Planet Fitness
Building Smart Gains: Lowering Cost Per Join While Growing Membership
About
As one of the largest and fastest-growing franchisors and operators of fitness centers in the U.S., Planet Fitness needed to evolve its media strategy—shifting from broad brand awareness to performance-driven, down-funnel tactics. The goal: drive membership growth and lower cost per join across hundreds of locations in the Southeast, all while maintaining efficiency and scale at the local level.
Length of Relationship
2016 – 2021
Marketing Campaign Types
- Existing Clubs
- New Club Openings
main Objective
Joins/Memberships
Clubs Supported
100+
Markets
- Central Florida
- West Palm Beach
- North Florida
- Alabama
- Georgia
- North/South Carolina
Primary KPIs
- Gym Memberships
- Cost Per Join (CPJ)
- Gross Revenue
The Challenge
Planet Fitness’s previous agency prioritized brand awareness over direct response, treating club joins as a secondary outcome rather than a strategic focus. This approach left significant gaps in visibility—making it difficult to attribute which channels were actually driving memberships. The lack of actionable data led to inefficiencies, eroded trust in media performance, and ultimately put franchise expansion plans on pause until clear ROI could be tied to media investments.
The Approach
Swish conducted a comprehensive audit centered on measurement integrity and scalable growth. We relaunched all existing paid media channels with upgraded tracking infrastructure, enabling a unified reporting environment that captured member join activity with precision. With full-funnel visibility into media performance across channels, we significantly improved efficiency, optimized cost-per-join, and delivered clear ROI insights. This allowed Planet Fitness to directly tie media investment to membership growth and bottom-line impact—restoring confidence and enabling smarter expansion decisions.
Key initiatives:
- Focused on the Bottom-Line: We shifted from a brand-first approach to a performance-driven strategy—focusing on measurable outcomes and executing tactics to increase both online and in-person club joins.
- Improved Inter-Agency Bond: Previously, each agency partner operated in silos. Swish introduced cross-agency collaboration—especially with creative teams—to align on shared goals and prioritize what was best for the client, not individual agendas. This shift created lasting processes and efficiencies that continue to drive results today.
- Create Scale: The final challenge was building a media program built for scale—crucial in a franchise-driven model. Swish developed and implemented scalable media best practices that ensured consistency across hundreds of independently owned locations, while supporting the brand’s rapid growth.
The Results
01
$800m
- In a short time our work was directly linked to an increased evaluation in 2016 of $100M to a sale of over $800M in 2022.
-
02
85%
Decrease in CPJ. Focusing our work on CPJ metrics allowed us to become smarter faster and put media dollars to work – not waste.
03
128%
- Increase in Club Joins. Planet Fitness saw a huge boom in bottom–line metrics like club joins, cost per join, and any meaningful financial metric being tracked.
