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How to Scale a Business Abroad using TikTok: The 1Fit Experience

1Fit's Marketing Director for Central Asia told Forbes Kazakhstan readers about the approach that helped the fitness startup enter the international market, and what role generative AI plays in this.

New Year is a time for change and new solutions. Many start the year with a promise to lead a more active lifestyle and play sports. This is where 1Fit, a single fitness subscription, becomes an indispensable assistant. The service has become one of the fastest growing startups in Kazakhstan and continues to expand into new markets: it is now also available in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia and Mexico. The company has achieved such rapid growth through the use of innovative marketing tools, including TikTok advertising solutions.

Akhmet Nazhmaddin, Marketing Director of 1Fit in Central Asia, talks about the advantages of cooperation with this platform.

— Ahmet, I would like to start the conversation with one of the brightest sporting events of 2024 — the Olympic Games in Paris. On the Internet, including TikTok, there were a lot of moments from there. Perhaps the most famous was the appearance of the Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikech. How do you feel about the fact that with the advent of online platforms, any moment of a sporting event can become a trend? Is 1Fit trying to integrate into similar trends or create its own?

— Of course, we follow trends, in particular from the sports and fitness industry. They significantly affect the effectiveness of advertising when the brand manages to get into the topics that the audience picks up the most at the moment. Periodically, we ourselves manage to revive old memes and jokes, such as "Zhumaisynba."

Sometimes we manage to create our own trends, but it happens more organically. So, for example, it happened with the "I love to swim" advertisement. This video was shown to users so often that a month after its launch, both regular users and brands began making parodies of it using similar text in their campaigns. Thanks to this, we have natively increased our brand awareness.

Trends are constantly being created, it is important for brands to monitor this and try to use it for their own growth and building audience loyalty.

What was the reason for the rapid development of 1Fit in In Kazakhstan and abroad — what is the essence and uniqueness of the service? 

— 1Fit is a single subscription for all sports, which gives access to fitness centers, swimming pools, yoga studios, boxing and dozens of other activities. For the price of a gym membership, the user gets access to a wide range of sports centers. Our main audience is young people who just want to discover certain sports or return to them after a long break. They are not ready to choose one thing, they want to try different activities in order to understand what will be comfortable and interesting for them. Or they want to combine different sports, which are not always represented in the same fitness center. This is what we help our clients with.

Our service offer is unique in Central Asian countries. Other regions already have services similar to us, but their business model differs from ours. Users of these platforms need to purchase credits, which they can spend on a limited number of classes for a limited period of time. In turn, 1Fit provides a subscription for access to an unlimited number of workouts.

What is your marketing strategy? Are there any differences in its implementation in Kazakhstan and abroad? 

— We try to reach as wide an audience as possible, we talk about the value and advantages of our product. What sets us apart is our activity — we scale best practices to achieve results in the shortest possible time. At the same time, we focus on the local characteristics of each country, adapt our strategies and creatives so that the ads respond and feel relevant to local users as much as possible. We also use a data-driven approach: whether certain creatives and tools bring conversions, and whether we spend budgets efficiently.

What role does TikTok play in your strategy? How did you come to cooperate with this platform?

— TikTok is one of our main advertising platforms, which accounts for a significant proportion of our audience. Unlike other platforms, TikTok has an official representative office in our country, they are willing to contact customers, talk about new tools and opportunities. And we are pleased with our cooperation.

One of the main advantages of working with TikTok for us is that the platform allows us to implement our strategy in our priority countries at the international level, test approaches and choose those that will work for us in each specific country.

What goals do you set when launching campaigns on TikTok? How do you rate the effectiveness?

— Our main goal at TikTok is to sell and attract new customers. Recently, we have switched to campaigns using Smart+ tools, in which the platform automatically adjusts the creatives and targeting of each launch. We can see that such campaigns on TikTok are more effective than on other platforms — the cost of attracted users turned out to be significantly lower.

There is a lot of talk now about how the use of generative artificial intelligence helps in the production of advertising. Does TikTok provide any advantages and tools in this direction? Do you plan to use them?

— We certainly plan to expand our cooperation with TikTok, in particular, through a wide range of innovative advertising tools on the platform. TikTok provides access to generative AI solutions that help automate processes. We plan to use them to work in new markets, where we do not yet have a full—fledged team. It takes time and significant resources to create and launch advertising campaigns. TikTok's tools make most of the work much easier.

I would especially like to mention TikTok Symphony — we managed to try the automatic translation function that this platform provides, as well as the dubbing of creatives into different languages. This allows you to quickly adapt your content to new markets. We tried this product and saw that it reduces the amount of advertising costs by at least 5 times and makes our work more efficient.

What would you recommend to companies that are just planning or have just started working with TikTok?

— I would recommend not just recycling the content that you post on other platforms, but creating videos separately for TikTok. On TikTok, perfect-picture advertising content won't get you the same response and audience attention as more lively, native, and authentic videos. It is also important to understand who your audience is, what information and value you can convey to users through your advertising. The more clearly you define this, the more likely you are to achieve the results you expect.

Author: Yana Akhmetova

Source: Forbes Kazakhstan

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Anna Spitsyna

March 17, 2025 03:50

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