One of the most powerful marketing tools that you have at your disposal are great success stories or testimonials from your clients. And on top of that they’re one of the easiest assets to create.
So why don’t more fitness pros and business owners use testimonials in their marketing?
Well, the first issue is that sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to ask clients, so that you capture feedback that is most helpful, yet authentic. You can’t get a lot from a “everything is great” comment. You want a story that resonates with your audience, helps build confidence in your brand, and ultimately brings you some new clients.
We provide you and easy-to-use formula for testimonials in our article, How To Create Killer Fitness Testimonials.
Read Article: How to Create Fitness Testimonials
Why Testimonials Matter
Before you learn 5 ways that you can leverage your amazing client success stories, I want to talk about why they are so powerful. You see, if you create testimonials using the simple formula we’ve provided for you then your clients will be telling a story, more importantly they are telling THEIR own story.
Humans naturally learn and are motivated by stories. It makes it easy to connect with someone or something and it allows us to see that others have overcome some of the same challenges that we are facing.
Humans naturally learn and are motivated by stories.
Great testimonials give people hope that they can change. Often times it’s what will push them over the edge from casually looking for a solution to making the decision that what you are offering is THE SOLUTION to their biggest problem.
This is why you want to leverage testimonials in your marketing and sales processes. It’s a powerful way to inspire action.
How to Use Testimonials
Ok, so let’s fast forward a bit. Now you have at least a few great testimonials for your business. They resonate with your audience. They paint a picture of what challenges youhelped them solve. So the next question is how to use testimonials most effectively?
Here are 5 tactics for how to use testimonials in your fitness business.
Tactic #1: Create a Client Wall of Fame
The easiest place to leverage your client success stories is a wall of fame. Somewhere in your facility, (ideally close to where you would hold a sales consultation or success session) you can create a wall or specific area where you highlight your client success stories.
If you do a little work up front and create a nice template for laying out your success stories and testimonials, you can easily hand this task off to an administrative assistant once you get the process started.
Don’t worry about including all the details of a story in your wall of fame. Most people will simply walk by and scan it anyhow, so a better approach is using lots of pictures (before/after works best) and some key phrases or highlights in larger font than the rest of the story.
This works great when a potential new client comes into visit you and it can be a great motivator when you are going into a sales consultation to close the deal.
Not to mention your clients that are on the wall of fame will appreciate the recognition!
Tactic #2: Create A Success Book
Another great marketing tool that is greatly under-utilized is a Success Book. This is something that you probably only update 1-2 times per year with 15-20 of your top success stories and current client highlights.
Your Success Book can be a much more in depth look at what your top clients are doing to have success and their biggest tips and pieces of advice for potential new clients.
To get this done you’ll most likely need to hire someone to layout the stories, format the pictures and pages into something that looks nice and then have it printed.
It’s an investment, but it will be well worth it!
There are plenty of resources where you can outsource the creation of this type of resource. Here are a few of our favorites: Fiver, Upwork, & Thumbtack
It would also be helpful to add in some team member highlights and a bit of a story about you and your business.
Once you create this book, you can do a lot with it:
- Save it as a PDF and send out to your leads that come in through a funnel online
- Give out as a print book to all your new clients or potential new clients you meet
- Share it with your strategic partners and joint ventures to use in their waiting areas or to give out to their customers
It will definitely make you stand out from the rest of the fitness businesses that don’t do anything close to this quality of marketing.
Tactic #3: Use videos on your website
There’s honestly nothing revolutionary about placing testimonial videos on your website. It’s common practice but you need to make sure that you include them in places that are easy for people to reference.
The biggest mistake you can make is hiding all your testimonials, especially the videos, on a testimonials page.
Here’s a quick checklist for you to follow when using testimonials on your site:
- Create a montage or mix up to use on the home page
- Add in 2-3 video testimonials on your service offering pages that directly tie into what you do
- Use them in your front end offer pages or sales sequences
- Strategically place them at the end of blog posts if you write frequently
- Add in a Call To Action at the end of each video telling the viewer what to do next (sign up for your FEO most likely)
That should take your marketing to the next level and it will only require a few simple steps to get done if you already have testimonials.
Here’s a quick look at how we use some of our video testimonials: https://frnation.com/what-our-customers-are-saying. We currently have this as the featured video on our homepage.
We also have written testimonials too. (Check them out at frnation.com/successstories/)
I also can tell you that our highest converting sales pages all have testimonials on them. It’s a sure-fire way to help reiterate the value of what you are offering, without YOU being the one to say it.
Tactic #4: Your Marketing Materials
This is a gimme but one of the things that we all tend to forget about! Each and every piece of marketing material you send out should have [at least] one testimonial in it.
Every piece of marketing material should have a before & after pic or a snippet of a testimonial in it.
If you have a post card or flier promoting your new challenge make sure to include a success story.
If you are sending out an email with a blog post on top ways to achieve a result then make sure you include a testimonial or success story in the email or on the post.
Running a joint venture promo? Make sure you tie in a testimonial.
By simply following this rule you’ll enhance your marketing impact.
Tactic #5: Add Them To Your Funnels
Creating an evergreen marketing funnel that nurtures your leads once they’ve opted in or given you permission to marketing to them is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business.
It automates a lot of the selling process and will increase your conversion rates substantially. It’s why we’ve created an entire course on it build around online advertising.
Once someone opts in you need to add in 2-5 pieces of content that is valuable to them usually in the form of blog posts or videos. These needs to solve a problem for your ideal client and create some value for them so they continue to pay attention.
Immediately after that sequence you should leverage another 3-5 of your top success stories.
This can softly sell your FEO for you and it will start to increase the awareness for the lead that you have a solution that will work for them.
It’s a way to get your clients to influence your leads for you!
BONUS! Create An Ambassador Program
This is something that’s not often talked about but can be a game changer if you implement it the right way. In fact, it’s one of the biggest priorities for us to finalize this coming quarter for our own marketing and sales funnels.
When you find your superstar clients that love telling people about your business and how you’ve helped them… recruit them to be ambassadors for your business. Not every great client will be willing to do this for you and not everyone will do it at the same level.
Utilize your Ambassadors by asking them to be a Success Partner for new clients during their FEO where they can help them find success in the program and increase the chances of them staying on board.
They can also talk to prospects that are on the fence via email or phone calls. It won’t happen often and you can filter the leads you send them but a quick conversation with your superstar clients can push someone over the edge and speed up the process of them joining.
Or you can simply have a group of people that help you recognize opportunities in the community where you can promote your business, kind of like a board of advisors for public relations, and if needed they can help you at these events.
You may only have 1-2 of these types of clients in your business, but if you can find them and find ways to reward and recognize them, you’ll have an extended sales force that is willing to share their story with the world.
Take Action!
You don’t need to implement all of these tactics in your business immediately to have success. But, you do need to take action if you want to see results, so here’s your action plan.
Step 1: If you’re not already getting great testimonials start by finding 5 clients that are willing to share their story and use this formula as a template.
Step 2: Pick the easiest and most simple of the 5 tactics to start using right now. What can you get rolling this week? What will have the biggest impact? Start there
Step 3: Implement, track your results and then add another tactic in the next month.
Over the course of a few months you can accomplish all of these tactics and have a huge pool of success stories to enhance your marketing.
Ready to start getting better testimonials?
Download our FREE cheat sheet for some pointers for creating killer fitness testimonials and start leveraging them to grow your business.
