Every martial arts prospect that sees your marketing is in 1 of 5 stages. Do you know what to say in each one?

• The 5 different stages of a martial arts student prospect
• When and when not to use a paid trial offer
• How to influence buying decisions at different stages in the signup cycle
• The landing page system that is currently responsible for more than 612 paid trial students
• How many touch points (brand interactions) it take before a conversion
• And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

So the big question is, right, does your website have these offers? Are you catering for the hot? Are you catering for the warm and are you catering for the cold?

Hey, this is George Fourie from Martial Arts Media and today I have an awesome training for you. So, this training is something that we focus on in our Martial Arts Media Academy and is part of a presentation that I did over the weekend at The Main Event, Fred Depalma’s ”The Main Event,” hosted by MA 1st, which was in Sydney. And the presentation that I did, or the segment that I'm going to talk about today rather, is called “The martial arts student sign up cycle.”

Now, credit where credit is due, always: this was created by Eugene Schwartz, who wrote a book called “Breakthrough Advertising.” You'll pay about $150 for this book on Amazon and it's, he was a legendary marketer and copywriter. And what he talks about is the 5 different stages that a prospect will be in based on their interest level. And when you understand these different levels, you are able to fine tune your marketing message to be relevant to them, because, let’s say you have somebody, they’ve got questions and they don't have everything together about this martial arts thing.

And you go and just present a price to them – they're just not ready, so that's where objections normally come from: ah, I need to think about it, I'm not interested, I don't know, I need to ask my wife – that's where those kinds of objections normally come from is, because a person isn't ready and there are questions that they might not know what it is or they just feel unsure, or they're just too embarrassed maybe to tell you. And that's where sort of the objections come up, which can generally be classed as excuses.

The flipside is, if you don't know when somebody is absolutely ready to join, then you can also miss the boat because you might be carrying on, waffling on and they could be ready to buy and you can talk them out of joining – also, something that can happen. So I'm going to share this segment with you – I highly recommend you look at the full the presentation because the full presentation will give you the nuts and bolts of how it all fits together, but this by itself is super valuable. So I hope it helps, let me take you through it. If you're listening to the audio, I recommend you go to martialartsmedia.com, check the video out and it will all be clear and make sense. All right.

So, the presentation was “Become the go-to martial arts school through the internet and social media marketing” and this segment is called martial arts students sign up cycle. So, there are five different stages of awareness that a prospect goes through.

1. The first one at the top, which is what most people normally focus on is hot, and right at the bottom is cold, the person that's completely unaware or not interested in martial arts whatsoever.

So, where do we look at the hot market? So this person, they kind of know everything they want, right? This person knows that they want confidence for the kid or fitness or discipline, they know they might want to lose weight and they know everything about your club as well, they just kind of need the right offer to switch them over. So this is where a paid trial can work very well, right? Because they're ready.

2.  Then you’re going to look at the warm, the warm audience and the warm audience, the warm prospect is service aware, right? They know about your school and what your gym has to offer, but they're just not sure if it's right for them yet, OK? So what type of questions can you ask this person? What do they need to know? Do they need to know what martial arts style is right for them? What do they still need to know to take them over the line?

I did a case study with Paul Veldman, I advertised and promoted it quite a bit, you might have seen it. It was titled “How a martial arts school owner turned quiet time into 96 paid trials student in 14 days while converting 70% into full members.” Now, that case study was really targeted at these top two segments, right, the hot and the warm market. There are obviously other things that went with it: the right time, the timing, the deadline on the offer and so forth.

And funny enough, I was going through all the statistics, preparing for the presentation and the landing pages that we create, so the landing pages that we create and we create paid trials for, has a total 612 paid trial students over the last 6 months, OK? So that's $19,542, but obviously, that's just the income from the paid trial. So, depending on what your lifetime student value would be, whether that's $1,500, or a $1,000, I know if you're going to work it out on $1,500, it's going to be just short of a $1,000,000 worth of business! So, that is the power of having a really, really good offer, but also having it constructed in a way that converts and takes in the business, all right?

So that's really focusing on those top, those top two. So you're looking at the warm and the hot market.

3.  Now, going a bit further down, you've got the lukewarm market, solution aware, all right? They know about martial arts and the benefits, they just need the right offer or school or gym to sign up, OK? So they don't really know about your gym or school yet:  what can you put in front of these people? Do they need to know details about how to choose a martial arts school, or do they have sort of myths that are lingering in their mind, if, let’s say martial arts cause violence in kids or something like that.

What are the questions that they need to be answered and where are they going to find this information? They're going to find it on your website or someone else's, that's really the key and that's what we got through in the full presentation.

4.  Then you're cool – now, this is getting a lot harder, you'll see at the top; there are only a few touch points needed, OK? It’s going to take 6-8 touch points, interactions before somebody converts into anything and at the bottom, you're going to have a lot of touch points, because there’s a lot of the education process that's happening.

Ok, so the cool are problem aware. They sense the problem with their own fitness, their confidence, or perhaps see it in their child, but they don't know what the solution is to solve it yet. So they haven't put martial arts in the same line of how it’s going to solve this problem for them.

5.  And then, of course, you've got cold, all right? You've got the cold audience, they don't know anything about martial arts yet, or somebody just told them something about it, so they might just go looking, all right, what's this martial arts thing. They know nothing, they've got no real desire yet, they may be curious, or they probably just know nothing at all, right? They're just not interested and that person, of course, doesn't matter. You can charge them a $1 for a month and they're still not going to join because they're just not interested.

So the big question is, does your website have these offers? Are you catering for the hot? Are you catering for the warm and are you catering for the cold, or the cool market? The cool audience rather, I keep on saying market – the cool prospect. Do you have offers on your website that are strategically positioned to answer all those questions? Because, if it doesn't, then chances are, you have a leaking bucket, all right? People are coming to your website and they are leaving because they don't find what it is they need.

And I've done a lot of training on this, but I’m kind of pulling back on the training because it’s too hard. I end up trying to educate people that should be educated on more than websites and it’s just hard work and I've done it for favors, but if you're going to get something like this done, rather get somebody that understands marketing, understands sales and knows how to actually build a website that's going to generate business for you and that knows how to target these different segments.

I hope that helps, I'm doing the full presentation on this, which will be invaluable for you if you take on board what we talk about. A lot of time has gone into this, this is a lot of things that we've done for our top clients and this is just really breaking it down, the information and the process that we got through.

And I’d love to have you on board. It’s at http://martialartsmedia.live, is where you can access the presentation, or there will be a notification of when the next one will be and that's it. And if you would like help with all this stuff and you want us to walk you through it, guide you or your team members, then you can head over to martial arts media.academy and we will see if we can help you with growing your martial arts school.

That's it – I will see you in the next video. Cheers!

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

Enjoyed the show? Get more martial arts business tips when you subscribe on iTunes for iPhone or Stitcher Radio for Android devices.