In this paper we show that absence of complex zeros of the partition function of the hard-core model on any family of bounded degree graphs implies that the associated probability measure, the \emph{hard-core measure}, satisfies strong spatial mixing on that family. As a corollary we obtain that the hard-core measure on the family of bounded degree claw-free graphs satisfies strong spatial mixing. We furthermore derive strong spatial mixing for graph homomorphism measures from absence of zeros of the graph homomorphism partition function.