CrossFit500 affiliates to over 10,000 globally in less than five years.
That’s the story of the CrossFit brand … and we had no marketing team. No paid ads.
How did we do it?
To understand the incredible rise of the CrossFit phenomenon, let’s go back a little bit – to 2007. That’s when I opened the 250th CrossFit affiliate in my two-car garage in Watertown, CT – and I started writing a blog about my members. It took off nationally like a CrossFit wildfire.
Six months later, the founder of CrossFit asked me to write the CrossFit Affiliate Blog. Then I became the Director of Global Affiliates for CrossFit, Inc. (which still had fewer than 15 employees).
It was then that I took a barely operational affiliate program from 500 affiliates to over 2500 affiliates in just 18 months. And that was only the beginning.
In 2009, I dragged the company single-handedly into social media and iPhones. (The executive team used Blackberries and thought Facebook was a fad.)
Here I am, creating content for the CrossFit Facebook page at the 2011 CrossFit Games.
We exploded.
By 2013, we had a million followers on Facebook and a new Instagram page. Our global affiliate count? Over 10,000 now, spread across six continents. (I was trying hard for Antarctica but no luck.)
A growth percentage of 1900% in 6 years.
We accomplished all that with no marketing team, no advertising budget, and a CEO who wouldn’t even let me send non-transactional email to our contracted affiliates. (“It’s spam,” he said.)
But we had:
a red-hot brand
our iPhones
a handful of video creators
a growing crowd of professional CrossFit athletes
and millions of devotees around the world
None of us who did CrossFit could shut up about it so I enabled and encouraged User Generated Content in a way few others were doing at the time – on our website and on Facebook. I identified the emerging marketing trends across multiple countries and capitalized on them, even if CrossFit didn’t call it marketing. We didn’t have fancy ads but we had a video team – and plenty of athletes who wanted to be filmed for an audience thirsty for content.
That’s how we built our brand in a way few companies had up to that point, merging the knowledge distribution structure of Catholicism (pope to bishop to priest to congregation) with the sexiness of sweaty, half-clothed athletes and the virality of social media. No business school would have written this plan but a handful of true believers made it happen.
Result: Wild, sweaty growth.
