According to Omnicore, there are over 500,000 active influencers on Instagram alone. While it’s unclear how many of these are fitness influencers, it is clear that fitness is a huge topic on social media today. In fact, there are over 180 million uses of the hashtag #fitness on Instagram. The rising popularity of fitness and health as part of an overall lifestyle is coupled with the rise of influencers who incorporate fitness trends into their content.
At the same time, the home fitness industry is in the middle of a boom. According to an analysis on industry statistics, the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the industry is 13.1%. If this continues, the home fitness equipment market will reach a value of $23.27 billion by 2025. This makes it the perfect time for home fitness companies to get into influencer marketing. If done well, collaborating with fitness influencers can be the very thing that helps your company stand out from the sea of home fitness retailers out there.
Matching Brand To Influencer
The most important thing to get right when it comes to influencer marketing for the home fitness sector is to find the right influencers for your brand. As a company partnering with an influencer, you won’t have ultimate control over the content the influencer posts to showcase your products. Rather, according to Zine, you should see influencers as creative partners. That’s why it is so important to find influencers that are a good fit with your brand identity. Make sure to study an influencer’s prior posts before reaching out to find a good match, but also to make sure they aren’t already sponsored by a direct competitor.
For example, suppose one of your main products is exercise bands. Resistance bands are a great addition to anyone’s home fitness inventory. Because resistance bands are easy to use, they make it super convenient to do strength training efficiently with lower risk of injury, while activating the core at the same time. Those who exercise with resistance bands see results like improved strength and athletic performance quickly. When looking for influencers to partner with, you may want to find someone who already incorporates exercise bands into their workout content. Fitness influencers who focus on strength training would be a good match, as would those who focus on injury-free workouts.
Questions To Ask in Your Search for Influencers
When searching the social media space for fitness influencers who could represent your brand, there are a number of key questions you should ask yourself.
What is your target audience? Who do you aim to market your products to? Think about gender, age group, location, and activity of choice. All of these factors will have an influence on the influencers you choose and the other questions below.
What platform(s) do you want to use? Depending on your target audience, you should look for influencers popular on different platforms. For example, while Instagram is still the most popular influencer platform, TikTok is increasingly popular among younger people.
What tier of influencer do you want? Influencers may be micro-influencers (>15k followers), rising influencers (15-100k followers), or macro-influencers (100k-millions of followers). Ultimately this is a question of budget, but it relates to brand identity too, as macro-influencers tend not to have the kind of engagement with their fans that micro-influencers do.
Freelance contribution especially written for Find Your Influence by Karoline Gore.