Everybody is talking about influencer marketing. You can read endless articles about the power of micro-influencers, how to choose influencers, how to reuse influencer marketing content, and so on. We want to be more specific and tell you the exact influencer marketing strategies that are used by the top brands that use influencer marketing as their main channel for client acquisition.
Fitness Brand Gymshark
Gymshark is a fitness apparel and accessories brand, manufacturer and retailer headquartered in Solihull, United Kingdom. Founded in 2012, Gymshark creates and distributes its own range of performance fitness wear for men and women. In 2020, the company was valued at over £1 billion.
Born from the bedroom of teenager Ben Francis, Gymshark has grown from a small start-up to a global business that has just become a £1billion+ company.
Francis understood that the best way to ensure Gymshark’s name would be on everyone’s lips was to impress influential individuals with huge followings — and it worked.
For our research we checked all mentions of @gymshark account on Instagram made by influencer accounts (accounts with over 1K followers) during November 2020.
The Competitor Analysis of Gymshark’s Instagram influencer marketing strategy was made with the help of the HypeAuditor Market Analysis report.
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Key Findings:
Gymshark uses the influencer marketing strategy of brand ambassadors. The brand chooses the most influential fitness influencers on Instagram and makes them its ambassador.
Ambassador works with the brand on a long-term basis.
The brand doesn’t reveal the specific requirements for being its ambassador. What we know exactly is that influencers with at least over 100k followers have more chances.
Fitness influencers want to become Gymshark brand ambassadors, as it makes them feel the chosen ones.
Gymshark works with mega-influencers on a paid basis, making them brand ambassadors. Micro- and Mid-tier influencers repeat for mega-influencers for free. Just because it’s cool.
Among mentions for November, most of the accounts with more than 100K followers (200 accounts) are Gymshark athletes.
In November, there were 502 posts about Black Friday at Gymshark. Some of the posts from ambassadors with a proposal to follow the link in the bio, some of the posts are organic — this is how influencers gave their audience useful information and asked if they were going to participate in the sale.
Gymshark's Instagram Influencer Marketing Analysis
In November, 1353 influencers made 3390 posts with the mention of the Gymshark account.
The estimated reach of these posts was 16.5M people.
We see that on average, about 100 posts are published per day with the @gymshark mention.
The maximum number of posts was published on 13 November — 216 posts with a reach of 1.5M. That was the day when Gymshark started its Black Friday Promotion.
The maximum number of comments was made on November 16: 112 posts and 23K comments.
Gymshark's Influencers’ Audience
We took a closer look at Gymshark’s influencer marketing strategy to understand its audience demographics.
The entire audience of influencers who made posts with the @gymshark mention is 123M, with a quality audience of 75M.
The major countries are USA, UK, India, Australia, Germany.
The predominant audience of Gymshark influencers is men aged 25 to 34.
Gymshark's Influencers’ Content
To better understand Gymshark’s influencer marketing strategy, we analyzed the distribution between image posts and video posts within their Instagram influencer campaign.
Among all the posts, video content accounts for 24%. This is a large share compared to influencer marketing campaigns of other brands with 14% of video content.
Three of the most popular hashtags are branded hashtags: #gymshark, #gymsharkwomen, #gymsharktrain.
Below is a list of the most popular Gymshark’s Instagram influencers.
Among the top 10 influencers, based on the number of followers, who mentioned Gymshark in November, eight are official athletes of GymShark (Kingryan, Behzingagram , Steverock , Demibagby, Lisafitt, Hannaoeberg, Nikkiblackketter, and Saffronbarker).
Most influencers are in the Fitness and Gym category, which means they post content mostly about this topic.
The Competitor Analysis of Gymshark’s influencer marketing strategy on Instagram was made with the help of the HypeAuditor Market Analysis report.
Examples of Gymshark’s Instagram Influencer Posts
Here are a few examples of content posted by Instagram influencers within Gymshark’s influencer marketing campaign.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBmZgjHTr6/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CHC0ZUvnVC-/
