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41 – The 5 Stages Of The Martial Arts Student Signup Cycle

July 21, 2017 by George Fourie

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

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

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.

35 – The Biggest Mistake Martial Arts School Owners Make When Marketing Online

April 28, 2017 by George Fourie

Struggling to string together successful marketing strategies for your martial arts school? You could be missing these 3 keys.

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

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi, this is George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com and today, I want to talk about the one biggest problem that martial arts business owners have when marketing their school on the internet. Now, a few days ago, I released a business case study from a client of ours that attracted 96 paid trial students within a 14-day period, which is a quiet time and on the back end, managed to convert 70% into full paying members. Now, that is awesome, it's great results, I'm sure you would like it for your business as well, but there's one big problem with this, a few segments, a few parts that contribute to this one big problem.

Firstly, that paid trials system, that paid trial offer is only covering 1 to 2 of 5 segments out of a buying cycle. What does that mean? It means that your prospects are at different stages in a buying cycle. Some are completely cold and they're not interested in martial arts at all, and others are hot and they're ready. And the warm and hot phases are where you can present the offer in front of someone and they're ready. They have all their questions answered about martial arts, they know it's good for them, they know their child is going to get confidence, they know they're going to get self-defence skills, they know the benefits that relate to them and all that they need is the right offer to take them over the edge.

Now, that's awesome and that's awesome if you have a lot of reach. The reach as in, you have a big market to get your message out to, like you live in a big city. But what if you are in a smaller segment of the market, in a small town? How quickly are you going to burn out just putting that paid trial offer in front of someone? So you're going to need to think a lot deeper and you're going to have to think of how you can cover that cold and cooler type market and swing them to the benefits of martial arts. That comes with a content marketing strategy, which we're not going to talk about right now. So that's one part of it.

The next thing you've got to look at is pre-frame. Pre-frame meaning, what has that person seen or heard about your business before that they see the offer. If your brand is not familiar or you have a bad reputation, or people just don't know anything about you, there's a lot more steps in the process before you can actually put that good offer in front of them, before they are going to cross the line and make that buying decision. And that comes to the one biggest problem, which is having no strategy. No strategy for how you market your business online. And it's not your fault because there's not a lot of this information out there.

And where you can find that information, it's normally not applicable to your martial arts business. And that puts you on the hunt, because now you go to Facebook groups and forums, you try and get information and you get a little bit here, and you get a little bit there and you try and piece it together, but it's not really a strategic approach from one end to the other that puts things in line, that helps you position yourself as that market leader and helps you attract the top leads and be the market leader within your area.

And so that is where I want to help you. I want to help you with a strategy, a strategy that you can use, that you can apply to marketing your business online that's going to benefit you for the long haul. So I'm not just talking about quick tricks, I'm not talking about a clever ad and a clever strategy and a clever trick, because yes, those things can help you, but if it's not congruent with a formal strategy, then that's what you're going to be always doing.

You're always going to be looking for that next quick trick, that next quick fix to help you grow your business. And it's a tiring approach. So I want to show you a strategy that you can apply for the long haul that's going to help you attract leads and help you position yourself as the market leader, as the go-to martial arts school within your area.

So if you want to jump on the web class, we're going to be doing this live, it's going to be a live interactive web class. You can go to martialartsmedia.com/workshop, or wherever the link is around this video if you're watching it.

Thanks, I hope to see you in the web class, I hope to help you grow your business – 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.

22 – How To Have Simplicity And Clarity In Martial Arts Marketing

January 11, 2017 by George Fourie

Keep your martial arts marketing activities simple, clear and specific with these key tips from the tropics.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

The art of simplicity and clarity within marketing your martial arts school
Why you should never rely on assumptions
The power of using deadlines within your offers
And more

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

TRANSCRIPTION

You've got to be so clear and so simple with your marketing. You know as a business owner, you tend to assume that people understand what you're trying to say and who it's for.

This is George Fourie from Martial Arts Media. And here's a bit of a different podcast for you. So I'm standing too… And if you're listening to this I suggest you head over to martialartsmedia.com and watch the video. But I'm standing on a very remote island in Indonesia.

It's the island of Nias, we came here for a couple of days to really relax. And believe me, there's not much you can do other than relax if you're looking for all your first world fixes of technology in busy shops. You're not going to find that here. There is literally nothing. And you know before we booked this place, the resort owner told us, “look, nobody really comes here this time of year.” So you've got to have it all to yourself. You are going to have the whole beach to yourself. And I thought Yeah OK. But. Probably not true.

But we came here and we literally have this resort to ourselves and it's not very big but it… You could see in the background here. There are a few; there are three chalets there between all the coconut trees situated within nature. So that's the spot. And I'm just quickly going to do a swing around. We literally do have this entire beach all to ourselves. And yes it's a bit cloudy and rainy today. But nevertheless we got here in the first few days and there was the sunshine and there was nobody here. There's absolutely nobody here and it's just delightful.

So to get the message of this podcast is. We arrived at this place. And as I said we came here to relax and we've really done that and it's made me reflect just on different things that we've done over the last year and going into the new year depending on when you're watching or listening to this. Just reflecting on different things that we will be doing and how we will be helping with martial arts school owners build and grow through the means of the Internet.

And coming to this village is one message that really resonated with me is just the message of simplicity and clarity. You know my beautiful girlfriend and I took a walk down to the village. A village you can't even explain it as a village here because you walk down a road with a lot of potholes. There are only a few bikes I haven't seen a car in about five days. I haven't heard it in five days. This is pretty much what we've heard all the time and I hope you can hear my voice but just the sound of the ocean.

Walking down the street there are just remote little huts. Just little huts where people live and I'll include a few of the videos and clips on this on this page and you can have a look but it just fascinated me how happy everybody is and everybody's waving.

And because we are the only tourists, we are literally only tourists on this island; people are just amazed and fascinated by us. They’re waving and they getting all ecstatic and it's kind of weird.

But it's really kind of cool in a way as well. And just see how these people live a simplistic life. The kids are running around, they're playing in the dirt. They're having fun. Nobody's worried about charging an iPod or an iPhone or sitting on Instagram or Facebook. It just doesn't exist in this place and people didn't care for that. Their main concern is just living and being happy and having a simplistic life and living on this beautiful island where they can eat coconuts every day and just live a healthy life and have fun.

And just looking at this and see how simplified life is here, it just resonated with me how we complicate life to have fun. The way we try and have fun, the way we do all these first world type of activities. You know, we need money to go to entertainment centres or things like that. That's just not something here. People just have fun with what they have with who they are. Appreciate the people around them.

So I want to tie this back into marketing, of course, which is the message of simplicity and keeping things simple. We had some huge success at the end of last year with one of our clients and it's something that we do with paid trials. And creating a clear message for the right target market and the right audience. And something I learned and gathered from that is you've got to be so clear and so simple with your marketing.

You've got to be so clear and so simple with your marketing. You know as a business owner you tend to assume that people understand what you are trying to say and who it's for. But if people don't read it, even it's the simplest thing and doesn't absorb what that message is, then they don't get the message. And it's as simple as saying who it's for. I'm not saying look this program is for kids or it's for adults. But saying this is for kids who like to do this or these adults who want a break from work or want to do something like this or want to be in a different environment after work and relieve stress.

Be specific. Specific to who it's is for and who it's not for. Then if you are creating a paid trial, make sure you put a deadline on it. Make sure that people have an urgency to take up this offer. Doing that, you are able to create that urgency and people will take up the offer where they… if there is no reason for them to do it right now, they will procrastinate and do what they do all the time. That's just what people do. We tend to procrastinate. So that's it. If we are creating the paid trial type of offer, something that we've created very successfully for our clients, let's do something with a great deadline. Be very clear on who it's for who it's not for. And get your message out there.

If you need any help with that, get in touch with us on martialartsmedia.com. I'm happy to help. I'm going to enjoy the rest of the, well I wanted to say the sunshine but, if you look at the back there these storms have been really unpredictable and they, they creep in when we least expect it. Behind me you can see there's sort of a point there which is awesome surf break. And we took a walk out there earlier but a bit too messy to surf today, but we were halfway through and the storm just hit us, which was rather fun because it's warm weather and it's just kind of soaking it up.

But there you go. That's the message. We'll be back with a normal podcast by the end of next week. Have a good week. Happy New Year. 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.

15 – Martial Arts Advertising Ideas: Google Adwords vs. Facebook Marketing

November 8, 2016 by George Fourie

Looking for martial arts marketing ideas? Google Adwords and Facebook ads are the big players. George Fourie shares the core differences.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

The key difference between Google Adwords and Facebook Ads
Why one click doesn't help you generate leads anymore
How to focus on multiple touch points to engage your leads
All martial arts marketing ideas are worthless without this (HINT: Remarketing)

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

TRANSCRIPTION

Good day everyone, it’s Facebook marketing, SEO: should you be doing all of this for your martial arts school, what should you be doing, what shouldn't you be doing, what is the differences, can they work together – let's discuss.

I'm George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com. In this video, I'm going to be talking about Google AdWords, should you be doing it, how does it compete with something on Facebook, what is SEO and all these fancy things. How do they work together and what strategies should you be looking out for where you implement this different marketing on these different platforms. So let's look at a comparison.

Google and Facebook. Google: firstly, Google has a whole different way of advertising and marketing, because when you go to Google, you've got the intent. You've got intent to find a solution for a problem, you're looking for something. On Facebook, you're not looking for something. You're interacting, you're being social with your friends, you're looking at funny cat videos: you're doing something else than looking for something of martial arts or what it is that you're looking for. So Google has intent and Facebook is more like an interruption type of marketing. You've got to keep that in mind on how you're interacting with people, because if you think about it, it’s going to take someone 6 to 8 interactions with your brand before there's any form of conversion.

And that conversion is not necessarily joining up, that's a conversion of leaving an online inquiry, or picking up the phone and trying to engage with you as such. So the key thing to keep in mind: on Facebook, for example, if the first interaction is an ad, you have risked potential of turning that person off and not being able to take that relationship further, whereas, if you have relevant content for them, something that might interest them and from that lead to an ad afterwards, which is something that you can do, then you have more chance of converting that ad, that person into a lead, by following a different sequence.

Same as with Google of course. With Google, it’s a bit more direct, because somebody is searching for something, so an ad will show up, telling them, “This is what you've searched for,” and if your ad matches what they are looking for, that message-to-market match, then they're going to engage with your page and they are going to more than likely convert.

With both these platforms, you've got to bear in mind that there are multiple touch points. It’s not just going to take that one click and that one view of the ad for somebody to actually convert. So you've got to be covering multiple platforms, and this is where you can have them both work together. This is how you're going to save money eventually on marketing. If you think there're 6 to 8 times that there needs to be an interaction before somebody's going to convert, how are you interacting with your prospect 6 to 8 times? How are you getting in front of them? Offer, offer, offer, offer, or content, value, content, content, offer? You've got to play around with how you are approaching your people so that you are starting by building a relationship and then slowly working towards the conversion.

Let's get back to this multiple touch points. A recent study – and thank you, Ezra Firestone, for this, mentioned that people start a search query on mobile and then they finish the transaction on a desktop. If you think about it, how many people are looking at your martial arts website and they click on the inquiry form and they just look at all this text and now they've got to sit and try ad work it on their phone with their thumbs and people just give up.

If somebody's found your website for the first time on the mobile website, they might not finish that inquiry on the mobile device, so you need a way to actually get them back to the website because chances are they're going to forget. How many times have you looked at a website on your mobile device, thinking that you'll get back to it and then you simply don't? I know I've probably got hundreds of saved things on my Facebook account that I don't even go back to that.

So it’s just something that you do and because of the way technology works, attention spans are just getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. So you've got to keep interacting with people on these multiple platforms and this is why platforms can work together, because if somebody has found you on Google and they looked at your page but they haven't done anything to convert, you can now do something like marketing campaigns, by tracking them through what's called the Facebook Pixel and you can show them ads when they land up on Facebook, so here's you next interaction. So you need all these little elements to work together.

Same as with Google Remarketing: when somebody goes to Google ads and they go away, you can have ads appear on different websites to get them back to your website and make sure that they convert. So if you accompany that type of things with good content – content meaning instructional videos or information that your prospects might be interested in and a good follow up email sequence, then you're touching all these multiple touch points and that is how you're going to have a profitable business and make your ads work and make your ads convert.

That's it – if you've got any questions with this type of thing and you need an help with that, – get in touch with us on martialartsmedia.com – 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.

12 – Why Martial Arts School Owners Fail At Marketing “Tactics”

October 18, 2016 by George Fourie

Struggling with marketing your martial arts school? Maybe it's not your fault, but rather the key elements that are missing.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

Why being a ‘one trick martial artist’ leads to marketing failure
The missing elements that no one talks about
Why your newest offer is not always the answer
Do this one thing prior to your offer to improve your results
The 6 critical elements of marketing for business longevity
And more

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

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, this is George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com and in this video, I'm going to be talking about why most martial arts school owners fail at marketing “tactics”.

Ok, so why do most martial arts school owners fail with marketing tactics? Now, I put emphasis on tactics because it's kind of like being the one trick pony martial artist. There're a few viewpoints on this, but I hope this analogy sort of gets to where I'm going with this.

Imagine you're doing martial arts and all that you do is, you've got one punch – that's all you do. Or you've just got one kick and that's all you've ever learned, you've only learned that one punch or that one kick. What happens if you break that one arm or you break that one leg or something happens? Now your whole game plan, your whole everything that you can do in martial arts is pretty much nonexistent because your one trick has been eliminated. And I see this happening a lot in marketing.

I've been doing this survey, this two-minute survey on the website to gather what pain points people are having about different aspects of marketing and with their business. And something that's been coming up a lot is people saying, let's say Facebook for example: how they started doing Facebook advertising and they're running all these ads and it's awesome and they're getting all these leads and it just dries out – what happens? What happened, it's worked once and now it doesn't work again. Well, there's a lot of things that come into play with that and you can't just be that one trick pony that only does that one thing.

Now, this is something I'm going to hammer on all the time, but go to Facebook right now: have you ever been on Facebook ready to buy or ready to join something? Have you ever gone down that track, especially for someone you're seeing for the first time, a brand that you're not familiar with – have you ever looked at it and said, wow, I just want to buy this! I don't want to look at my friends anymore, I don't want to look at funny videos, cat videos, or whatever it is that you're doing. It takes a lot for you to break that element and switch off and go, ah, I actually want to buy something. Unless it's of course super targeted and super relevant to something that you want, but for the most part of it, you're really doing interruption marketing.

It's a social platform, people are there to connect with friends and watch funny stuff and do whatever they do. They don't really care about your brand, they don't care who you are. And a lot of people don't get this, they think that everybody's just going to stop and bow down to what it is that you offer. But it's just crap, it doesn't work that way. So you've got to match people, you've got to have that message-to-market match, you've got to match people in the frame of mind that they are at and what they're doing and the way you do that is through valuable content.

Now, if you are doing advertising on Facebook and it's working right now and it stopped working, I want you to ask yourself this: have people been turning off to your brand because all that they see from you is ads? I mean, think about it: your market in a certain radius from where your club, your school is positioned, there's only so many people. You're going to very very quickly exhaust that market if you target all those people and all that you do is go offer, offer, offer, and buy it, buy it, sell, sell, join this, this offer, $20, three lessons, four lessons, free offer – whatever it is, offer, offer, offer.

Now, this brings up a whole other can of worms, because if all that you're doing is an offer, offer, offer, offer, then all that you're doing is, you're training your people to only respond to offers. So the value has become in the offer and not actually in what you do, whereas the value should really be in what it is that you teach, the principles of martial arts and what people are getting out of it.

But if you are just offer-centric, then you're always going to be depending on new offers and every month be drained, because you've got to get this next big offer up, because people only respond to offers. So what I'm getting to with all this is, it comes with a good content marketing strategy. You've got to be giving people value and you've got to be covering all bases with all these elements.

Now, I've got a free martial arts business plan that I give away, I talk about 6 elements of marketing. And the reason why that's so important is because it's not just one thing, you can't just focus on this, you can't just focus on that – you need all the elements. You need the converting website, you need to have a form of lead generation, you need a follow-up system and then you need all the social platforms and everything.

And I understand that that's got to be painful for you as a martial arts school owner, because you've got enough on your plate: you've got to run the classes, you've got to run the school, you've got to run the staff. There's so much happening and then, unfortunately, this is only more that I participated other than training martial arts, is this digital world of all these different elements of marketing. Somebody said in a meeting to me the other day, it used to be so easy, you could just put up an ad in the newspaper.

Well, now it's not that easy, but you have the benefit of the internet. It's a lot more to know, but you can just reach so much more people in a shorter amount of time and you're able to track and measure what's working in advertising or not, which is something nonexistent really in a paper type ad or flyer. Not always, but for the most part of it, it's a very hard process.

So to embrace this whole online platform and online marketing thing for your business, you've got to find a starting point, and implement that, but you've got to be able to adapt, because if the only thing that you're doing is putting the ads in front of people's faces, they're going to turn off from it. And now you have lost complete opportunity to connect with this person because you didn't establish the value first.

You started with an offer – offer, offer, offer, no value, where you reverse that process: start with the value, give content, give people education about what it is that you're doing in your marketing and from that point, make your offer. But it's the same thing if people walk through the doors and you say: offer, this is how much – there's no relationship, there's no connection. I mean, who's really going to jump to the offer? People want the relationship first, and then they make decisions afterward.

So I hope that helps – look, depending on the time you're watching this, I've put together a survey. It will take you about two minutes, it's for school owners like yourself, it's just to establish what the different pain points are that you are having in the marketplace. And I want to put together a web class which, depending on when you're watching this, could be live already right now.

If you're not, I would love for you to take this survey, martialartsmedia.com/survey. So that's martialartsmedia.com/survey. If you can, help me out with that, much appreciated. It will take you about two minutes, you can keep it anonymous if you want, but that's going to enable me to learn about what the problems are that you're having, like this video, which has inspired this video. And I could put together a complete web class and help you with the problems that you're facing day-to-day in your martial arts school.

I hope that it helps, thanks a lot – I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers!

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

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10 – Should You Use A Facebook Profile Or Page (Or Both) For Marketing Your Martial Arts Gym?

October 4, 2016 by George Fourie

Many Martial Arts Gym owners use a personal Facebook profile for their marketing. But what are the consequences of doing this?

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

Costly consequences of having a profile for your martial arts business
The awkward Facebook friend request
What is Edgerank and how it controls who sees your post
Why people don't see your Facebook status updates
Why you can't scale a Facebook profile
How to segment your friend lists for different posts
And more

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

TRANSCRIPTION

GEORGE: Hi, this is George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com. In this video, I'm going to be talking about should you have a Facebook profile for your martial arts business, or should you have a Business Page and what's the difference: should you have both, what should you be doing in this scenario?

Ok, so should you have a Facebook Profile for your martial arts business, or should you have a Facebook Business Page for your business? I think that kind of answers it: of course you should have a Facebook Business Page, but let's explore the options why.

Now, first and foremost, if you have your business set up in the Facebook Profile section, which is actually just for a normal person, then that is actually against the terms of service for Facebook (see section 4), and they can actually shut your account down. If you're building authority on this account and you engage with people and your members most importantly, the last thing you want is your Facebook account shut down, so you do need a Business Page, instead of the Facebook Profile. Let's also look at the obstacles this is going to cause.

If you look at a Facebook Profile, it's a lot more personal. So for me to be able to connect with you, I need to add you as a friend. And it's a bit hard to be a friend with a business as such. You can be a friend with a person, but to be a friend with a business – it’s a bit awkward.

So what you've got to look at from that point: if I'm a prospect and I'm trying to find out more about your business, now I've got to engage with you on a personal level, which I don't want to do yet – I just want more information about your business. That is why a “like” is so much easier, because I can just like your business and I can follow your updates and find out more information about you, whereas, if I had to add you as a friend – which we are not friends, I'm just searching for information about you, it’s so much more personal. There's just a bit of an awkwardness of actually adding someone as a friend who's not your friend and you just want to find out if this is a business that you actually want to engage with and if you want to take up training.

So you definitely want the Business Page. Now, the Business Page has advantages and initially, it has some disadvantages because Facebook would prioritize your posts from a profile versus a Business Page. Now this gets a bit technical, but there's a thing called EdgeRank. And EdgeRank is basically Facebook's ranking mechanism, how they decide which posts show up in your news feed. So yes, it doesn't mean that if you post something on Facebook that it’s actually going to show up: it means that Facebook still has a look and prioritizes and sees, OK, well – what should be showing up in your custom news feed?

And of course, if you had a sister that just had a baby, or there's a wedding anniversary or your friend has a birthday or something, these are things that are going to show up in your news feed, rather than a business promo special. And this is why it’s so important to have engaging content and be telling people stories. And this is where blogging and things like that come into play. So it’s not just about putting offers up and doing specials and so forth.

But that's going a bit off topic. So essentially, yes: you want to get onto the Business Page. Now, the Business Page is going to allow you to scale, which is something you're not going to be able to do with a Facebook Profile anyway because it maxes out at 5000 friends. As a martial arts business and if you're targeting your local area, you might never need that limit or reach that limit, but nevertheless – do you want a limit on your profile and your reach and do you want to have the risk of having your account shut down as such?

So you've got to get the Business Page setup. If you already have your whole business set up on the profile, you can convert that to a page, OK? That can be done. You are going to see a drop in your reach in the beginning, but hey – you're a business, so you should be extending that reach with paid ads, and that is something that you can do with a Facebook Page, which is something that you can't do with a Facebook Profile.

So that would be the first step for you to do, is to convert it, get it over to a Business Page and start providing value to your audience from that. If you're not getting reach and you've got a promotion, if you've got something that you want your entire audience to see, then it’s very very easy to just hit the boost button and pay $5 or $10 and just make sure that your reach gets extended to people who like your page and their friends and so forth.

OK, so: should you use both? Why not? If you have your business and you are seen as an authority in your industry and people have already added you, then post on the page first, and then go to that page and share those posts onto your personal profile.

So now you're doing both and you're reaching both benefits. And yes, if there are people who are adding you on your personal profile and they're not friends as such, then it also becomes awkward, because you don't want to be rude and you don't want to not add them because you want to connect with them. But you can actually exclude posts from them.

So if you have people who are of a business nature that are adding you onto the personal profile, then add them to a list – there's a way that you can do this and you'll see this if you update on a status, there's a little drop down box that says public, friends, and this basically says who has access to the posts that you are posting.

So if you're only posting it to friends, only your friends will see it. If you want to post in public, it means anybody on Facebook can see it. And then, if you have a segmented list, martial arts students or whatever that are, martial arts prospects, you can have that as a list, and then when you do a status update, you can actually segment to that specific list and make sure that only that audience sees your posts.

All right, I hope that helps. Plenty more tips on how you can build your martial arts business . Go to martialartsmedia.com, I'll catch 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.

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