For many personal training studios and group training facilities, sales growth tends to rely heavily on word-of-mouth referrals and advertisements or local flyers as the primary marketing source. While these are fantastic marketing mediums to leverage for almost any fitness-based facility, there is another option that could be an untapped gold mine for your gym: social proof.
What Does Social Proof Mean for a Gym?
Social proof is a concept that correlates a human instinct to rely on the actions of others, or a group, as being the correct action or response for a specific situation. Gyms, studios, and fitness facilities can leverage this social phenomenon in many ways. However, the goal is to establish that your facility is the correct place to be for specific goals, needs, or interests based on your niche and strategic points of distinction/unique selling proposition (USP).
What Gym Marketing Is Social Proof
Wielding the social proof phenomenon can be done in many different ways. We will focus on four areas where you can quickly implement social proofing in your fitness studio.
Member Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Also known as referral marketing, word-of-mouth references not only leverage social situations but also invoke trust from the person referring your business. This marketing strategy is known to have a massive impact on business, especially in the fitness industry. Unfortunately, due to its popularity, most companies are already jockeying for customers’ mind space for referrals, so standing out and holding mental space with your members can sometimes be tricky.
Testimonials for Gyms
Similar to word-of-mouth, testimonials typically capture the approving words of your happy clients in a quote or video format. While they may have different strengths than word-of-mouth because they do not organically come up in informal situations, they still hold significant value when implemented properly into your marketing efforts.
Reviews for Gyms
Unlike testimonials, reviews can serve as a quantifiable “ranking of the people” for your business based on prior experiences, services rendered, or overall value delivered. Reviews can come from multiple locations, both online and offline. Understanding that these public opinions (good and bad) can affect your marketing and your brand’s overall image is necessary for successful social proof utilization.
Client Before-and-After Photos
Before-and-after photos are an incredible tool for facilities for multiple reasons, but ultimately, images help show your clients’ progress. These can be powerful due to the nature of images, especially when a client makes a significant transformation.
Shareability: Making Sharing Easy
The next step is to leverage these social proof marketing options to your fitness studio’s benefit. As we mentioned earlier, word-of-mouth marketing is a hard nut to crack. Due to heavy competition for mental real estate, exploring other avenues to gain traction is critical. One effort to help penetrate a client’s social network and remain organic is to make marketing pieces easily shareable. People like to feel celebrated, especially when it involves the specific client’s progress and achievements from the hard work they put in.
Acknowledging these milestones as a business is critical to capturing the growth opportunity. However, how your health center recognizes these moments sets the stage for their marketability. Making sure to offer social media posts, emails, flyers, or even public shout-outs about the story can help make these moments of recognition easy to re-distribute to the client’s close contact group.
How to Collect Testimonials and Reviews for Your Gym
A summarizing phrase regarding testimonials or reviews collection and the lack of results is, “You don’t get what you didn’t ask for.” Many gym and studio owners think the reviews will pour in. However, what often happens is reviews come from one of two situations—those who had a fantastic experience and those who had an awful experience. Everyone else, in that middle ground of these opposing ends, tends not to have much initiative to post a public review or give a testimonial unless prompted.
Motivating action can include a prompt or ask to draw interest. Still, a convenient link or way for them to quickly give you the testimonial/review is critical to collecting it. Further, follow-up requests may also be required if your initial invitation needs to be more convenient (based on time, ease of action, or any other reason). Persistence and consistency are vital and can pay off in this category.
How to Show and Not Tell Client Success Stories
Fitness marketing can be a vain industry. A picture can often say a thousand words when working with consumer-facing marketing efforts. Learning to “show, not tell” your gym or health studio’s strengths and successes is critical for marketing and sales/conversion efforts. Adding elements like testimonials, before-and-after photos, and positive user reviews from various websites can all help solidify your marketing efforts through this utilization of the social proof phenomenon.
The essential factors to keep in mind when crafting your story to show via other people’s words and images include knowing your gym’s target audience, the campaign goals within your sales funnel, and finally, implementing these pieces in a way that is not only easy to share via email and social media but also benefits your website from a search engine optimization standpoint.
Integrating Before-and-After Results Into Your Gym’s Processes and Systems
Getting photos of clients’ success stories should be straightforward for most personal training studio owners. But to drive home the social proof factor within your fitness facility, you need quantity and consistency to subconsciously emphasize that your fitness center is their answer via the abundance of people shown using it. How do you accomplish gathering these numbers? Processes and systems!
From onboarding a new client or member to your fitness facility to scheduling progress check-ins and assessments, your gym needs precise operations processes. The collection of processes for your studio can serve as an operations manual over time, but building these step-by-step processes with marketing in mind can help consistently grow your materials and ability to social-proof market your business. Building in details such as specific pictures to capture at each stage, getting client testimonials, or even capturing a video of a client’s positive feedback about their progress are all great marketing opportunities.
Integrating these processes into an automated system like your studio member management software can enable further consistency and success. Because you can easily access client files and information, logging information like body composition, measurements, strength assessments, and even images, details needed to build out these marketing materials quickly becomes a simple process. Additionally, as your business grows, this automation allows your fitness studio to continue collecting and managing needed data systematically since it’s part of your operational process.
Finally, ensuring that these results are easy to share and that there is a documented process for using them for marketing is crucial to utilization. By focusing on ease of posting, sharing, and repurposing, you set your gym up for success in two ways. First, reducing process friction will improve the proper procedure fulfillment by employees. Second, when these gym marketing materials are easy to share or interact with, it increases the chances for them to get engaged with or expand the message’s reach to an audience outside your own.
Making A Splash
Testimonials and reviews have been a long-known powerhouse of material for marketing. When leveraged in strategically large batches, you may invoke the social proof phenomenon with potential members; however, building this collection and utilization process long-term requires big-picture thinking. Building step-by-step processes and an operations manual for your fitness business will be pivotal as your gym or personal training studio grows and expands. Additionally, implementing these standard operating procedures (SOPs) into your gym’s membership management software and leveraging automation to your advantage will become a considerable efficiency long-term.
