Goldfish Swim School was created by parents, for parents with one goal in mind—to give kids the platform to build essential skills that will help them stay safer while making waves in life. Since opening its first franchise in 2009, Goldfish Swim School proudly serves more than 70,000 students every week throughout the United States and Canada.

SUCCESS STORY

How social micro-influencers helped establish a local swim
school as the authority on water safety education.

The opportunity

Goldfish Swim School spent years building a strong reputation across their first seven locations in the Detroit metropolitan area. However, seeing their success, other swim schools started edging into the marketplace. Goldfish knew they needed to rise above the region’s newcomers—and fast—so they leaned on our team to help them strategically broaden their network in order to raise awareness in the community and engage new customers in Metro Detroit.

The approach

We immediately got to work, narrowing down three chief priorities which included, keeping swimming and water safety top of mind among media, bloggers and influencers; generating new blog and social media content to reinforce Goldfish as the authority on water safety and swim lessons; and identifying brand ambassadors to share messaging with families not already familiar with the brand. Together, Goldfish and Approach identified a fleet of ambassadors and invited them to try one of the seven Detroit area locations and share their experiences online.

The impact

With first-hand experience, these ambassadors became enthusiastic advocates and were eager to talk about Goldfish within their social networks. And we positioned founder and CEO Chris McCuiston as a water safety expert—further amplifying Goldfish Swim School’s unique value proposition of a curriculum that focuses squarely on water safety. In the first six months of the campaign, we were able to generate 385 pieces of coverage that was 100 percent positive in tone and earned 11,500 social media engagements and 19,822,198 overall impressions.