Soho gyms

About soho gyms

Soho Gyms was a British chain of gyms spread out across central London.

After visiting New York, entrepreneur Jeremy Norman was inspired to open his first gym, Power Station in Chelsea, in 1983. Following on from this and using his experience in the nightclub world Jeremy opened the Soho Athletic Club in Covent Garden in 1994. Together with fellow founding directors Derek Frost and Richard Taylor, Jeremy rebranded to Soho Gyms and then expanded to include Earl's Court, Camden and Clapham. The Managing Director, Michael Crockett joined the business in January 2003, the group has now grown to 10 gyms including Waterloo, Borough, Bow Wharf, Lewisham, Farringdon and Tower Hill.

Soho Gyms was acquired by Pure Gym Ltd. in June 2018 and the brand ceased to exist on 16 November 2018.

The Brief

The brief for Soho Gyms was to cover all areas of marketing, including SEO, website build, social media, design and event creation.

The goal was to have Soho Gyms organic traffic improve to entice potential customers to join and discover them, this included developing a bespoke ecommerce Wordpress website to help with user journey plus create a website that compares to the mass amount of competitors.

Along with the website the brief included being in charge of Soho Gyms social media (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter), this included creating the content and copy. The goal was to improve following and engagement.

We were briefed to create regular events for the Soho Gyms members, plus openings of new gyms (Lewisham and Tower Hill).

The outcome

The outcome for Soho Gyms was very successful, we improved their SEO ranking drastically with results that began on page 12/13 of Google ranking on page one against top competitors.

The organic traffic improved by 63%.

With the new user friendly website and new traffic, day passes purchased on the website increased by 43%.

We regularly designed posters, created videos and produced high quality photography for Soho Gyms.

We created 3 successful events which were the opening of Tower Hill, Lewisham and the farewell party - this included getting press (Metro, Evening Standard and local news sources) to arrive and write about the gyms.

Honest London worked on improving all Soho Gyms social media presence and building the website and improving the SEO. Before getting started, we ranked on Google pages 12/13 on critical searches and within the space of less than a year we were comfortably on page 1, drastically improving our website traffic numbers. They are skilled in numerous areas such as SEO, websites and digital marketing plus graphic design and event organisation and I would recommend them to any future company.  They have been loyal, reliable and diligent throughout their years here and is liked by all the Soho team.

- Michael Crockett, Co-Founder Soho Gyms