Why Facebook’s latest update is changing how martial arts ads really work, and what school owners can do to stay ahead without relying on agencies.

• How Facebook’s Andromeda update reshapes martial arts ad targeting and what you should do first.
  
• Why your content strategy has become your new targeting system.
  
• The unseen cost of having no control over your Facebook ads.
• How building martial arts ad campaigns “from the mats up” can lift your results fast.
  
• Adapt your martial arts marketing as AI starts guiding ad targeting.
• And more.

 *FREE: Bring 50 Enrollments Into Your Martial Arts School Every 90 Days Need help growing your martial arts school? Watch Training + Take The Assessment

TRANSCRIPTION

If your martial arts Facebook ads are tanking right now, then listen up.

This is for you.

Welcome to the new Facebook algorithm update.

Now, you might have been seeing fluctuating ads all your life.

This is a little different though.

This is very different, and I urge you to pay attention to this Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast episode because I'm going to be going through what's changed, what's different, and how you should be approaching this from the ground up, all the way from your organic social media strategy all the way through to your ad campaigns.

So it's definitely time to not bury our heads in the sand anymore and depend on other people to just press all the buttons for us.

It's got to start from the ground up.

So this episode, I'm going to be covering what's different, what's changed, and how we are going about it with our martial arts school and our clients and helping them elevate their ad campaigns from the ground up.

Let's get stuck in.

So first up, a little bit of context.

I saw this update release back in December, and initially it was just for e-commerce brands, and so I didn't really pay much attention to it.

Actually, we've been avoiding it like a plague, to be fair, and it started to roll out more, and slowly we've started adapting our strategy.

Now, there's two schools of thought here.

We've got clients that are, their ads are humming and thriving like it always has.

And so nothing has really changed or got impacted by this update.

Then on the flip side, we have some new accounts that are really struggling to get traction.

And then there's a few in the middle where the changes are starting to roll through, and it's really made us zoom out and look at, all right, how are we going to be approaching this difference?

So what is this Facebook update?

And I don't know how to pronounce it properly, but apparently it's called Andromeda or Andromeda, that's how you spell it.

That is the update.

Let's call it Andromeda.

It sounds like a drama.

Anyway, so that's the update.

So what is this really?

In short, traditional targeting as we know it, targeting interest-based or you want to target parents or certain, maybe they're interested in martial arts or health and fitness or whatever the interest base is.

That's slowly starting to peel back.

So Facebook launched this thing called Advantage Plus where they want you to hand over, let them decide who is a potential student.

That's really what they want.

And I love AI, but I'm not a fan of ad platforms taking away controls because every time they take away controls, it means they try to dumb it down.

And by doing that, they just push the ad costs up.

And that's what we're seeing with this Andromeda update.

We've been avoiding it for so long, for so many months and, well, since December really.

And just recently I've started to see some of the updates roll out, and we started to experiment and kind of split test between not doing it and turning on the Advantage Plus settings and slowly started to see some differentiation and some instances where it is working better.

I kind of, like I say to my Partners clients on the weekly calls, feel like we're going to the dark side, but if this is what the Facebook platform is pushing, it's important for us to really look at everything that we do.

So in essence, it's probably going to get a little easier to run ad campaigns, but in that, there's going to be this little learning curve that we're going to have to go through, changing our strategy with media from the ground up.

I'm talking from organic social media posts all the way through to how we run ads.

And so this is what's brought us here.

So I want to urge you to do this.

I know for most martial arts school owners, you don't want anything to do with Facebook ads.

You just want to have somebody else press the buttons for you.

But this thinking about it is really what is holding so many martial arts school owners back.

Because by not knowing and just avoiding how marketing works, you are expecting somebody else, the expert, to know how marketing works.

And the reality is most of those experts are just outsourcing it to someone that doesn't know how it works.

And they're working off a Google doc and being told how to press the button.

So it's your business, your livelihood.

Marketing is the thing that propels it forward.

It helps to have just a little bit of understanding of how this works because it's going to impact you down the line.

And you can save a chunk of money just by understanding how to approach the strategy properly without being that dependent on everybody pressing the buttons.

That probably takes as long as all the meetings and feedback and communication that you've got to have with this company and all these meetings and so forth.

Doing a lot of the legwork yourself saves you so much time and brings in so much more cash flow for you with signing up more students.

Anyway, that's my little rant of taking ownership.

So what are we doing?

What's different?

So first up, the creative side is what is being pushed.

So, and I was going there and I might have not ended up there, but really with the targeting going away, the actual parent targeting or the martial arts interest base and all these different things, where the algorithm is now leaning in is creative becomes the actual targeting.

The way I think about this is if you think how algorithms have changed with Facebook Reels and people just mindlessly scrolling, of course I've never done it, but maybe once or twice, but if you think of the amount of information that gets shared with content and with Reels.

And the minute you pay attention to something a little bit longer, you're just paying attention, you've got your eyeballs on it, scroll one or two, three Reels down and you'll see the same type of content, the similar type of Reel.

Maybe it's like news generated content, or maybe it's something that's got a comedy edge to it.

Maybe it was a long video and now you're starting to see longer videos.

So you pay attention to different segments inside Instagram, inside Facebook, that is becoming the targeting and the algorithm can pinpoint you like this type of video and this type of media, and they keep serving you that type of content.

So there's content as in, is it carousels?

Is it images?

Is it a video?

Is it a certain type of video?

Is it a trending type video?

And so you've got all these things that are happening, then your interest base could be changing on what you are paying attention to.

So maybe you have a parent that is paying attention to the problem of screen time, too much screen time, and now you start getting served these things about screen time.

And the next ad you might start seeing martial arts, gets kids off the couch and gets them on the mats and gets the activity up.

And so now you've evolved and you're paying attention to that.

And then the next thing you're seeing an offer from a martial arts school.

And so what Facebook is trying to do with Andromeda is they're trying to actually dictate this entire system through the ad platform.

So in the past, where we used to think of, we have the top of the funnel, we got the middle of the funnel, we got the bottom of the funnel.

And if you're not familiar with those terms, top of funnel being your cold prospects, like people that don't know you, middle of funnel, people that have started paying attention to you and they are now paying attention to you as a brand.

And then you've got the bottom of the funnel, those that are probably by now know and trust you, and they're just ready to see an offer.

Actually, if you want to go see something funny, go to martialartsmedia.com/41.

If you're watching this on YouTube, I'm just clicking over to it right now.

It's called The Five Stages Of The Martial Arts Student Signup Cycle.

I did this eight years ago, 2017.

I covered the Eugene Schwartz model, the five stages of awareness, where prospects go from problem aware, solution aware, et cetera.

And so I covered that in this podcast episode.

And so this will give you a great idea of beardless George explaining how people go through these different levels of unaware, problem aware, solution aware, service aware, and most aware.

And so that will give you, zooming out, something to think about when you now do your Facebook ads, because what Facebook is attempting to do here is actually serve content to the potential prospect for the stage they are in.

And so there's things that's going to happen here with how we used to optimize ads that are now completely different because of this, because Facebook is trying to serve the right content with the right media at the right time for where people are in the buying cycle.

So as a marketer, it's pretty exciting stuff.

So here's what we're doing differently with our Martial Arts Media™ Partner clients: we've created a system called the martial arts Creative Motivator Map.

And it's basically looking at different motivators, like you have confidence, focus, discipline.

We got a list of about 15 and looked at what is the emotional driver?

What is the message theme?

And then creating an angle that you can approach with your organic social media, instead of having two different strategies of you've got a social media strategy, and you've got an ad strategy.

Ad strategy now starts for us with social media.

This is based on the research that we have, the tests that we have done.

This is where we're at.

It's still early days with this whole changeover.

So what I'm saying today, the strategy might change tomorrow based on new data.

But that is how we stay on top of it in our partners group, because we are always creating, always evolving, always testing.

And so if you want some help with that, reach out, find me on Instagram, send me a message and let's have a chat.

Otherwise, what I'll include in this episode is what we call the Martial Arts Creative Motivator Map.

So that'll give you a bit of a start.

It will show you what we are doing, what we are using, and how you can start creating different content elements to start serving your social media feed.

And that can become the strategy for how you start testing different ad campaigns within your Facebook ads.

So I'll leave it there.

I'll be doing some more updates on this.

It is a pretty exciting time to be a marketer.

I believe it's a great opportunity for martial arts school owners to really simplify and zoom out.

That's why if you've got somebody running your ads and somebody doing social and somebody at reception doing the email follow-ups, I urge you to look at how you can bring all that together, because it's both going to simplify how you go about things, going to amplify your results down the line and keep your brand authentic to the way you operate.

So if you want to grab a copy of the Martial Arts Creative Motivator Map, then head over to martialartsmedia.com/161.

That's the number of this episode.

I'll leave a link there for you to download a copy.

Anyway, that's it for me for now.

I will see you in the next episode.

Cheers.

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