Are You Winning the Google Reviews Race? with Ben Pickard

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, I am back with fellow Business for Unicorns coach Ben Pickard. And we are talking about the Supreme importance of Google reviews. So in this podcast, we talk about why Google reviews are so important in growing your gym. We talk about our proven strategies for making sure that you are consistently getting Google reviews and are a standout amongst all the gyms in your area, because we know how critical they are when people are choosing which gym to go to.

So if you want to up your game, when it comes to Google reviews and stand out. out from the crowd in your market. This is a great episode for you. Keep on listening.

Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice. Expert insights and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym, [00:01:00] get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the business unicorns podcast. Before we jump into today’s conversation, I just want to let you know that our next round of our gym growth blast off is now on. Open. And so if you don’t know what the gym growth blast off is, it’s basically you working with Mark Fisher personally for 12 weeks to grow your monthly recurring revenue.

We’ll give you everything you need to make that happen and nothing you don’t. It’s a very focused program on growing your monthly revenue. The program starts September 23rd and there are only a handful of spots left. I think when I last checked, there were only maybe 10, 12 spots left. And so we. This is not unlimited capacity.

So if you’d like to know more, click the link below in our show notes or DM us on Instagram, and we’ll give you everything you need to know for how to join our gym growth blast off again, starting September 23rd. Ben is with me today. What’s up, my friend. How the hell are you? I am [00:02:00] doing awesome. Thank you.

I just got back from my first ever. River whitewater canoe trip a few days ago. I know you were telling about it before we started recording. It seems pretty badass How is this different than like regular canoeing? So for the Ontario listeners, this will make a lot of sense But for everyone else, it may not.

Ontario has like a trillion lakes. Not a trillion I think it’s like two hundred two hundred fifty thousand or something like that. So normally when we go camping You can do normal car camping where you park and have all your shit. And that’s great. But we do back country camping where you put all your shit in a canoe and then you paddle it to the end of the Lake.

And then you do a portage where you have to carry all your shit, including your canoe to the next Lake. And then you do that until you get to whatever Lake you want. Yep. And that’s what we normally do. And it’s awesome. But this was a river. So it was a river in Northern Ontario called the Spanish river.

And you start at the North part of the river and it flows South and you end 50 kilometers at the bottom of it. And there’s rapids and there’s all sorts of river stuff that wouldn’t be just like hopping or River riding. That sounds fun. It sounds a little [00:03:00] more like adrenaline filled of, of having to like navigate a fast flowing river.

Yeah. I will say it’s not, if you’re picturing like people in kayaks, jumping off waterfalls, like that wasn’t the rapids in the video, let’s just say this. The rapids in the videos we took don’t look that impressive. You’re going through them in a canoe. It’s, it’s pretty nerve wracking because if you.

Spill, you lose all your shit and it flows down the river. Yeah. Good for you. That sounds super fun. I had a fun weekend. It was full, but way less adventurous. I was telling you beforehand, my, my husband and I hosted a fundraiser at our house, so there’s a slow, some of you as listeners might know, I spend most of my time living in a house about 90 minutes North of New York city in the woods.

And up here, there’s a really great organization that we’re part of that does like basically nature preservation in the area, there’s a lot of land in upstate New York that gets bought. Privately. And so it means that there’s less public land for people to enjoy. So this organization, it’s called the Oblong Trail Association.

Quick shout out to my OTA friends, the Oblong Trail Association, they basically make [00:04:00] hiking, biking, walking horse trails available to the public through public and private land. And so anyway, we had a fun fundraiser at our house to raise money for this charity, and it was super fun. There was a big tent in my front yard, a band on my front stoop, and it was a really fun weekend.

That’s really cool. I didn’t realize when we were talking before that like a lot of the land gets bought privately. So if there wasn’t an organization like this, there could be this wonderful trail that just ends because somebody bought the baker’s. Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people up here. I don’t have a lot of space, but compared to my neighbors, I have like basically no land and I still have like seven and a half acres of land.

And that’s like nothing compared to most people up here where there’s giant farms and people who own hundreds of acres. And so I’m making sure that there’s still public access to a lot of these lands is really important. And so anyway, it feels good to connect with the community and give back in a small way.

And so that was really fun. Let’s talk about today’s topic of this podcast, which I’ve already introduced, which is all about. Getting client reviews, gym owners know this in our bones that over the [00:05:00] last five, 10 years, Google reviews have been somewhat of like the lifeblood of every gym in most markets, you are living or dying by how your Google reviews compared to your competition.

And so one of, I think a really important key metric to growing your business is how well you’re growing specifically your Google reviews. And in other markets and places, there’s other types of reviews that might matter a little bit as well, but really for most of us in the U S and frankly, most countries we’re talking to people are searching for you on Google.

And they’re comparing you to all of your competition based on your Google review score. And so I think this, that’s the lay of the land these days is it makes it important. And so let’s talk a little bit about the way we teach people to get Google reviews. Ben, you want to kick us off and share just our broad thinking about how to get Google reviews on a consistent basis.

Yeah. A hundred percent. So there’s basically two streams. The first stream is you’re evergreen. Google review processes, which are how do you get Google [00:06:00] reviews on a regular basis? Just from having your members love you and delivering amazing service, getting them great results. So stream one is happening as a trickle all the time.

Stream two is doing. Targeted time sensitive contests for Google reviews where you wouldn’t run these like every month? Probably. I guess you could try, but that doesn’t seem like a great idea. Sure. But you probably run this more like a couple times a year, maybe once a quarter, and you wanna increase your Google reviews by a lot in that period of time.

So all the time promotion. Yeah. Let’s start with the first one. Let’s start with kind of the on on the regular basis. What are all the kind of points in a client journey where we think about getting a Google review? Yeah, we’ve got a ton of these in the playbook for Unicorn Society members, but there’s a lot more points than you might expect.

Point of sale, conversion conversations from a member, an LBO to a membership, if you do any feedback surveys when someone writes you a 9 following that promoter score, you’d follow up with asking for a reviewer. Um, referral if they haven’t done one or the other [00:07:00] doing during a member nurtured emails, you should definitely be asking for Google reviews in training sessions.

When members hit a really important milestone, that person came in because they want to, I don’t know, go. We have a client who got a knee replacement and is now hiking in the Arctic circle. Who’s like a retired inner sixties lady comes back from that trip. Can we get a review? You can use it in PSs and marketing emails.

You can have dedicated like review campaigns on email, social media, or Facebook groups. And one that is often forgotten, but it’s during an exit interview. We’re usually, it’s usually sad when a member leaves, particularly one who’s doing so awesome. And it might be for reasons outside of our control, like moving away.

But if they love us and it’s just a logistical thing that they’re not going to drive across the country to go to your gym. Ask them to write a review as a thank you for time. That last one’s so critical because there’s so many folks who leave our gyms on very positive terms. They’re leaving because they got a new job, or they’re moving far away, or they’re moving around a new house.

And so, those are great moments to ask people for a [00:08:00] review, and they feel bad about leaving. So they want to do you a favor, but I think that’s a really great list, Ben, I think for listeners go back and listen to that list again, write it down because really you want to find multiple places along your client’s journey from the first moment that they sign up.

The first moment they walk in your door to moments where they’re recommitting to moments when they’re hitting personal records or having lots of success to moments where they’re just having lots of fun and leverage those moments as moments to really ask for. A Google review. And so maybe Ben, you want to go into that a little bit.

I know we break this down more in our playbook, but what’s the, what’s the kind of process for getting people on the team to make these asks for a Google review, because it can be awkward for people to like be having a conversation about someone’s new PR and doing their first pull up and then say. Want to leave me a Google review, but it really is the best moment.

If you do it well, and it’s well rehearsed and it feels authentic, it can really be some of the best moments to ask. So can you just maybe talk through a little bit about how we think about that? Yeah. [00:09:00] So this is where it’s a good and a challenge at the same time. So the good of this is for getting more Google reviews, you don’t often need to like, you’re not going to ever SOP for how to get Google reviews.

And it’s just going to have the list of all these things. It’s meant to be woven into existing things you have. So to use the example that you gave of leading your coaches to be able to do that, the best way to do this with them is really make sure you have an SOP and train them on it. And we’ve talked about this on lots of podcasts.

So check out any of those for how to go. So do SOPs and train your team, but then it’s really role playing it with them on a regular basis. Your team is given, this is going to be one of those like one off things that aren’t going to happen that frequently. That they’re probably going to forget unless it’s top of mind for them and you as the leader or the owner or whatever your role is listening to this fitness business podcast, it’s your job to keep it top of mind for them.

So you need to make sure this is on your right radar to train your team. So it’s top of mind for them and also make sure they’re doing it in a way that isn’t like a good pull up kind of a review. Yeah. Or they’re like checking the box on their head. Totally. [00:10:00] Yeah. I think those are great points. I think getting clear about what process are your, is your team already involved in where you’re going to weave this in and part as part of the process, right?

Are they closing sales? And then how, when they’re closing sales, are they asking for Google reviews? Are they having renewal or conversion conversations of any kind? Then how are you going to weave that into that existing process? And then to the most important thing I want to highlight is they have to practice.

This is like any other skill, right? That no one ever. Got great at doing kettlebell swings by reading books about kettlebell swings. You have to do them. You have to actually do the thing. So if you want people to get good at having a genuine, authentic ask for a Google review, make it easy for them, practice it in your team meetings, make it a really.

Comfortable conversation to have. And also I think sometimes having a team have really access to easy tools to do it right. Having a little printed QR code that takes people right to Google to give a review and having that available on the floor on their clipboards or on the apps that they’re using or right at the front desk, they make those little kiosks, what are they called?

Those little tap. [00:11:00] I’ve seen those recently. You type your phone on it and it pops up. All these things just grease the wheels to make it easier and easier for you and your team to get Google reviews. But the first stream we want to highlight here for you is that getting Google reviews has to be woven into your existing processes and it should be happening throughout the client experience.

So you have, you. Capture every moment, every possible opportunity you, you have for asking for reviews. That’s the first stream. Let’s talk about the second stream, Ben, because you’re actually in the midst of doing this right now at your own gym. The second stream is really all about a dedicated Google review kind of campaign.

So maybe Ben just walk through a high level. What’s this kind of tend to look like? Yeah. So this is going to look honestly like any promotion that you run at your gym. Um, You want to have, there’s not really a scarcity element with Google reviews. Cause I guess you could have an infinite number, but that’d be a good problem to have, but there’s an urgency component.

So let’s focus on the urgency piece and there’s a something that’s in it for them. So like most promotions, they’re going to run from start date to end date. And during that promotion, there’s be some sort of [00:12:00] value that the person buying it or doing the thing gets to participate in. This is your promotion on the planet.

Do a raffle, do it, whatever. So you’re going to have a start date and an end date, and it’s going to be some version of getting more Google reviews or updating them or making them better so that the Google algorithm will like your gym more than the competing gyms in your area. So a couple examples of, and I’ll get to the one that I do, but a couple of examples would be like, if you leave a review in this month, you get entered into a raffle to win an iPad.

If you do a review in the next 10 days, you get X gift card to win. A local business, usually someone I’d recommend that you have some sort of joint venture with, because then it’s a, you were scratching my back, I’ll scratch yours or to win like a free month or buddy passes or something like that. Now the, so relatively straightforward, you put in your email marketing, you put it on your social media or in your Facebook group for members, you make sure trainers are asking about it and like beginning of or end of session announcements, however you run that in your gym.

But your members should be being reminded of it quite frequently. It’s [00:13:00] not one email that goes up or one poster that goes up the front door. It’s this is what you are pushing for this period of time with your members. Yeah. And I’ll also say just, I think you rattled them off in some of those examples, but this isn’t an unlimited open ended thing that should last many months.

It should be maybe a week or two at most a month. If you’re giving away something very generous, like you’re doing a big raffle of a, like Ben said, an iPad or a bike or something, but this should be what we’re really pushing is just for this month. Give us a Google review or a second Google review. If you’ve already given us one, I think people can give multiple.

And I think that’s a really good, good idea. A good way to think about this is it’s a shortened time period where you there’s some extra benefit to giving us one right now Sorry, keep on going man. Tell us about the one that you’re doing Yeah, so I have to give credit where credit is due I got this from halen who some of you have heard him on the spin off podcast a couple times Just an absolute rock star and friend in unicorn society Um and me and him have very similar avatars So this might not work for all markets, but you can probably adapt it for yours He did something where if you do a Google review during [00:14:00] X weeks of the year, you win a really fancy bottle of wine and it worked so well for him.

So we started doing this. We’re in the middle of doing it right now. Ours goes till September 2nd. So Alicia and I, it’s hilarious because neither of us know anything about wines. We actually asked one of our clients, what’s a good wine? And we’re just, and I’m just like, I don’t know, buy one that’s a hundred dollars.

That’s probably something that people won’t buy for themselves as a regular Friday night dinner. And if you either, you can do a review, you get one entry. But we didn’t want to exclude all the people who have written reviews for us before. So if you update a review or update it and add a picture, apparently the pictures are more useful for the algorithm now.

Each of those can be a point. So I guess theoretically you could write a review at the beginning and then update it and add a picture and get three entries. We’re not policing this, but we’ve got, I think as of today, we’re up 10 or 11 reviews and we only started the beginning of last week. And I want to be clear, friends, I don’t have 20, 000 people at my gym.

Like, We had 81 Google reviews before and now we’re at 91 or 92. You can look and [00:15:00] people love it. And we’re just sending, we sent an intro email explaining how the contest works. Cause again, we didn’t want the other people to feel left out. We’ve been on a positive become a negative for people who already did this when there wasn’t an incentive.

And then we put it as a PS or a reminder at the beginning of the second email last week. They got another, then we’ll get two more emails about it this week. So we’re still sprinkling in the content, but we’re reminding people a lot. Yeah. The bottle of wine is sitting on the front desk with a colorful sign that says, want to win this bottle of wine?

Do a Google review. Love it. QR code kind of thing. I pay, even if we only get those 10 reviews, we pay 10 bucks a Google review. I would pay that all day. 100%. I love that. I think that’s so smart to play around with. I say all the time on this podcast and to our Merck Center members, like when you’re thinking about marketing and creating different offers and promotions, different bait catches different fish.

And if you have a client avatar who is really into wine, great. Use that as bait once in a while, but there’s also probably other people at the gym who don’t [00:16:00] drink at all. So the next bait you use when you do something similar probably shouldn’t be wine again. Right? Pick something else. But I think I love the idea that you y’all are getting creative and having just different perspectives.

Different things for NMFF at one point, we did a giveaway for, it wasn’t Google reviews, it was referrals, but it seems it works very much the same way we gave away like a trip to Mexico, which, you know, only costs us a couple thousand dollars, but, you know, over the course of that month, we got. Probably dozens of referrals.

We only need one or two people to stay and to get our lifetime value and, and what it paid for itself. And so I think you don’t want to, you don’t want to, let’s sort of undercut people’s interest in like winning something fun. And that’s a really good point. Cause I think often we’re biased towards giving away stuff that our gym offers.

Yeah. And don’t get me wrong. I would like to believe that all of my clients at our gym love our gym to death and everything about it. But I’m also aware that a lot of them come to the gym so that they Have the absence of the problem that they were wanting to solve in the beginning. [00:17:00] Not all of them identify as fitness people are going to bend over backwards.

You get a free bag of protein or a sweater or a shaker cup or something that might work with a younger demographic that it’s a little more raw, but it’s really tailoring it to what does your avatar want? And there is a small piece of me that’s like, I don’t know if I’m going to be encouraging people at my gym to drink more wine, like generally they should probably cut back.

Sure. And at the same time, it’s like, if we want to get the thing done, we should Like it’s the platinum real treat people or they want to be treated. Yeah, 100%. I love that. I think it’s such a great example. All right, then maybe let’s close out with this. So for any listener who has yet to do really any of these things when it comes to Google reviews, where does someone start?

What is the, what’s the first kind of system you would encourage people to put in place of all the things we talked about today? Oh, that’s a good question. Can I have to pick just one? You can pick two. You pick one or maybe I’ll pick one. We can give more than one. The top two that come to mind for me, if you like literally have no systems whatsoever, so ever for this is first included in your member nurture emails.

Yes, you’re [00:18:00] not going to get 100 percent conversion rate, meaning everyone who reads it does a Google review, but it’s also automatic. And even if that gets you a handful of reviews a year, It’s something that you only had to do once. So I think it’s a really good starting point. If nothing else, it’s a low lift.

The second one I would say would be really nailing it at the point of sale conversations. Reason for that. I think it’s probably more powerful for your staff to be asking on the floor on a regular basis because you have more sessions that happen in a week and more attendances than you do sales meetings usually.

But it’s also one that you can control. You can get good with the script. You can get your reps in. And then when you do integrate the other systems, you’ll naturally just have it. The verbiage that’s appropriate for it, for your avatar. And you’ll have proof, like proof of concept, because my suspicion is most people aren’t asking for Google reviews because they’re a little bit nervous.

And that’s fair. And by getting your reps in, it’s going to make you a lot less nervous and work out those kinks before you roll out a semi broken system to your team. Yeah. That might’ve been a longer answer than you’re looking for. No, I think that’s great. I think that was great. I was going to [00:19:00] say, I say, if there’s one thing I’d encourage people to do first, those are both fantastic.

I also say, just have one team meeting where you talk about this. I’d have one team meeting where you just talk about the importance of Google reviews and practice making an ask, right? And maybe give your team something to incentivize folks if you’ve never done that before. And even if you’re incentivizing your team to make the ask, say for every ask you make this week, for every Google review that you get from one of your clients this week, I’ll give you as a team member or something.

That’s also a good way to start. Just get them thinking about this topic because it’s just not on their radar. They’re just as if they’re not the gym owner, it’s unlikely they’re thinking about the How, how attractive your Google reviews are, but I think your two are also fantastic Ben. So I think that there’s easy places to start here listeners, but you got to start, this is not an optional thing anymore for every day that you have competitors in your area who have more and better Google reviews, you’re losing customers.

That’s just the facts these days. And so don’t let customers be running by you just for the simple fact that someone else is getting more Google reviews. So [00:20:00] get on top of it. Get on top of it. Awesome. Thanks for the great chat, Ben. I’ll just remind everyone that our gym growth blast off is starting again.

So click down below in the show notes if you want to spend 12 weeks growing your monthly reoccurring revenue with Mark Fisher, if that sounds like fun to you and you want more money in your pockets, it’s a great program and I think you’ll be very happy you did it. Thanks so much, Ben. Talk to you on the next one.

Talk soon.