Fit Factory Fitness Creates Community Through Military-Style Boot Camp Training

You could liken an exercise regime to a great Facebook ads campaign. It’s all about setting goals, testing different elements, learning how to be efficient (yet effective), and determining what actions can drive the results you want.

Fit Factory Fitness, a Toronto-based fitness training facility, provides high-intensity interval training for their clients. During the rise of boot camp gyms in 2011, the company drew inspiration from co-founder Sgt. Tony Austin’s former career as a U.S. Marine and decided to offer a military-style approach to their training to ensure clients receive a workout that is time-efficient, but extremely effective in the one hour that they have. Co-founder Ivan Ho says that beyond the dedication both the staff and clients share, there’s also a sense of community at the facility.  Everyone supports and motivates one another to achieve their personal and professional goals.

Easily Create Video Facebook Ads with Cinemagraph Pro for iOS

Their social media reflects the family environment one can expect when they join Fit Factory Fitness. Photos, often shot by hired professional photographers, capture clients motivated, breaking a sweat, and working hard to achieve their goals, how the studio gets involved with the Toronto community, and the staff that makes it all happen. While they often run ads on Facebook and Instagram, there are typically only two occasions where they run video ads: early in the fall, and right around New Years, when potential clients are motivated to transition out of the traveling, partying, and binge-eating, and get back in shape. While seasonality is certainly key, it’s also because those are the best times to really invest in video work.

“With videos, because it’s so hard to shoot quality video by yourself. We usually have to hire a company or a team of videographers and shoot. We have clients, members, or volunteers, friends to kind of stage a shoot. Generally, that takes quite a bit of time. It’s quite a lot of work to prepare for.”

Ivan Ho, Cofounder, Fit Factory Fitness

Cinemagraphs made Ivan pause, and put his imagination to work. He found himself thinking about what was taking place, and the characters before him. He believed that audiences would behave similarly, and consider the marketing message more deeply. That, combined with the ease of creating cinemagraphs on an iPhone, appealed to Ivan.

“These assets combined makes it very attractive for me as a business owner that now, I don’t have to spend big budgets to have a company, a video company, to come in and shoot a video for me,” he said. He liked the prospect of spending less time on preparing for video campaigns for a full month, and reallocating those resources elsewhere in the business.

“Now I have everything in the palm of my hands that I can use to create all the advertising, all the marketing campaigns that I want to create. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, and it costs me a fraction of what it would usually cost me. I love the whole idea of cinemagraphs, and I love the whole combination of photo and video and all the things that you can play around with it.”