Owning and operating a fitness facility requires orchestrating many moving parts. From general upkeep and customer service needs to marketing a gym and working on new client sales tactics, managing a fitness business requires you to wear many hats. While all the jobs involved carry value to the overall success of a company, ensuring a healthy funnel of leads and conversions is critical for your bottom line. That said, we will focus on how you can apply Cialdini’s principles of persuasion to marketing your gym and your sales process.
Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion
Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, describes the seven principles that drive influence and persuasion—learned from years of training at used car dealerships, telemarketing agencies, and similar sales-based organizations. The book (published in 1984) covered six principles: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. However, in 2016, he presented the new principle of unity to make seven total persuasion points.
Applying the Principles to Marketing a Gym
To help drive these topics home from a fitness industry perspective, we will break down each principle to explain what it is and how it relates to gym marketing.
Reciprocity
You may understand this concept clearly if you’ve walked into a store and received a free offer or sample. The idea builds on the notion that people desire to return a favor or lower their guard of a quick “no” to perceived sales tactics. An easy example is receiving a food sample at a mall food court. While you might not have been craving a smoothie or teriyaki chicken, a free sample not only gets you to let your guard down and give it a try but often puts people in a state that may make them feel awkward saying no to making a dinner purchase there.
For owners looking to leverage this concept into marketing their gym, free trial periods, day passes, or complementary personal training sessions on sign-up can be a great starting point. While this might sound straightforward enough, applying this principle correctly to achieve successful results requires you to have a well-established sales funnel process and robust interaction points during the prospect’s experience with your reciprocity lure.
Commitment
Similar to working with a client, getting a commitment to a goal or action is critical to success. You establish commitment when you get that buy-in from someone dedicated to their goals, a routine, a fitness program, or whatever the process is.
To implement the commitment principle to marketing a gym, you can start by adding wording to your materials and website that is more devotion-focused. This wording helps establish feelings of commitment with your audience early on. For example, on your website, you might have a button that says “click here to learn more” or maybe even “learn more.” While this is a familiar call-to-action seen on many sites, mixing in different phrasings like “start your transformation journey” or “take the first step” can invoke more commitment feelings for those engaging with your website or brand.
Social Proof
In our blog post on how to social proof a gym, we describe this as a concept of human instinct that relies on the actions of others or a group as the correct action or response for a specific situation. For example, if a large portion of your friends are going to a particular event, you may be inclined to think that that event is probably the best (or most important) thing happening that day. While there is no evidence other than many people you know are going, the human tendency is to give it more weighted emotional value because of the personal factors involved in seeing others doing that thing.
Ways to incorporate the concept of social proof into marketing a gym include word-of-mouth marketing from members/clients, testimonials you can publish, reviews for your facility, or even client before-and-after photos.
Authority
This concept is pretty straightforward—people tend to obey people with a certain authority level. We can view authority from multiple perspectives, though. It can come from experience/expertise, commanding presence, or even a role bestowed upon someone. However, for this blog, we focus on authority through the lens of search engine optimization (SEO).
When marketing a gym, one of the main factors of lead generation for your sales funnel is appearing in the search results. Digitally speaking, that involves SEO for your business’s keywords and phrases to show up in searches made by your target audience. With this in mind, one of the prominent factors that go into website rankings is your domain authority. Topical relevance (aka keywords) and the number and quality of websites pointing back to your fitness facility’s website play a part in influencing domain authority levels.
Liking
Similar to social proof, “liking” is based on the premise that people tend to want to buy from or work with people they like. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be their friend (although that would make it even more effective), the idea is that you are presenting yourself as likable.
From a marketing and sales perspective for a gym, this boils down to how you present your business, interact with clients/leads, and carry out your processes. Having too strong of a personality, pushing too hard with sales, or even being verbally aggressive can all lead to negative experiences for a client or prospective lead. Instead, focus on listening, observing, and offering honest or genuine answers to their needs or questions. Further, focusing on positives and highlighting fun things or success stories are easy ways to try and lean into a more likable state.
Scarcity
Supply constraints can affect demand based on fundamental economic reasoning. Put into the perspective of marketing a gym, scarcity can come in the form of limiting client spaces, capping membership availability, or even restricting hours of operation.
This concept may sound counterintuitive to some, as many promote catering to the needs of our audience. However, some facilities can benefit from this limiting-style model when looking at the persuasion principle involving scarcity. It is worth noting that this tactic needs to be thought out beforehand and based on your facility’s target audience.
Unity
This final principle was an addition to the initial six documented, but it is very relevant and valuable in the modern age of mass communication. The idea of unity highlights that people are more likely to participate or engage with your brand/business if they feel included.
We commonly see this principle in the fitness industry through communities. When you build a community for a gym, you establish a sense of belonging for your members or clients. The community is huge for a few reasons, but mainly, it helps promote retention rates and draws in others from outside who want to become part of that community.
Making A Splash
Marketing a gym and growing your sales requires more than just making a website and running advertisements. Understanding and properly implementing the persuasion principles discussed in this blog can help you position your fitness facility well in your target audience’s mind and leverage outside factors to help drive interest and conversions.
