Insightful digital outreach assures an innovative and sustained user engagement in Digital fitness space. Growing demand for fit and toned body has encouraged fitness industry in India as a whole.
Be it young kids or elderly people, fitness has become an essential route to keep body mind and soul active. This has shifted focus of many sharp business minds towards fitness industry, which is currently is pegged at over US$ 0.78 billion and is stated to grow at a CAGR of 25 per cent, to hit US$ 2.4 billion mark by 2015.
The growing fitness industry, which not only includes fitness & slimming centres, gyms and equipments, but, it now includes, health and fitness mobile apps market as well.
Fitness brands are leveraging on mobile apps
The free versions of most fitness apps provide the space for in-app advertisements, which has been leveraged by brand marketers to promote their products. With access to crucial consumer data (user preferences, diet plan etc), the mobile apps open channels for marketers to do personalized in-app targeting.
User engagement ration
Significantly, during the period of December 2013 to June 2014, fitness apps market has seen good surge. While on an overall basis, mobile apps have seen a growth of 33 per cent in terms of usage, health and fitness apps have grown by 62 per cent over the years.
As compared to other mobile apps, which witness a male: female ratio of 52:48, fitness apps showcases a 68 per cent higher percentage of female users’ engagement in comparison with male.
The target audience of these apps fall in the age group 25-54. Research reveals that people between the age group of 35-54, uses fitness apps, 47 per cent more than the ones between 25-34 (only 41 per cent of consumers from this lot uses mobile apps).
Factually, sports fans are much more inclined towards using fitness apps than social network enthusiasts.
Roadmap ahead
According to Grand View Research, Inc. the mHealth industry will reach US$ 49 billion by 2020, with an impressive 47.6 per cent CAGR over the next 6 years.
Currently, over 100,000 apps available on iOS and Android platforms are successfully operating across the globe. As per the findings of technology research firm Flury, the rate of development of mHealth apps is 87 per cent faster than the mobile app industry. The top 5 per cent of mHealth apps – of which fitness-focused versions, make up the bulk of available apps - have accumulated over 500,000 downloads to date.
Interestingly, these fitness apps are not only being downloaded, but are regularly used by the consumers, which forecast a very promising future ahead.
