Helping GymMaster build a growth engine designed to double the business every three years

GymMaster is a Christchurch-built SaaS platform for gyms, health clubs and fitness businesses. It helps operators manage memberships, billing, access control, bookings, communications and day-to-day club operations, and is now used by thousands of clubs across more than 70 countries.

GymMaster has an ambitious commercial goal: to roughly double the scale of the business every three years.

That is difficult in any market. It is even harder when your customers are gyms and health clubs, where business closures, ownership changes and natural churn are part of the category.

Growth therefore has to do more than add new customers.

GymMaster needs to:

• replace customers lost through normal market attrition
• generate enough additional acquisition to create strong net growth
• help existing customers run stronger businesses so they remain successful for longer

That creates a much more complex growth equation than simply generating more leads.

Traction has worked with GymMaster since 2010.

Jordana Clarke became involved very early in GymMaster’s journey, working with founder Dru Hill when the business was still deciding whether the product had a viable future beyond New Zealand.

At the time, GymMaster was struggling commercially, the New Zealand market offered limited room for growth and subscription software was far less established than it is today.

Rather than retreat, we investigated the Australian opportunity, researched the market and customer, refined the proposition and helped shape the early strategy for international growth.

Today, GymMaster operates across more than 70 countries.

The question has changed completely.

It is no longer:

Can GymMaster grow internationally?

It is:

How do we build a repeatable commercial and marketing engine capable of compounding global growth?

Start with the growth problem, not the marketing channel

For GymMaster, the answer was never simply to spend more on advertising.

We needed to understand what was actually constraining growth.

Traction increasingly looks across the complete customer acquisition system:

market opportunity → awareness → website → demo → sales → customer → lifetime value

That gives us a very different view of performance.

A campaign can appear highly efficient because it produces inexpensive leads, but if those leads rarely become long-term customers, the apparent efficiency is meaningless.

We identified exactly this in one GymMaster acquisition programme.

On the surface, the cost of acquisition looked attractive. But when we followed those prospects through the commercial funnel, they were not converting into the higher lifetime-value customers GymMaster needed.

Our recommendation was to stop optimising for the cheapest acquisition and invest in pathways where the initial cost could be higher, but the quality and lifetime value of the resulting customer was significantly stronger.

That is an important distinction.

The goal is not the cheapest lead. It is profitable, sustainable customer growth.

Researching the market before deciding how to compete

As GymMaster expanded internationally, one global marketing strategy was never going to be enough.

Traction researched GymMaster’s customers and prospects in depth.

We used:

• sales conversations
• demo transcripts
• customer feedback
• internal sales expertise
• market research
• competitor analysis
• search behaviour
• campaign and website data

to build a clearer understanding of who GymMaster was trying to reach, what mattered to those buyers and how buying behaviour changed across markets and customer types.

From that research, we developed digital marketing strategies designed to cut through an increasingly competitive international software category.

The strategy could then be individually honed by market and customer segment, rather than repeating the same proposition around the world.

That influenced the combination of:

• positioning and messaging
• search strategy
• landing pages
• organic content
• paid media
• conversion journeys
• AEO and AI-search visibility
• proof and sales support

used for each growth opportunity.

That localisation matters.

The challenge is not simply to be visible in another country.

It is to be more relevant to the buyer in front of you than the competitor next to you.

“Traction helped me understand my customer base and where to focus our sales and marketing effort. It gave us a strong understanding of both our position in the market and who our ideal buyer persona’s were.” Dru Hill, CEO

Building multiple acquisition engines

GymMaster had historically been heavily reliant on paid search.

Traction helped broaden that acquisition mix by strengthening organic search, taking over Google Ads management and extending activity into additional channels.

Organic search has developed from a secondary contributor into a significant source of customer acquisition.

SEO-generated conversions have grown to approximately the level produced by paid search.

At the point of our recent analysis, GymMaster held approximately:

442 page-one Google rankings in Australia

382 page-one rankings in Canada

364 page-one rankings in the United States

Those rankings include commercially valuable searches relating directly to gym management, membership software and related technology.

The result is a healthier acquisition mix and less dependence on any single source of demand.

Making a global brand work in local markets

International growth creates another challenge.

What works in the United States may not work in Australia.

What resonates in Australia may need to change again in Europe or Asia.

Terminology changes.

Search behaviour changes.

Competitors change.

Customer expectations change.

Traction worked with GymMaster to prepare its website architecture for regional localisation and multilingual expansion, while creating greater flexibility to adapt pages and content for individual markets.

This goes well beyond translation.

The digital strategy needs to balance a strong global brand with local relevance.

That means thinking carefully about market-specific messaging, search demand, content, imagery, customer proof and conversion behaviour while still protecting the authority GymMaster has built internationally.

Extending SEO into AEO and AI search

Search itself is changing.

Traditional Google visibility remains commercially important, but prospective customers are increasingly using AI-powered search and answer engines to research software and compare solutions.

Traction has therefore extended GymMaster’s organic strategy into Answer Engine Optimisation.

The objective is not simply to rank for more keywords.

It is to strengthen the signals that help search engines and AI platforms understand GymMaster as an authoritative source within the fitness industry.

That includes improving:

• depth and usefulness of content
• structured information
• first-party expertise
• customer proof
• authoritative external references
• original research and insight
• digital PR and thought leadership

GymMaster has a considerable advantage here.

Thousands of fitness businesses using the platform create a depth of industry knowledge that many competitors cannot easily replicate.

The opportunity is to turn that knowledge into genuinely useful content and evidence that strengthens GymMaster’s authority across both traditional and AI-driven search.

Test, prove, then scale

Paid acquisition follows the same philosophy.

Traction works directly with platforms such as Google to test new opportunities rather than simply adopting every new feature.

In one recent US experiment, a campaign restructure produced:

33% more conversions

and

41% higher conversion value

during the initial test period.

This was followed by further experimentation with Google’s AI Max capability.

The approach is straightforward:

test the opportunity, measure the commercial impact, scale what works.

The same discipline applies when something does not work.

If a campaign produces attractive platform metrics but poor customer economics, we change it.

If the growth constraint is conversion rather than traffic, we focus on conversion.

If research shows that an audience or market requires a different proposition, we change the proposition.

Marketing follows the commercial opportunity, not the other way around.

Connecting marketing with sales and customer success

As GymMaster has grown, the work has increasingly connected functions that might traditionally have operated separately.

Marketing cannot be optimised properly without understanding sales conversion.

Sales cannot be evaluated without understanding lead quality.

And customer acquisition is less valuable if the resulting customer does not succeed.

Traction therefore works across the wider growth system, helping GymMaster understand:

• where the strongest demand exists
• which activity generates the most valuable customers
• where prospects fall out of the journey
• how different markets behave
• where additional investment is justified
• where customer research should influence messaging
• how marketing can support long-term customer success

That last point is particularly important in GymMaster’s market.

Helping gyms operate more successfully is not only good for GymMaster’s customers.

It also strengthens GymMaster’s own growth model by helping more of those businesses remain healthy, active customers over time.

Growth recognised by Deloitte

GymMaster’s growth has been recognised externally at multiple stages of the company’s development.

Treshna Enterprises, the company behind GymMaster, has received Deloitte high-growth recognition over the course of its journey, including earlier Technology Fast 500 recognition.

More recently, in 2024 GymMaster was named:

Fastest Growing Exporter for Christchurch and the Upper South Island

and ranked:

16th in New Zealand’s Master of Growth index

The Master of Growth recognition is particularly relevant because it reflects sustained growth over five years rather than one exceptional period.

That five-year window also included COVID, an extraordinary disruption for a software company serving physical gyms and health clubs.

The impact

Building growth that lasts

Traction has worked with GymMaster since 2010.

The challenge at the beginning was whether a Christchurch software product could build a viable international future.

Today, GymMaster operates across more than 70 countries.

The challenge now is how to keep compounding that growth in a category where natural customer attrition is part of the market, acquisition costs move quickly and every new region behaves differently.

That requires more than a collection of marketing campaigns.

It requires:

• clear commercial priorities
• deep customer and market research
• market-specific strategy
• multiple acquisition channels
• strong search and AI visibility
• disciplined experimentation
• good sales and marketing alignment
• and an understanding of which customers create the greatest long-term value

That is the role Traction continues to play with GymMaster today.