Literature Review: Social Media Impact on Gym Customer Retention

This literature review explores the critical role of social media marketing in enhancing customer retention within the fitness industry, particularly focusing on gyms. The review examines the multifaceted dimensions of customer retention, highlighting its significance for business success and the development of long-term customer relationships. It differentiates between customer retention and customer loyalty, emphasizing the importance of retaining the lifetime value of customers. The study delves into the strategies fitness companies can adopt to leverage social media, including reliability, tangibles, empathy, assurance, and responsiveness. It also analyzes the advantages of social media marketing, such as target orientation and cost-effectiveness, while addressing key aspects of fitness marketing management, including providing information, order taking, billing, and hospitality. The review synthesizes various research findings to provide a comprehensive understanding of how social media marketing can be effectively utilized to foster customer retention in the fitness sector, offering insights into brand building, customer engagement, and long-term relationships. This research emphasizes the need for fitness companies to use social media marketing to reach their target customers, develop long-standing relationships, and ensure customer retention.

Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW
Impact of social media marketing strategies for customer retention in Gym (fitness industry)
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

1LITERATURE REVIEW
Literature Review
The main aim of this research involves in identifying different factors having impact on
the aspect of customer retention obtained through social media marketing in the fitness industry.
In this research, Literature Review part has a significant role to play as it helps in uncovering
various dimensions of the factors of customer retention through social media in the fitness
industry.
Customer Retention
In today’s business organizations, customer retention is considered as a major factor for
business success. Customer retention can be regarded as the ability of the companies to retain
their customers over some specific period; thus, customer retention management is a major tool
for the business executives. As per most of the business executives, companies are able in
establishing effective customer retention management when it is measurable (Garcia-Fernandez
et al. 2014). There is not any doubt of the fact that long-term relationship with the customers
contributes to long-term customer retention that provides the companies with various other
crucial benefits. From the perspective of the customers, they receive good value from the
companies when they get better quality of products and services from them for their money (Yu
et al. 2014). While discussing about the topic of customer retention, it is needed to mention the
fact that there is a different between customer retention and customer loyalty. Customer retention
involves in retaining the lifetime value of the customers that is the development of strong
relationship with them. On the contrary, customer loyalty can be considered as a micro concept
that can be defined on customer by customer basis. Customer retention leads to customer loyalty
that makes the customers to involve in purchase frequently (Ilina 2015).

2LITERATURE REVIEW
As per this research, companies can ensure the retention of their existing customers by
incorporating social media into their business efforts. There are many instances all over the
world where the business organizations are using social media for retaining their existing
customers. The ability of retaining customers has major importance for the types of business
where it is not easy to identify the customer base such as the businesses heavily dependent on
indirect distribution of goods and services. This particular research involves in the customer
retention in fitness industry, especially in gyms (Harmeling et al. 2017). It needs to be mentioned
that it is not easy for the management of such companies to do the promotion of their business to
any specific group of customers as it is difficult in identifying any specific group. For this
reason, it is needed for the fitness companies to adopt the strategy of social media marketing so
that they can better reach to the target audience for their businesses. It needs to be mentioned that
there are certain aspects under customer retention that ensures the retention of customers in the
companies (Ballings and Van den Poel 2015). They are reliability that is the ability of the
companies to provide the promised products or perform the promised services to the customers;
tangibles that refer to the physical facilities, communication medium, employees and
equipments; empathy that refers to the provision of caring, attention to the customers; assurance
that is the knowledge, courtesy and ability of the companies to convey trust and confidence; and
responsiveness that is willingness or enthusiasm of the companies to help their customers and to
provide prompt services. Business organizations are needed to take into consideration all these
aspects in customer retention management (Malthouse et al. 2013).
Social Media Marketing
The above discussion indicates towards the fact that social media has a crucial part to
play in the aspect of customer retention in the healthcare industry. Marketing with the help of

3LITERATURE REVIEW
social media is called as Social Media Marketing. Social media marketing can be regarded as a
part of online marketing that involves in complex processes and efforts through various social
media channel and the aim of it is to attract the attention of the target group of the customers to
the products and services of the companies along with receiving feedback from the customers
(Tuten and Solomon 2017). Creation of a specific message in the social media with a specific
content is the main component of social media marketing so that the target audience can easily
find them. In the presence of new web technology, business organizations have become able in
distributing the messages about their products and services to wider audience in small time when
they have to pay less for this kind of advertisement. The presence of many social media
instruments can be seen in today’s business market (Olof Lagrosen and Grundén 2014).
Business organizations can avail many opportunities o advantages by adopting social
media marketing strategy. The greatest advantage of the adoption of social media marketing for
business is the process of target orientation; it indicates towards the opportunity for the
businesses to find a certain audience for the business so that the required as well as necessary
information can be provided to them (Killian and McManus 2015). This process is largely
helpful in converting the target audience into potential customers and further into loyal
customers. On the other hand, social media marketing helps the companies in not touching the
potentially uninterested customers without further investing any money. One important aspect is
that the social media users like to share the interesting information with their friends, relatives
and communities. In this manner, this approach helps the companies in capturing wider target
audience by not investing any further amount. This it can be said that social media marketing
helps the companies in sharing the right information to the target audience in a less costly
manner (Ilina 2015).

4LITERATURE REVIEW
One major feaster of social media marketing is that it not only concentrates on single
purchase customers, but also helps the companies in long-term customer retention with the help
of interaction with them so that they needs and demands can be understood in the most effective
manner (Ilina 2015). In this manner, the customers of the companies can provide their valuable
feedback on the products and services to the companies thorough social media; this way the
companies can get the vital recommendations on improving the quality of their products and
services. It needs to be mentioned there are certain reasons for which the customers follow the
companies in the social media such as to get the news about promotions and discounts, latest
product information, customer service, entertaining content along with the ability to offer
feedback (Tuten and Solomon 2017). It has been seen over the years that customer retention and
making the customers loyal are the greatest advantage of using social media marketing. Hence,
from the above discussion, it can be seen that the adoption of social media marketing has many
advantages for the businesses.
Fitness Marketing Management
The current study focuses on a particular industry that is the fitness industry and one
major aim of this research is to uncover the role of social media on customer retention in the
fitness industry. It can be observed that the fitness industry comes under the service provider
business. For this reason, the companies are needed to take into consideration all the relevant
aspects of service industry at the time of developing the strategy for customer retention (Garcia-
Fernandez et al. 2014). It needs to be mentioned that there are some major aspects of services
that the companies are needed to consider. The fitness companies are required to provide their
target customers with all the information about their products and services so that it can become
helpful for the potential customers. In case of gym, the information can be about schedules,

5LITERATURE REVIEW
contact information, prices, usage instruction, membership and others. Order taking is another
major aspect for fitness companies and it includes reservation, check-ins, submission of the
application and others (Yarimoglu 2014). Billing and payment are other aspects that can be seen
in any kind of gym. Some other crucial aspects are hospitality, safekeeping, health consultation
and others. These all are the essential elements for a fitness company that they are needed to
provide their customers with in order to ensure their retention (Albayrak and Caber 2014).
Now, the social media plays an integral part to deliver all the above-mentioned
information to the target audience of a fitness company like gym. In the practice of social media
marketing, the presence of many social media channels can be seen; some of them are Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, Wordpress, Pinterest and others (Lovelock and Patterson 2015). These social
media channels are essential for the creation of a strong gym brand. For the companies under the
fitness industry, it is not an easy task to segment their target customers. For this reason, social
media marketing is regarded as a major tool as these companies can reach to their target
customers with the help of various channels of social media like Facebook, Twitter and others.
At the same time, these companies are not needed to spend huge amount of money the promotion
through social media. With the help of social media marketing, the fitness companies can
develop long-standing relationship with their customers and it is a major contributor towards
customer retention in the fitness industry (Ilina 2015).

6LITERATURE REVIEW
References
African Journal for Research in Sport, Physical Education and Recreation, 36(3), pp.75-91.
Albayrak, T. and Caber, M., 2014. Symmetric and asymmetric influences of service attributes:
The case of fitness clubs. Managing Leisure, 19(5), pp.307-320.
Ballings, M. and Van den Poel, D., 2015. CRM in social media: Predicting increases in
Facebook usage frequency. European Journal of Operational Research, 244(1), pp.248-260.
Garcia-Fernandez, J., Bernal-Garcia, A., Fernandez-Gavira, J. and Velez-Colon, L., 2014.
Analysis of existing literature on management and marketing of the fitness centre industry. South
African Journal for Research in Sport, Physical Education and Recreation, 36(3), pp.75-91.
Harmeling, C.M., Moffett, J.W., Arnold, M.J. and Carlson, B.D., 2017. Toward a theory of
customer engagement marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45(3), pp.312-
335.
Ilina, A., 2015. Social Media Marketing Strategies for Customer Retention in Fitness Industry.
Killian, G. and McManus, K., 2015. A marketing communications approach for the digital era:
Managerial guidelines for social media integration. Business Horizons, 58(5), pp.539-549.
Lovelock, C. and Patterson, P., 2015. Services marketing. Pearson Australia.
Malthouse, E.C., Haenlein, M., Skiera, B., Wege, E. and Zhang, M., 2013. Managing customer
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7LITERATURE REVIEW
Olof Lagrosen, S. and Grundén, K., 2014. Social media marketing in the wellness industry. The
TQM Journal, 26(3), pp.253-260.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage.
Yarimoglu, E.K., 2014. A review on dimensions of service quality models. Journal of Marketing
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Yu, H.S., Zhang, J.J., Kim, D.H., Chen, K.K., Henderson, C., Min, S.D. and Huang, H., 2014.
Service quality, perceived value, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intention among fitness
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