How The Gym Group automated four-stage launch messaging across 50+ gym openings
The challenge
Four messaging stages, 15+ openings per year, one lean team
Gyms don't open in one moment. They get announced, an opening date is confirmed, doors open for tours, and then the gym officially opens. The Gym Group built a four-stage communication and performance framework to match, ensuring local audiences see the right message at the right point in the journey, from building early awareness to driving membership sign ups.
Good strategy but brutal to run as standard campaigns. Every location needs it’s own creative and copy updated four separate times, once per stage, each version tailored to whichever area and consumer type that the individual gym serves. Across 50+ launches it added up to more than 160 hours of versioning, amending and exporting. Roughly three hours of production work per gym, spent moving assets instead of improving them.
The bigger problem isn't just hours. It's what happens when operational delivery pace picks up. Openings overlap. One update gets missed, and local audiences keep seeing "coming soon" for gyms that opened last week. The Gym Group needed every location's messaging to stay in step with real-world opening progress. With the same team and no loss of precision.
The solution
Automation Plan that moves creatives through launch stages on its own
Working with Hunch, The Gym Group replaced stage-by-stage campaign management with one Automation Plan on Meta. Every gym's opening timeline sits in one feed. As locations move through their lifecycle, Hunch swaps in creative and copy for that stage automatically. No campaign rebuilds and no gym caught mid-transition with wrong ads live.
Four stages where plan moves through:
- New Gym Announced - Builds local awareness and excitement around the new gym, introducing the location.
- Opening Date Confirmed - Creates anticipation with a confirmed opening date, while driving early memberships sign ups ahead of gym opening.
- Doors Open for Tours - Encourages local audiences to visit, explore the gym and experience the facilities before opening.
- Gym Now Open - Shifts messaging, highlighting that the gym is open and encouraging people to join and start their membership
Creative at every stage is tailored twice over: to the local area each gym serves and to where that location is in its own launch journey. Someone in Manchester sees different ads to someone in London, Edinburgh or Bristol. Someone seeing a newly announced gym sees something different to someone whose gym is already open. All of it automatic.
Automation Plan was built in four days from brief.
Alongside staged work, The Gym Group is testing many different creative approaches per stage such as native-style creatives designed to read like organic social content rather than ads, as another route to local audiences who scroll past anything that looks like advertising and improving performance.
The results
50+ launches, 300+ creatives, four days to build, zero campaigns rebuilt by hand
50+ gym launches and refurbishments were activated through Hunch. More than 300 creatives across four lifecycle stages. 160+ hours that used to go into amending and exporting came straight back to the team. For lean teams opening new sites every few weeks that want performance gains through more granularity, those hours are the difference between keeping assets in sync and improving them.
Precision & performance survived automation. That was the part that made this launch exceptional.
