Want to boost your client reviews as a personal trainer? This blog shares tips on how to deliver exceptional service, encourage feedback, and build a strong reputation. Whether you’re just starting or looking to grow, we’ll guide you on turning satisfied clients into your biggest advocates. Let’s take your reviews—and your business—to the next level!
Offer Top-of-the-Line Services, Of Course
We’re going to assume this is something you’re already doing, but we threw it in here at the top for an important reason. If you’re not consistently checking in with yourself, your services, and your business as a whole, you’re doing your clients a disservice. Every few weeks or so, take a good, hard look at your business. Are you doing everything you can to offer your clients the best services possible? Look at your goals—are you on the right track? How’s your customer service and your attitude, lately? If you’re getting bad reviews, don’t take that lightly—really address what any negative review says and evaluate where you can make improvements. Excellent reviews come from truly excellent experiences—never forget that!
If you’re not really struggling with getting positive reviews, rather, getting any reviews at all, the next few tips are just for you!
Be a Source of Education for Your Clients
Even though most consumers and potential clients will absolutely gobble up online reviews before they make a choice on who to hire as their personal trainer, it’s not always easy for current, satisfied clients to make the connection that they’re supposed to be the ones leaving you those helpful reviews.
Here’s something important we want to specify—just because you don’t have the number of reviews you’d like doesn’t necessarily mean your clients aren’t happy. Truthfully, they may just not be educated enough on reviews to realize how helpful they are. So, educate them!
There’s nothing wrong with explaining this process to your clients, and there’s nothing wrong with outright asking them to leave you a review, either. Think of reviews as a two-way street. Your customers would probably be more than willing to leave you a review with no incentive—you just need to ask them. In fact, about 77 percent of consumers would be willing to leave a review if the service provider simply asked for it!
Make it Easy for Clients to Leave Reviews—Optimize Your Platforms
Of course, just because you ask a client to leave a review doesn’t mean they will. That’s why you have to make this process as seamless, easy, and streamlined as possible. We’re not trying to say that your clients wouldn’t go above and beyond to sing your praises, just that, historically, when it comes to reviews, if the process is difficult, you can bet a majority of people won’t leave one if the process is too complicated.
How do we fix this? We get rid of any major roadblocks and make the process as easy as possible. Be sure that you’ve created a business profile on all the major review platforms—Yelp, Google, Bing, etc.—so they don’t have to jump through hoops to find you. Make sure your profiles have current information, a photo, and meaningful descriptions about your business so your customers know immediately they’ve found the right profile. The added bonus of this process? A better, more optimized business profile will only help you with your search engine traffic. (Kill two birds with one stone, guys).
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Don’t Be Afraid of Incentives for Reviews
A lot of your customers might feel inclined to give you a review without any incentive whatsoever, but if you think your reviews could use a little boost, think about a quick incentive program to build up your online reputation quickly. We’re not saying you should pay your customers to leave you quality reviews—but offering small discounts, little extras, a coupon or two, etc. isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The bottom line here is this: you should already be offering positive-review- worthy services, the incentive is simply for the effort it takes your clients to actually leave you a review.
Be a Good Social Listener
No, we don’t mean you should listen well in social situations (although, you should, don’t ignore that advice either). Social listening is the collection of tools or processes you use to track, analyze and respond to conversations about your brand or your services in an online format. If you’re not paying close attention to your own social media, your website, and other online platforms (like Google, Bing, Yelp, etc.), you’re likely missing out on opportunities to respond to negative reviews, monitor your reputation, and create a dialogue with clients who leave you reviews. Investing in reputation monitoring software or apps is never a bad idea, especially because there are hundreds of review sites out there and it can be near impossible to monitor them all on your own.
Be Gracious, Not Pushy
When asking your satisfied clients for reviews, it’s important you find the balance between deserving and pushy. Be gracious with your clients, be transparent with them—explain how positive reviews benefit you and how they could help improve your online reputation and become even more successful. But remember, you’re not a salesman, you’re a personal trainer—if you become too pushy about this, your clients might be turned off. Translation? They’re likely not going to want to write you a good review.
Send Gentle Email Reminders
Schedule a subtle email campaign using software, like Mailchimp, for your current clients that sends gentle (and not too frequent) reminders about incentive programs for reviews, the education behind leaving good reviews, and more general review information. Make sure this email doesn’t come on too strong but gives them clear direction on how to leave reviews, where to leave reviews, and why leaving reviews could help you.
We hope our online review article can help you boost your review ratios, gather your hard-earned credibility in one place, and convert some leads into clients! Have another great tip for boosting your online reviews? Tell us about it in the comment section—that’s why it’s there, people.
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