george fourie Archives

67 – And Still… The No.1 Martial Arts Marketing Mistake

October 19, 2018 by George Fourie

How to avoid the biggest marketing mistake that martial arts school owners make when advertising online.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

Matching your message for the right platform.
If this one thing doesn’t work, your ads won’t work.
The ‘kitchen sink’.
The real reason why you need to simplify your sales funnel.
And more

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

TRANSCRIPTION

The first thing that you really, really need to get down to is, how do you structure the offer, how do you get an offer to convert? Because if the offer converts, everything else is going to work.

Hey, this is George. And I quickly want to talk about how to avoid the one biggest marketing mistake that comes up quite often when I speak to martial arts school owners.

So just a bit of context: I'm in New Zealand right now, just on a bit of a family vacation. And we've got this awesome view and the weather’s been up and down, but today it's just such a perfect day on the lake here in Hamilton, so I just wanted to get that on video.

So here's what happens, right? So we've got a program in the Martial Arts Media Academy, where we help school owners with all areas of marketing. When it comes to emailing, Facebook, Google, etc. And where the problem came, was trying to mix too many of the same strategies.

So, here's what happened: one of our members had been trying to get their Facebook ad to really work. And we've got an email structure that sends out… basically, we structure emails that go out to your prospects. They're structured over about two weeks and it basically helps build a relationship with your prospects while you're not there.

And so when doing email, you follow certain…there's certain things you can do, right? There's a certain way you can speak, there's a certain way that you can format your message. And the first message that goes out, we call it “the kitchen sink,” because it's everything in the kitchen sink, right? It's telling the prospect everything they need to know about you.

And so where the confusion came in, was trying to actually use this strategy, because our member got such good results with this one email, he decided it would be a good idea to put that on a Facebook ad. But the problem was that the email, it sends people to… it's in a whole different position, right?

The person is already a lead, they're already a prospect, the relationship has already started, and now they get this email that sends them to YouTube, that sends them to everything that they can learn and know about them and then martial arts school, right?

So when you use this on a Facebook ad, of course, that's kind of suicidal, because you're sending people to all these different locations. And by sending them to all these different locations, you’ve got no way to ever know if it works, or not. And my exact answer was, let’s say this ad works – awesome. You get a good result. That would be great, but let’s say you run it again and it doesn't work?

Then there's no way for you to know why, because there were just too many variables, right? People went to YouTube, people went here, people went here, people went here… so that creates a lot of confusion and…not a confusion so much, but there's no way for you to actually scale and improve that type of ad.

So here's what the biggest mistake is: the biggest mistake is trying to do too many things too soon and sending people to too many directions too soon. So when you create an ad and- it's a very common thing, but just have people do the one, simplest thing that's going to start the conversation with them. How can you make it easy for them to raise their hand and do something?

And sometimes that's just a comment, sometimes that's sending a message. Because here's the thing, right: if you’ve never run a Facebook ad and you’ve never gotten anybody to respond, so you never got a conversion on your Facebook ad, then nothing else is going to work, right?

So the first thing that you really, really need to get down to is, how do you structure the offer, how do you get an offer to convert? Because if the offer converts, everything else is going to work. So if the person is going to respond to your offer, then you can start looking at, OK: how do I make this landing page better? How do I make this message better? But on the frontend, you’ve got to get the offer to convert.

I hope that helps. If it helps in some way, then leave me a comment below, or yeah – I’ll 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.

66 – The Hard Way Vs The Easy(re) Way

October 12, 2018 by George Fourie

Every martial arts business has its challenges. If there was one ‘shortcut' to success, this would be it.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

The real ‘shortcut’ to martial arts business success
The easy and hard ways of marketing your martial arts school
Why you should invest in these marketing strategies
And more

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

TRANSCRIPTION

If you're struggling with something and need help, then why don't you just get help from someone who has done it before, made all the mistakes and shortcut all that learning? All the mistakes that they made, you can bypass that and get the result faster.

Hey, George here. Just walking back from a trip, we were just at Mount Ruapehu, if I've said that right. You can probably see it, it's sort of in the background there. Yeah, the snowy mountains, pretty awesome scenery here in New Zealand. Pretty cold, when you're used to the hot weather in Perth.

I was reminded today, there's the easy way to do things and a hard way. So today was the first day I took up snowboarding and because I’ve surfed before, I always thought, oh, this is going to be so easy. So I thought, you know what, why not give it a shot? Why not I go and try snowboarding, without lessons and just go do it, right? And the outcome was pretty… interesting.

So, yeah, I ate a lot of snow, falling down and, yeah, it was an interesting affair. And it reminded me that there's always the easy way to do things or the hard way. Just like before I started helping martial arts school owners with digital marketing stuff. I took the hard way, I tried to learn everything myself, without any help.

So just going by mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, spending a lot of money, wasting a lot of money and it's just a long process, which can be really frustrating, right?

If you're trying to learn something and you don’t have any help, then you try everything, you do everything. It doesn't make sense and you think you’re going to save money by not spending money on a course or trying to get advice or coaching. So you go the long road, the long route.

And you try and fumble through things by yourself. And it can be really frustrating and it can take a long time and I guess that’s why a lot of people also stop doing what it is they were trying to achieve because it's just too hard.

So, yeah, when you go that route, it's always, it just takes a lot longer and it's a lot more frustrating. And I guess that’s just with everything, right? Like, with your marketing, marketing your business with your martial arts, you can try to fumble through things, try and take shortcuts, or just get help.

Get help from someone who’s done it before, who’s tried things, who has invested in some knowledge and gotten good results, obviously. You can’t just follow someone that invested in good marketing, or good coaching or something, because if they didn't get results yet themselves, then how can they teach you to get a result?

So I guess I just thought I’d shoot this video, the real message I want to get across is: if you're struggling with something and need help, then why don't you just get help from someone who has done it before, made all the mistakes and shortcut all that learning. All the mistakes that they made, you can bypass that and get the result faster.

Hope that helps in some way. I’m going to go into that spot over there, which is nice and warm and get myself a nice drink. 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.

64 – Google Search Vs. Social Media For Martial Arts Schools (And Goldfish Have Surpassed Us!)

July 31, 2018 by George Fourie

The subtle difference you need to know when creating content for Google search vs social media for martial arts schools.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

The difference between search engine marketing and social media marketing for martial arts schools
How goldfish have surpassed us
Leveraging your content creation
And more

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

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, this is George. Just here in Perth City and I was at an event from Google, Google Garage. And pretty basic information but some interesting stats, which was a good refresher on just how things work in the digital world, so I thought I’d share with you something that you could use when you create content for your martial arts school.

Before I get to that, one of the most interesting stats that I thought was interesting was that goldfish have officially surpassed us, meaning attention span. So where goldfish used to have a shorter attention span than human beings, according to their stats, Google stats, we are now… human beings attention span is 8 seconds and goldfish have 9 seconds. So they have the one up.

So here's something that I found interesting, was the difference between your strategy with Google search and social media. So it's one of those things that… When you kind of know it and we’ve been really trying to be deliberate about it, but when you really realize the big difference, it's kind of an aha moment about how you go about it.

So, when you look at social media, social media… a big thing about social media, which is a pet peeve is, the longevity of your content, right?

Because you can create social media posts today and you’ve got about 24-48 hours before they have completely lost their reach, ok? So unless you're doing something else with it, like using it for an ad or something like that, that's going to be the lifespan of the content for you.

So when you look at Google, so again, social media – very positive and generally positive, right? I mean, obviously, when you create content, you want to create positive content. Some people just create complaining posts, right? I mean if that's your thing – awesome, but I wouldn’t recommend it for your martial arts school, right? So that's the one side. You’ve got the social media content that you create.

Now, Google on the flipside, is not so much of a… dare I say it, like a fake facade, right? It's not all “Everybody’s happy” moments; it's people going to Google and really typing in real life problems, ok? Real things that are going on in their life, that they're trying to solve in a martial art school’s case, self-defense, or its activities for the kids and that can also just be the super, the first level of the problem, right? Because it could be a few layers deep.

So that is the real difference, the difference being, one is being created for more of a positive and friendly and happy vibe and at Google, people are typing in real-world problems. And then obviously, finding results for that and that's how you find articles, videos and so forth. So I guess the key thing is always, how do you bridge the gap, right? How can you create content that leverages both platforms?

Because if you're only investing in social media, then it's ongoing and you’ve always got to do it. But if you create the content with the purpose of how can it be leveraged and how can people find it later on your website, then you're playing a whole new different game.

A little tool we use in the Martial Arts Media Academy, which I’m revamping now for our new modules, is a content multiplier. Content duplicator like a cloning type tool. So you create one piece of content and then you model it and clone it for different platforms.

So that's one side of it, but then the really cool thing about it is, how to take one piece of content and then making sure that it's relevant on all platforms. So I won’t go into all the details and that but I want you to really think about it; when you're creating content, how can you create your content so that it could be used, obviously on social media, how can it be used so that it can be found afterwards, so if people are doing a Google search and they can find it on your website. And then even better, how can you use it on social media for an ad and how can you use that to really broaden your audience.

And if you want a few more details on that, I’m happy to shoot another video, perhaps even share the tool that we use for this, but I'll leave that for now.

Speak soon – until 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.

Why Your Martial Arts Website Was Designed To Bleed Business (And What To Do About It)

May 31, 2016 by George Fourie

Does it seem that no matter what form of online marketing campaigns you run to drive traffic to your martial arts website simply doesn’t work?

You keep spending the dollars, but your return on investment (ROI) simply doesn’t justify the cost.

More than likely, your problem is NOT marketing. Your problem is a martial arts website design that doesn’t convert. Thus, it’s bleeding business.

The biggest misconception about Martial Arts websites, or any other website for that matter, is that they are all created equally.

‘A website is a website’ seems to be a common mantra.

Yet one website could be the powerhouse behind multiple schools, getting a steady stream of online enquiries with the phone ringing consistently throughout the day.

But the other martial arts website is dead.

Silent.

Maybe the odd email and phone enquiry being produced within the week or the month.

And what’s even more bizarre about this, these exact two businesses could be running on the exact same advertising budget. Sometimes, the better website is even generating more business with a fraction of the budget.

To top that off, what stings even more is if you forked out multiple four figures for your website and it's still not bringing in the business that you need.

So the question is, what’s going on here?

Is it cheap (or fancy) stock pictures?

The layout?

The design?

The words?

What makes one martial arts website design a prospect magnet and the other as busy as fitness training on New Year’s morning?

In this short crash course, my goal is to give you complete clarity on what your website needs to be a lead generation machine.

These are elements that we’ve tried and tested (and keep testing) on numerous websites through using traffic methods as described in our free Martial Arts Business Plan for online media.

And, we are going to dig deep into the one key element that is the maker or breaker of your martial arts website.

If you have not yet ventured into the world of promoting your website online and walking away with a bruised wallet, study this post before you do ANYTHING!

If you have been marketing your martial arts website online, this post will give you the guidance or maybe a few ‘tweaks’ to turn your website into a prospecting powerhouse.

But first steps first, we need to get clarity on…

Your benchmark numbers that determine your profit

If numbers aren’t your thing, please bear with me. I can guarantee you that doing this exercise will change the way you look at your business from here on out.

I might be preaching to the choir, and maybe you’ve done this exercise before. Either way, let’s tie them in with the success or lack thereof with your martial arts website.

The numbers are everything! (Yes, even more important than the fancy stock images.)

Here’s why.

EXAMPLE: Working with easy numbers, let’s say your student acquisition cost needs to be $100 for you to run a profitable business.

But, your cost per acquisition with running online ads is $150 stretching up to $180, even $200.

How long will your doors stay open for?

The scary part is, most martial arts business owners don’t keep track of these numbers and go out of business because of it.

You could be throwing thousands of dollars every month into Google Adwords, and if you don’t know and keep track of these numbers, you might find your business on rocky grounds when it’s already too late.

That brings us too…

Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)

This figure is key. The lifetime value of your student can be determined by multiplying your weekly or monthly student fee by the average time that a student remains a member.

Example (again keeping the maths simple), let’s say that a student pays $150 per month at your martial arts school and the average time a student stays is 12 months.

That brings the figures to:

$150 fee x 12 months = $1,800 LCV

And in reality, it will be much more than $1,800.

That member might bring in a few referrals, attend extra events or purchase merchandise or gear if you provide any of those.

But to keep things simple of the purpose of this guide, let’s stick to $1,800.

And not to go off topic here, but that begs the question:

Are you treating every online enquiry, walk in and phone call like a potential $1,800 student?

What if that student stays three years ($5,400) or even five years ($9,000).

SIDE NOTE: As a quick guideline, if you are spending 10% of your LCV as a student acquisition cost, you should be running a healthy business.

However, this can differ for each business, so best to run your own numbers.

And that’s exactly how seriously we take every visit to your website, which brings us to that one key element…

Conversions

Conversions are the cash cow, the make or break, the new student that you get or lose to Bob and Mary Martial Arts next door.

Consider this:

Every time someone clicks on your website, that’s a potential $1,800.

Every time they click away, it’s $1,800 spent elsewhere. One life that you didn’t have the opportunity to improve.

A pretty serious way to look at a simple mouse click isn’t it?

But truth be told, one of your best students right now more than likely joined up that way.

They found your website at the right time in their life, was intrigued enough to pick up the phone or email you and now they are your biggest advocate.

Maybe they were a referral, but doing their own research they found on social media or your website pushed them over the line.

There are so many variables that can affect whether a potential member gets in touch with you or not.

That’s why we need to take these variables super seriously because every one of them could be valued at $1,800.

I know I’m harping on about the numbers and dollars rather than , but that’s the business side that simply can’t be avoided.

And yes, of course, your members aren’t objects walking around with dollar signs on their heads; these are valuable people whose lives you will transform and the only way that will happen is when you do all you can to make sure they start their martial arts journey. I can vouch for that. 🙂

The difference a 2% conversion makes

Let’s say your website right now is converting at 2%. That means that for every 100 visitors you get to your website, two people either pick up the phone or complete an online enquiry.

Doesn’t sound like much, but that is about the average conversion of average websites.

Get 1,000 visits to your website; you get 20 new prospects.

Now, using the conversions elements we will discuss below, you improve your website conversions by 2%, bringing it up to 4%.

“What’s 2%?”, most people might snicker. But that’ 2% moving from 2% to 4%, is actually a 100% improvement!

4% means four leads for every 100 visitors, making it double to 40 new prospects, lifting your stakes to 40 new prospects from a 1,000 website visitors.

And let’s be conservative and that 4 of the 20 prospects signed up, that means that you gained an extra four students for the same amount of visitors to your martial arts website.

You didn’t fork out extra dollars on marketing; you simply optimised a martial arts website design that converts!

And going back to our numbers, that’s 4 x $1,800 lifetime customer value, which is an additional $7,200 added to your bottom line.

That’s an additional $86,400 in one year!

Again, might be stating the obvious, but until you see the numbers in front of you and the benefits or repercussions of not doing things right, it’s hard to see the real monetary value.

How to ‘tweak' your martial arts website design to boost conversions

OK, let’s get down to it, how do you increase your website conversions? And if I come to the realisation that my website is no good, do I revamp the whole thing or build a new one from scratch?

That will depend on many variables. The state of your website, the code it was written in, and of course, budget.

Does that mean you need to fork out multiple four figures and get a new website?

No. At least, not yet.

What’s the point in spending thousands of dollars on a brand new website, when you have no idea whether it will generate leads or not?

Here at Martial Arts Media, we like to:

Create one landing page first
2. Drive traffic to it
A/B Split test it (Split testing is creating two versions on the same web page with slight variations and see which one delivers the better conversion percentage)
4. Test it some more
5. Build a new website based on the landing page that works (if desired)

This means that Martial Arts Gym owners can trust that the websites that they are building are going to serve their business for years to come.

Getting back to the conversions.

Let's say you have the resources to take this on yourself or have a trusted web developer that values marketing and conversions more than the tech itself, here’s what needs to happen.

The most important thing you need to know about your website visitors:

They are impatient, generally lazy and love to play dumb!

That doesn’t mean your potential new students have any of those attributes, and this is no judgement towards anyone, it’s simply the common behaviour of an internet browser.

If they don’t get what they want, they’re out of there. If they need to click through hoops, they’re leaving. If you don’t tell them what to do, they’re back to Google and looking up your competitor. (The inevitable $1,800 sting!)

Key factors to optimise your martial arts website design

Mobile web viewing now exceeds desktop viewing! More of your prospects will be viewing your website on a mobile device than on a desktop computer or laptop. Does your website deliver a user-friendly experience for mobile? Having a mobile responsive website is essential
You have 0-8 seconds to grab your visitors’ After 8 seconds, the majority of the visitors leave
Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to take action (call, join or make an online enquiry) Are you capturing their data? What are you doing to follow up on these visitors? We will discuss this in future posts when we get to Email Marketing and Remarketing campaigns
The more landing pages (pages with specific information that your visitors are looking for) you have, the more leads you are likely to get
Product videos can increase your enquiries by 144%
1 second, yes, 1 SECOND delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
Ideally, you should be testing with a method that’s called A/B split testing to determine what works on your website. This topic stretches beyond what we will be covering in this guide

That can be a lot to take in.

This is why it's important to have a team behind you that understands these metrics and can manage them for you.

What you can do right now to improve your website

Make your unique value proposition clear

Visitors should be able to see clearly on your homepage or landing page why they should be training at your Martial Arts School. No guessing. State the biggest benefit of training at your school clearly in one headline.
Have your phone number visible at the top

I’ve been to so many martial arts websites where you have to jump through hoops to make contact. Have your phone number visible AND clickable. Many people will be searching from their mobile phones.

If your phone number can be clicked to make a call when viewed on a mobile, your phone enquiries will increase.
Have your online enquiry form visible above the fold

Your online enquiry form needs to be short and visible above the fold of the webpage. That means that they don’t have to scroll down to see your enquiry form.

The more information you ask, the less likely they will fill this in, especially if they’re on mobile (again, notoriously lazy!)
Make sure your website is fast

If your website is on slow hosting and takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load, your visitors are going to get frustrated and leave.

This is why I'm not a fan of website providers who offer package deals with hosting included.

More often than not their technical experience or team do not know how to optimise and scale their hosts for maximum speed.

Or they sell too many websites, and the whole network starts to slow down, and they don’t upgrade their systems fast enough.

It saves them and you money in the short term, but you pay for it in loss of customers.

You should also question ownership if you own a website like this, who owns the actual website? Can it be transferred to a different provider if you are not happy?

If you think your website might be slow, you can contact us for a free website check.

If your website is taking more than 2/3 seconds to load, this is something you need to be concerned with.

Although the above tests are proven strategies that will improve your website, the only real way to know what is going to work for your audience demographic is to test.

TEST TEST TEST.

And the only way you can run tests on your website, is to track your analytical data.

What you think people want on your website and what they do are two very different things. And it’s what they do what really matters, as those are the actions that they take.

How and what to test conversions on your website

Google Analytics is the standard tracking software (and free) that you must use on your martial arts website.

There are other tools that can also be used that create heat maps of your website visitors’ activity.

These give you invaluable insights.

The things you want on your website might not be what your customers want.

REMEMBER: Your visitors will only stay on your website for a while. It’s important that every single click intrigues them to take the desired action, like getting in touch with you.

The two conversion elements you need to test from your website is phone calls and online enquiries.

The easiest way to do this is to set up a different phone number for your website only.

For online enquiries, you can set up a thank you page, a page that they land on only if they complete an online enquiry.

From there it's relatively easy to create this as a goal (conversion element) in Google Analytics.

Even if the above list is exhausting and you don’t have the time or resources to take all these on right now, you have a comprehensive list of items you can test to improve your conversions month to month as you move forward.

In our free Martial Arts Business plan for online media which you can download here, we discuss 4 key elements of an high converting website that can help improve your conversions faster.

If you need help or have any questions about optimising your martial arts website, get in touch with us for a free strategy session.

Make your unique value proposition clear

Have your phone number visible at the top

Have your online enquiry form visible above the fold

Make sure your website is fast

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