Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
The 8-week Challenge is the engine. Brand guidelines are the rails.
An F45 studio is a franchise: head office runs the programming (Romans, Lionheart, Hollywood, Athletica), the brand guidelines, the global ad templates, and the F45 Live tech. The franchisee runs the local marketing for an exclusive territory, fills the 8-week Challenge cohorts (the franchise's signature growth engine), and converts Challenge graduates into ongoing 6 or 12-month memberships. The constraint nobody tells you in the franchise pitch: you can't write your own ad copy from scratch, you can't deviate from the brand colour palette and lockups, and the studio in the next territory is running the identical national campaign at the same time. The differentiation has to be local: your studio's team, your floor footage, your Challenge cohort photos, your local intro-week offer. That work has to happen weekly and almost never does because the franchisee is teaching three sessions a day plus running a small business.
Good F45-franchise marketing has three jobs running in parallel inside brand guidelines: a local intro-week landing page that beats the national template on conversion (your team's faces, your floor photos, real testimonials from your own members, local 'F45 [suburb]' headline copy), a Meta Challenge campaign with a 5km radius excluding the neighbouring F45's territory, and a Challenge follow-up sequence that runs the 8 weeks plus the conversion-to-membership ask at week 7. The page is conversion, the ad is acquisition, the sequence is retention. Do all three inside the franchise brand rails and the Challenge fills; do one and you're back to the head-office national campaign that the studio next door is also running.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Sets the plan around the one number that moves the franchise: 8-week Challenge cohort fill. Briefs the other agents so the local intro page, the territory-targeted ads, the team-training floor content and the Challenge follow-up all push toward filling the next Challenge inside F45 brand guidelines. Tracks the intro week, the Lifestyle Activator, and the Hyrox-crossover crowd as secondary cohorts.
Imports your existing site and makes the 8-week Challenge landing page the highest-converting page on the studio site, inside F45 brand guidelines. Local team photos, real-member before-and-afters with consent, your trainers' names and faces above the fold, one-tap into your Mindbody or Hapana booking flow. New Challenge cohort? New page in five minutes.
Owns whether you appear for 'f45 [suburb]' and 'f45 challenge [suburb]' searches in your territory. Complete Google Business Profile, schema on the Challenge page, review prompts after every intro week, trainer photos in the profile. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes. Beats the neighbouring F45 on local relevance signals.
Runs a local Meta Challenge campaign with a 5km radius excluding the neighbouring F45's territory, lifts spend 6 weeks before each Challenge starts, and pauses when the cohort is full. A small Google ad set catches 'f45 [suburb]' urgent searches. Layers your local creative on top of the national F45 template, inside brand guidelines.
Turns every Romans, Lionheart, Hollywood and Athletica session into a post in your voice: trainer-of-the-week, Lionheart wearer-of-the-month, Challenge graduate spotlight, the 'why our 6am team is the room you want' post. Builds the 'this is the studio with the real trainers and real members' case the national template can't make. You photo or film a 60s tripod video, agent drafts the caption, you approve.
Drafts the longer-form pieces curious first-timers search for: 'what is the F45 8-week Challenge', 'is F45 worth the price', 'how F45 compares to a normal gym', 'what to expect in your first F45 session'. Two a month, in your voice, inside brand guidelines, that pull consideration-stage search and lower the barrier to the intro week.
Your first 30 days.
- Site imported, hosting bill cancelled
- Challenge cohort fill plan and territory map delivered by Sam
- Google Business Profile flipped to 'Gym' with full F45 workout list
- 8-week Challenge landing page indexed and ranking on the local long tail
- Meta Challenge campaign live with a 5km radius and neighbouring-territory exclusion
- First fortnight of floor-training captions queued in your voice
- 8-week Challenge follow-up sequence wired into the booking system
- 'What is the F45 8-week Challenge' blog draft in your inbox
An F45 franchise wins on the 8-week Challenge engine and the boutique-gym positioning. It loses when the franchisee runs only the national templates and the studio across the territory line runs the identical campaign. The differentiation has to be local: your team, your floor, your members, your territory-tight ads. That work happens weekly inside the brand guidelines and almost never does because the franchisee is teaching three sessions a day.
Agencies are too dear to actually run the local Challenge page and the territory-targeted ads for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but you're left running the national template the next-suburb studio is also running. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the local page, run the territory-tight ads, post your team and floor, and run the Challenge follow-up. You photo the warm-up, approve the week, done. Inside F45 brand guidelines, every time.