The Fit to Grit Cast

How Fitness Studios Use Communication to Build Brand Trust

• Zachary Colman

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The fitness industry is rapidly evolving beyond physical training into spaces where people seek community, mental well-being, and genuine human connection. At the heart of this transformation lies the crucial element that can make or break your fitness business: authentic client communication.

This eye-opening episode dives deep into why 84% of consumers prefer being treated as people rather than numbers, and how this fundamental human desire directly impacts your studio's retention and referral rates. As fitness spaces increasingly become sanctuaries for mental wellbeing and community building, your ability to connect authentically with clients has never been more valuable. While AI and automation reshape aspects of the fitness business, the irreplaceable human touch remains your competitive advantage.

Discover a practical framework for mastering client conversations that feels natural rather than scripted. Learn how your personal values should guide your communication style across all channels—whether verbal interactions, email campaigns, or visual branding elements. Through real-world examples and personal insights, we explore how consistent practice, tracking engagement metrics, and making incremental improvements can transform your client relationships from transactional to transformational. Whether you're a solo trainer, studio owner, or operations director, these strategies will help you build a communication approach that authentically represents your unique value while creating the meaningful connections that keep clients coming back. Ready to elevate your client communication from good to extraordinary? This episode provides the roadmap you need to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

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Speaker 0:

You know you've made it once you can dress how you want to dress. You shouldn't have to dress for somebody else. You shouldn't have to communicate for somebody else. You should be able to be yourself.

Speaker 0:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Fit to Grit cast, where we talk to leadership, operational directors and anyone looking to really just utilize their everyday outdoor activities gym sessions as their visionary time. I'm your host, zach Coleman, and today I want to talk a lot about client communication, mastering client communication and unlocking better relationships within your organization, your studio or even your personal brand, really depending on what you're really going after with your brand. There's a study out there. Did you know that 84% of customers and consumers prefer to be treated as a person and not a number? Now, you probably already have heard this stat. You probably see a lot of larger companies or have your own frustrations when you deal with someone who sends you abroad or sends you to one line you've been put on hold, sends you to another, and as you get a lot bigger and your organization grows, there's definitely going to be this type of environment that you're going to have to deal with on a normal basis, but the struggles aren't as deep, as I'd say they would be if you were a smaller studio or an individual looking to make it to the next level of your studio's growth. Here's the thing. Like I said, 84% of consumers believe that they'd rather be dealt with a human. You know, especially in the studio realm right now, you have a big emphasis on AI. How is AI going to affect client negotiations, client contracts, retention and that's just it. It's probably going to direct it a lot. You know, studios are becoming that next place for people to have their mental well-being, their mental space. It's where they're going to find their community, the people that they want to work with. This isn't just coming from other members, but this is coming from trainers and people within the organization.

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So today, let's kind of nail down the three topics I really want to discuss today. You know why being authentic if you'd be a trainer, a leader, an ops director, if you're dealing with a team or if you're dealing with members itself how really being personalized and having a personalized communication, whatever that communication may be, is actually going to build better retention and actually build better referrals. I want to kind of go through a framework with you on how you can start to master client conversations and interactions with them to have more effectiveness on helping them achieve their results or achieve whatever solution that you're trying to provide for them. And, lastly, practical tips. I want to dive into your studio's client engagement strategy.

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We're not going to go very, very deep into this. Some of you may be watching on the podcast, some of you may be watching in a video and it's going to be hard to articulate a lot of this if you're not seeing the video. So I'm going to try to do it mostly in words so that you guys can have a good understanding of how you can take action with this, especially if you're watching from the podcast side of things. And so, as we dive in a little bit, a little bit about me and my authenticity, you know, continuing to work on reps, continuing to work on my communication skills I think, no matter what those communications are a big value of mine, a big value for our team, and communication seems to be the lifeblood of what makes an organization move forward.

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I have a big pet peeve of mine is having my team really understand and articulate communication, not acting like children and unfortunately, if you're working with clients, it's going to be. You know, you can't really dictate their values, what they want, what they want to perceive. So you're going to have to kind of get a grasp of you know how can I really dive in and start becoming more authentic without naturally knowing what to do? So to dive in a little bit here if you struggle with communication and that's your first step, learning how to understand your communication style the only thing I can really really dive into here is how are you articulating your communication? You may be a trainer and articulate it in the way you do exercises. You may be a trainer also looking to bring in members or talk to the members on how you can build out a structured, a structured regiment for them. Or maybe you're just looking to put them in on an offer and they walk in the door and you're trying to understand their pain points. And so first you need to kind of understand your communication style, understand who you are, the types of person you are, because first thing I'll say is really being yourself, I think is first and foremost going to be your bread and butter, and it's hard for us all to be authentic. And so the way I've really started to learn my communication style is really understanding funny enough the things I value.

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Going back, we've talked about values before, but values really dictate behavior. They dictate behaviors on the types of people you're going to talk to, the types of conversations you're going to have, the types of organizations you're going to work for, the team you're going to build, all that stuff. So behavior is really going to dictate from those values. And so really understanding the types of values that you have and then, funny enough, something that I would say that really affects communication is diving in and understanding from those values, the things that bring you energy, what are the things that help you grow as a person and as a professional. I understand you're going to have certain organizations talk about certain things, but I'll say right off the bat that effective communication is going to start with having not just a deep understanding of your skill set but how to articulate that to your audience, and so you really want to drive that personalized type of communication. You really want to drive that personalized type of communication. And so, yes, having emails and having text messages that somewhat have a basic template style to them is great, and putting their name on there, that's very basic. Millions of people are going to get emails from 80 different other studios or competitors that are going to be like oh thanks, happy birthday, joe. So make sure you really work on that articulation and understanding that those emails and that type of communication also need to match your style and your values, and so making sure that you're writing them in that way. If you're a large organization and you're the owner, you're the face of the company and you have trainers, you know you still want to match that same, that same style amongst everything that you do. So getting your team to articulate that communication, which is a lot easier if you're hiring off of those behaviors and those values, right.

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So I would say, personalizing communication. That's just just such a just such a huge point I want you to to really understand in that communication. Now, personalizing your communication doesn't just have to be written. Remember that we talked about verbal. You also have verbal communication. You have visual communication. How are you visually appealing? If it be the way you dress, if it be the way you build your brand out for the organization, it be about the messaging internally, your hiring process. So just kind of make sure that you think about how you can authentically communicate yourself through different forms.

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In short, you can look at some of the big people out there right now that you may look at, you have like Alex Ramosi and people like that. How are they communicating authentically? Alex Ramosi, for instance, he likes to wear his flannels, he likes to wear his tank top and it's the whole premise of you know, you've made it. Once you can dress how you want to dress, you shouldn't have to dress for somebody else. You shouldn't have to communicate for somebody else. You should be able to be yourself and align and build that communication. So let's talk about how you can kind of approve and framework that you can start doing to master client conversations and interactions.

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Well, you're gonna have frameworks for different things, but I would say, first and foremost, number one is reps, sit down and build out solid set of communication that you wanna practice. If it be a sales script, if it be the emails that you wanna write, if it be your positioning that you wanna to practice, if it be a sales script, if it be the emails that you want to write, if it be your positioning that you want to position yourself, take those and just build reps with them. Build reps, continue to speak it, because you want to eventually live by those, by that messaging. So it's going to be a lot easier if you write it down, naturally, and then you build off that. So write it down and then build reps off of it. If it be visual communications, for instance, is building a brand. You only really have to do that once and then build consistency off of that. But that's a story for another day. And so I think that's a very easy framework that you can start setting in in your week, build out what the type of communication that you want to perceive and then start repping it so you can start articulating that message on a much easier and deeper level, and then you just take that one step further.

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Step three of that framework is just doing the 1% better. Right, every week, take that ability to take that rep material, or every month, depending on what the goals are and then just try to make it 1% better. What are you seeing? How are you talking to these people? Are you losing clients due to bad behaviors? You know like what kind of behaviors and what kind of situations or pain points are you seeing. And then utilize that and build 1% better, go back to the frameworks, rewrite it, re-rep it and continue to do that over and over again, and unfortunately, there's no magic bullet. That's gonna be how you're going to get better at your communication is by doing that.

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I think a golden gem in there, too, is going back and looking at your values, right? So let's get into some practical tips for elevating your studio's client engagement. How do you really build a strategy around client engagement? There's a lot of AI tools out there, but I would say, first and foremost, I really want you to focus on what types of engagement can you track? So you're going to be looking at, for instance, email marketing. If you're looking at email marketing, is it post-sale or is it pre-sale? So that's the way you can do that. Once you get an email and a phone number, you can set up campaigns and you can start tracking those. How do you track those Open rates, engagement, click-throughs Are they clicking, are they setting up calls? And start tracking those metrics so that you can start seeing that from an internal post-sale, like if you're doing an up up sale or check with engagement on certain types of threads you're doing, for instance, let's say you track for a whole year.

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You send out, you know emails on post engagement. You talk about email in your emails birthdays and hey, come in for this special event, or having a special monthly get together with studio, with group members, to do this like, create those things. But that's the first thing you're going to have to do is you're just going to have to create them and then you track. You can wait six months, you can wait a year. See how your engagement level shifts year over year or month over month if you, if you're more of a smaller studio and you only have like 30 members, right. So those are the kinds of things that you can use to try to start seeing engagement. You take that engagement, you see what's working and what's not more people resonate with, and then you start creating similar strategies around those strategies. So, for instance, if you felt like webinars and events do very well for you and those engagements are starting off great, then hone that in and do the 1% better and continue to work on that and cut out the fluff that's not working anymore, so that you can keep that authentic communication and not be spraying the wall with a million things, and start focusing on that perspective. If it's pre-sale and it's, for instance, sales engagement level, right.

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Let's talk about engagement level from a different perspective. You're doing challenges, for instance, facebook ads. What's your engagement level on that? Really, sit down and focus on all right, well, half the people aren't picking up the phone, they're not calling us, okay. Well, what about other channels? What about other ways? What about walk-ins? What about coming through different types of advertisement? That's just different right, like, let's say, google search, for instance, where their intent is they're already looking. What about phone calls? How is the engagement level with that? How are all those engaging differently? And then you can kind of either weed out the ones that aren't working or you can take one and say, hey, how do we improve on this to have better results? Maybe it's okay we're going to engage over rough numbers over the phone, but we want you to come in and we want to engage with you personally and go through deeper options with our offers so that we can kind of help build off of that. So maybe a sales script and you can communicate in that way build that out and continue to build it more around you and what you're trying to achieve with getting better sales. Take that script and don't utilize it word for word, but just learn from it enough that you can start to grow from it, try to improve the process.

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A story of mine, you know about three weeks ago I went to the Health and Fitness Association conference, went there to meet potential partners. We went there to just build relationships right in the industry as we continue to evolve and do our thing. And my wife came with me and we started getting invited to these parties and me and my communication, you know style is I've been really big into saying, hey, I am going to go to these events and meet people and I want to talk business. We all flew from different parts of the country and want to talk business and my wife had to sit down with me and she had to be like, hey, like this is all about just getting to know people, getting an understanding of who they are, and so it's all about being personal and authentic with yourself. I talked to a lot of them about family and now you know we have some deals in the works and so that's the kind of stuff that you can kind of do from a practical tips association. So to learn and to master your communication style and being authentic is all about building meaningful relationships, not transactional, and you wanna foster that as you start to continue to build and continue to grow your fitness community.

Speaker 0:

Now, if you wanna hear more, I'm your host, zach Coleman. Stay tuned for more episodes of the Fit to Great cast. And if you want to subscribe to the 50 Great Cast, why don't you go down in the comments below? You can get to it. Go to our YouTube channel if you want to watch the videos for it or if you'd like to. You know, talk to me a little bit further about some of our services. Go ahead and link below in the comments as well. But again, I'm your host, zach Coleman. 50 Great Cast. We'll talk to you next time.

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