop application that aims to cut costs, increase diversity and remove barriers to practicing sport for anyone and everyone. It leverages 10,000 partner locations across Europe to allow its members to create personalized  routines plans incorporating more than 50 sports and wellness activities.

Easy and intuitive, members of Urban Sports Club can find, book and check in to live or online classes directly from their smartphones.

The Campaign: Create a week-long live event to generate awareness for both brands

Sportswear brand On approached Urban Sports Club to strengthen the brand’s perception beyond running and into everyday training. #movementweek was a weeklong campaign aimed at getting people active and trying something new by participating in dozens of free sports classes — from dance or yoga, to HIIT, boxing, and more, at Urban Sports Club affiliated venues around Berlin. For both brands, the key objective of #movementweek was awareness generation.

It’s really cool to collaborate with other brands on influencer campaigns. It makes you think outside the box in terms of the kinds of influencers you partner with because they have to fit with both brands. They tend to differ from those you usually target, and because of that you can broaden your reach to audiences you may not have considered previously - Julia Bell, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Lead at Urban Sports Club

Challenge 1: Target the right influencers for both brands

To get #movementweek moving, Urban Sports Club and On needed to work with influencers who could bridge the gap between the brands, and appeal to both fitness and streetwear audiences in Berlin. The idea was to launch a paid influencer campaign with content creators who would activate their audiences in the leadup to #movementweek by sharing the event schedule and inviting their communities to come and join them at the free classes on offer.

We needed to have paid influencers to market #movementweek in the week before the event to tell their audiences: “I’m going to be at this class, come and meet me there”. It’s a similar concept to if there was an event where you could meet your favorite celebrity, except in this case it’s your favorite influencer. - Julia Bell, Social Media and Influencer Marketing Lead at Urban Sports Club‍

For Urban Sports Club, finding the right influencers to fit this particular campaign was a key challenge. Because the company has offices and facilities all over Germany, its regular pool of influencers reflects that and is spread country-wide. They also generally work on a barter deal basis, posting content regularly in return for a free membership to Urban Sports Club. For the #movementweek campaign, the brand needed to leverage Berlin-based influencers specifically, and on a remunerated basis.

“We had to use Kolsquare to really go in and find new people that fit the bill for both brands. We were looking for influencers with an audience of around 100K with decent market share in Germany — at least 30-40% — and ideally German-speaking because one of the problems we have specifically in Berlin is that a lot of influencers prefer to post in English.” Urban Sports Club Social Media and Influencer Marketing Lead Julia Bell

Kolsquare’s search module provides highly granular data, enabling users to apply a customizable set of rules, such as setting a minimum quota for a certain audience location, age-group or language preference. This way, Urban Sports Club gained valuable time finding influencers posting in German, which is not necessarily a common standard in Germany — and especially in Berlin — where a lot of KOLs adopt a more international approach and post content in English. When engaging with Urban Sports Club’s target audience, German language was however a crucial factor and condition for potential KOL partnerships.

Challenge 2: Separate and filter results and content specific to #movementweek from general content produced by rostered influencers on barter deals

Between them, the two brands on-boarded more than a dozen KOLs for the paid campaign. When added to Urban Sports Club’s regular Berlin roster of influencers, #movementweek was now up and running, and Berlin’s sporty, active community was being alerted to the events taking place around the city.

“Using influencers to promote the live event gives it a really personal feel, and shows that it is not just brands that are going to be there. We had fabulous engagement, all the classes were booked out within two days,” comments Bell.

From there the content began rolling in. But as well as content produced as part of the paid campaign, Urban Sports Club’s regular influencers — who have audiences varying from 600 followers to 30K — joined in the fun, often taking the initiative to post about the event in the lead-up, and joining in classes.

With content originating from Urban Sports Club’s paid and regular creators, in addition to those activated by On, accurately analyzing and reporting the campaign’s true impact was a major challenge. A variety of hashtags and mentions were being used — sometimes all at once, sometimes on their own — and all of them needed to be tracked and analyzed. Thankfully for Urban Sports Club, Kolsquare’s extensive reporting capabilities made light work of what would have otherwise been an onerous task.

“Honestly, Kolsquare helped me so much, especially when it came to the creators who weren’t being paid, which was the majority of the people who went to the events. Often,  they didn’t tag both On and ourselves in every story. But with Kolsquare, regardless of who or what they tagged, we were able to get all of the content. Equally, we were able to filter out content that was just their regular monthly content and not related to the campaign. Having those functionalities means we can get really accurate reporting and see how impactful the campaign was.” Urban Sports Club Social Media and Influencer Marketing Lead Julia Bell

The Results: see how we roll

Well, what a week! From just 43 contents posted (mostly Stories) by 15 paid content creators, Urban Sports Club saw all 30 classes and events fully booked out in just two days. #movementweek was a runaway success with a potential audience of 792K targeted and estimated impressions of 503K on Instagram alone.  

“The results were amazing, I was over the moon! We ran the entire campaign through Kolsquare and were able to easily share all our data with On. It made working seamlessly with another brand just so simple.” Urban Sports Club Social Media and Influencer Marketing Lead Julia BelL