For most of the last decade, fitness-tech platforms have grown the same way nearly every consumer app does: performance ads, conversion funnels, discount codes, and a constant push to lower cost-per-acquisition. As digital ad costs climb and audiences grow increasingly numb to paid placements, that playbook is getting harder to run profitably — and a handful of platforms in the fitness space are starting to test a different approach, borrowing a page from how the biggest consumer brands build loyalty: entertainment and genuine connection instead of paid reach.
The logic behind the shift is straightforward. Performance advertising is built for short-term conversions — a click, an install, a sign-up — but it rarely builds the kind of brand equity that keeps customers around once the ad spend stops. Branded content, docuseries, community features, and storytelling take longer to pay off, but they create something harder for a competitor to copy: an audience that feels connected to a brand rather than targeted by one. It's a strategy long used by larger consumer brands outside fitness, and it's now showing up among smaller, category-specific platforms trying to differentiate in a crowded market rather than compete purely on ad spend.
The contrast is easiest to see against the platforms that already dominate the category. Mindbody, the management software used by more than 40,000 fitness and wellness businesses to handle scheduling, payments, and marketing, also runs a consumer marketplace app with millions of active users. In 2021, Mindbody acquired ClassPass, the subscription platform that lets members book classes across thousands of partner studios rather than committing to one gym; both now sit under the same parent company. That scale was built largely through B2B software adoption and marketplace network effects — a huge, searchable inventory of classes and studios — rather than brand storytelling. It's an effective model for aggregating discovery and bookings across a large footprint, but it leaves little room for any single studio, trainer, or city to stand out inside the marketplace.
That gap is where a wave of smaller, more localized platforms are testing something different: building a distinct identity and audience in one market first, rather than optimizing for scale from day one. Some lean on creator-style social content; others are experimenting with original video programming tied to a specific city or niche instead of a national ad campaign. Fit Local, an Austin-based platform that connects personal trainers with clients, is one example. The company recently framed its own growth strategy around this exact tension, arguing that most fitness marketing chases conversions while comparatively few brands invest in entertainment and connectivity. "Ads get you a click. Story gets you a customer for life," said Fit Local founder Conley Miller, describing the company's shift away from traditional performance marketing toward content built to engage a local audience directly.
That shift shows up in how Fit Local talks about its own mission, too — not just as a matching platform, but as an effort to give fitness professionals more visibility and career stability while helping clients find trainers suited to their specific goals, including managing chronic health conditions. Whether or not that framing resonates commercially, it illustrates a broader pattern: platforms increasingly market themselves around a cause or narrative rather than a feature list.
The clearest illustration of the approach in Fit Local's case is a new local video series, Fit Local TV, which the company plans to launch in the Austin area in the coming weeks. Rather than producing traditional ad creative, the series is designed to spotlight neighborhood gyms — profiling their coaching, culture, and community in a documentary-style format instead of running paid placements for them. It's a small-scale, hyper-local version of a tactic more brands are testing: using original content to build an audience first, and treating direct response advertising as a secondary channel rather than the primary growth engine.
This kind of pivot isn't unique to any one company, and it isn't without risk. Branded entertainment is harder to measure than a conversion campaign, slower to show return, and easy to get wrong if the content doesn't actually engage anyone. Performance marketing still plays an important role for most platforms, particularly for driving immediate, transactional actions like a first booking or a sign-up. But as more fitness-tech companies compete for the same limited pool of local trainers, gyms, and health-conscious consumers, some are concluding that differentiation has to come from somewhere other than the ad auction — whether that's community features, original content, or a more explicit mission tied to public health outcomes like chronic disease prevention.
Fit Local is a small, single-market example of the trend rather than a definitive case study, and it remains to be seen whether an entertainment-first strategy scales the way a more traditional growth playbook might. But its bet — building an audience through story and local content before leaning further into paid acquisition — reflects a question more fitness-tech platforms are likely to face as ad costs keep rising and consumer attention keeps fragmenting: whether it's more sustainable to buy attention or earn it.
