Are Your Customers Promoting You?
As a facility owner, you are exposed and have quick access (each and every day), to your best advertising asset; your clients. So the critical question then becomes: “Are your customers promoting you?” If they are, I am willing to bet you have a successful enterprise, if not, well……. This blog will highlight some of the things you can do to help take advantage of your most critical asset and how they can help you to reach your business goals.
- Knowledge – I believe in a saying that a good friend of mine passed on to me; “Learn More, Earn More”. This works well with your clients. The more you teach them, the more they will look to you for support, guidance and instruction in their fitness goals. The more they look to you, the more valuable you become. The more valuable you become, the longer they will stay with you. The longer they stay, the more they talk about you.
- Consistency – Go to a restaurant and have a good meal and most likely you will tell someone. However, go their 30 times and have a good meal every time and you will tell everybody! The same applies to your gym clients. Every time they walk through the door, you need to treat them and act like it is their first time. This means you greet them by name, provide them a clean towel, ensure that the equipment they use is clean and well maintained, that the class they are taking starts on time and of high quality, that their personal training session is exciting, demanding and rewarding, etc. When you consistently deliver a quality product your clients will naturally begin promoting you.
- Rewards and Recognition – Make the extra effort to reward an individual for their progress. If someone has reached a milestone in their fitness program, provide them a reward or recognition that they will appreciate. This can be something as simple as a “verbal congratulations” to more elaborate gifts. You may choose to recognize them in your newsletter or website. When other people see this recognition it leads to discussion on how they did it, who helped them, etc. This form of self promotion leads to promotion of your facility, staff and services.
- Cleanliness – This may seem overly obvious but I don’t think some owners realize just how critical this is. I don’t care where I go: a restaurant, a car dealership, a movie theater, etc. if it is not clean, I will not go back. So many facilities clean their equipment and flooring once per week or their washrooms once per day and this is simply not enough. You should constantly have someone wiping down the equipment and washrooms all day long. This added expense will more than pay for itself by your members who will be discussing this point with their friends and relatives. I don’t know of a single person who will join a dirty gym but I know 10s who will leave a dirty one.
In the end, you can spend hundreds and even thousands on marketing and advertising and this will work to a point, but using your client asset as your key marketing strategy will pay off with longer client memberships and lower client churn.
