Automation Of Fitness Reputation Management

For fitness-centered businesses such as gyms, reputation is everything. This is because, for most people, a gym membership is a long-term investment. Fitness enthusiasts are looking for a home and it’s on you to show them your establishment fits the bill.

With fitness reputation management, you can attract new customers, open up new business opportunities, and increase your bottom line.

On the other hand, failure to manage your reputation can wreak havoc on your business, and if the negative reputation snowballs, you’ll quickly see a drop in new memberships. In the end, the sound of iron might become more and more silent.

Luckily, reputation management for fitness doesn’t have to be hard if you know what you’re doing and if you use the right tools to simplify this process.

Let’s see how you can set a new personal record for your fitness business!

Why fitness reputation management matters

In short, your reputation is how the general public perceives your business. If your potential customers negatively perceive you, you might lose out on sales or gym memberships. 

This is where fitness reputation management comes into play - it’s a practice that gives you full control over the narrative around your business. While it might seem overly complex, fitness reputation management is simply a practice you can use to ensure that the reviews placed in front of your prospects are overwhelmingly positive. 

Before they choose your gym as their new home, most new people will first research your business and read a bunch of online reviews before biting the bullet and contacting you. This means that customer reviews have a lot of power in influencing the perception of new customers. 

For example, online reviews can massively affect conversion rates as modern users trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations. Reviews can also impact customers’ purchasing decisions, as most users will be more compelled to trust a business after seeing positive reviews.

With that in mind, let’s spring into action.

Basic fitness reputation management practices

Managing your reputation starts with the awareness of what your customers are saying about you, thus, you need to make an effort to monitor all the discourse surrounding your business. This might include following the relevant hashtags on social media and setting up Google Alerts to receive notifications.

One of the key aspects of fitness reputation management is devising a proper strategy to respond both to positive and negative feedback. 

This is especially important for negative reviews, as you can use your response to acknowledge the criticism and apologize. By taking the higher road and showing that you’re willing to improve, you’re demonstrating you truly care about making your customers happy.

Fitness reputation management isn’t limited to user-created content. You should also create and publish positive content about your business. We’re talking about everything from blog posts, and engaging posts to press mentions. 

This way, you can push the best sides of your business to the forefront.

With reviews themselves, you need to offer multiple options for potential customers to leave reviews. Fitness reputation management is as much about addressing negative attention as it is about making it easy to leave reviews on multiple platforms. For example:

• Google reviews:  when looking for anything, including a gym, most people first turn to Google. Because of that, having a Google Business Profile is essential if you want to manage your reputation the right way, because these are the reviews that your customers are most likely to run into first.
• Facebook: this social media platform is still a juggernaut, and many people turn to it to find products and services. Facebook lets users review any business (in the latest incarnation, the review system was abandoned in favor of recommendations) and this rating can even pop up in Google search results.
• Your website: this is the heart of your business online. As such, you need to include it in your fitness reputation management efforts. While you can use a system to allow users to leave reviews on your website directly, you can also use reviews from other platforms.

The methods of reputation management

When you complete the groundwork for your fitness reputation management endeavor, you’ll quickly learn that it takes some significant effort to do it the right way. There are two paths that you can take to manage your online reputation:

1. Manual management

Managing your reputation manually is certainly feasible, but it will cost you a lot of time.

For instance, you can use a spreadsheet to list the different review platforms. This spreadsheet is like a database in which you can keep all the information about your reputation management.

You can also manually look through review sites to keep the negative reviews in check, and you can also reach out to customers directly and ask them to leave a review.

The first problem you might encounter is the slow pace of generating new reviews. You might be puzzled by this if you tried to make review generation a priority. You might have even generated a review link that leads customers straight to Google reviews, and you still haven’t noticed any significant changes.

The problem is that customers are not very motivated to leave positive reviews, which is a stark contrast to unhappy customers who won’t spare any time in giving you a mouthful.

There are also too many review platforms to keep track of. This can be a major pain point as customers expect you to respond to their reviews as quickly as possible. If you fail to do so, you’re missing out on an opportunity to build and start an engaging relationship with the customer. 

Bigger fitness chains might not have a problem managing their reputation using a mish-mash of different tools because they have the financial means and the appropriate human resources. For small businesses, on the other hand, it gets a lot more challenging.

2. Automated reputation management

Luckily, with the newest software, you can automate most steps of fitness reputation management and avoid all the issues we outlined above. The best thing is that you will save a significant amount of time and money in the process (you won’t have to hire a person to handle reputation management).

With ReviewArm, you can significantly simplify capturing and managing reviews. Since you usually need to nudge happy customers in the right direction if you want them to leave feedback for your business, our platform allows you to strike while the iron is hot. 

With ReviewArm, you generate reviews automatically. Every time a customer completes the sale or signs up for your service, our platform automatically sends out a review request. This is the best time to nudge your customer because their satisfaction is at a high point). However, you also have the option of sending out review requests in bulk or even sending out a single review request. 

You can also manage reviews with a new efficiency - all the options are easily accessible within a single intuitive dashboard, making it easy to monitor all the major review platforms. Thus, you can finally make sure that you’re on top of all the discourse around your business, and you can respond to what happens as soon as it happens.

As a huge plus, you get a plethora of comprehensive analytic reporting features perfect for seeing the results of your fitness reputation management in real time.

Progressive overload of your reputation

All things considered, the price of admission for management reputation software is very low for the comprehensive list of features you can get. We tailored our pricing model to help small and mid-size fitness businesses thrive and progressive overload their online reputation to see actual growth. 

Most people get into fitness to increase their confidence. A proper fitness reputation management system can increase their confidence in your brand and what you’ve got to offer.

If you want your fitness business to become one of the most reputable businesses in your area, manage your reputation the right way with ReviewArm, and set a new personal record for your fitness business.

Fill out  our contact form, and we’ll help you control the discourse around your business!