MA Business Success 49: Conventional vs. Modern Marketing Practices - How to Market Your Martial Arts School Effectively

Watch the video below Listed to the podcast below Graham: What are we looking at? Phil: I don't know, there are so many different options out there. Like you said, you can run a competition, a likes and a shares competition. You can run a free membership competition. It could be just literally adverts of advertising your school, a special discount or offer that you're doing. So it's all these. There are so many different opportunities out there to test and measure the market. I don't really have one that works better than anything else. The way I sort of see it, personally, is Facebook marketing is just like any other marketing. It's just another touch point. And as Graham mentioned, we don't put all our eggs in one basket. I think the statistic last time I heard is something about 16 times someone has to see your brand before they make a buying decision. That's why you've got to have at least 10 to 15, to 16 to 20 things going on at once. Which means internally in your school, externally at your school. And I think Facebook marketing and Instagram and all that, that's just another element which is what I classed as new aged marketing. It's just capturing another audience that you may not have captured before. Graham: So Facebook aside, or social media aside, we have some other streams that we use and we certainly have used a system in the past called Mailchimp. And we do email campaigns for I guess email addresses we've collected and picked up all along the way over the 3, 6, 12 months, however. Brief summary, what is an email sort of campaign? What is it about? What does it entail? Phil: Well, again, the email campaign, it depends on what your email is setup like. You make sure you've got it set up probably. And I think I've said it before, you need to have at least three buckets, I guess or three lists, all right? So you have the list of people who you just got their details from, it could be from Facebook, it could be from anywhere, a shopping center display or any where. You've got their details but they didn't join. So these are people who have not even taken one step in your school yet and aren't training at your school. So, there's that list there. You've also got your current member list. So your membership list, your list of people who are currently training, and then you've got your other list, or your other bucket of people who were members and are no longer. Each three of those lists you want to be able to market or promote certain things to those guys, because you want to be out to touch people with different touch points, where they are feeling, what they're doing, what they're seeing, how they're acting in everyday life. Graham: Yep, for those guy that are actually chiming in on this just thinking, "Oh my God, my head's about to explode with this not understanding of social media or these emails campaigns." Look, at TIMA, in our Gold Membership, we have all of this stuff in our social media little pack. So if you want to, team, hit us up on email. Find out a little bit more about it because I certainly know it's not a quick discussion topic and you get your head around it. But certainly we know that we've trial and tested both, very good in success but also I found some, definitely some learning lessons in there as well, too. Phil: And again, at the end of the day, if you're not an expert in it, and you not interested in it, then probably don't do it. Hire somebody else to do it for you. Do what you're good at which is teaching the on the floor or running your business. Do what you're good at doing. If social media doesn't interest you, if it's a grind, if it's a pulling your hair out type of thing, hire someone else to do it. We actually do that, too. We hire out to a company and if you're interested in knowing who we use, we're happy to help you out in that regard, too. Graham: So, new age market, we touched a little bit on the social media aspect. We touched a bit on the automatic emails and whatnot. Is there anything else that sort of falls under that new ways, a little bit more modern? I guess you can always have a new kind of plan or something of the old marketing and call it new, but it's really, the old school stuff is still there. We'll talk about that in a second. But is there anything more in the cyber space or the technology sort of a space in regards to marketing now, as these guys are listening to? Phil: I think new age is literally just online. It just means that it's all online. It's how people get to websites, how people see your brand, how they see the offer, how you communicate with them. I think that's more new age. So, you've got email marketing, anything online, Facebook, Twitter, all that sort of stuff. And your website, how people are getting to your website. Is your website easily seen when someone Googles in "Martial arts, your area," or "Martial arts, your state,"? Graham: Guys, myself and Phil talk about this in many, many podcasts previous to this. Make sure whatever message you are singing or you're presenting, or marketing is consistent with who you are. Don't try and be Joe Blow up the street or somebody that you've seen, heard of in America or in Europe, that it's working for them. You need to make sure it's congruent with you and your brand and what you stand for. So it's really important in that regard. You can have all this social media marketing all of these email campaigns, but if it's not you and it's not your business, you've going to come unstuck in some way, shape or form. Phil: Yes. Graham: So let's go a little bit back to some of the old school methods. Now, I know that we have a ton of ways that we try and generate leads and whatnot within our school. So we've got events. Events that we run and, how do we actually capture that as a lead or a marketing tool in the business, Phil? Phil: Whatever you do inside your school, you've got to think before you do it, "What is this? Is it just to give back to my students? Or is it a way to try and get new members in?" Because if you confuse the two, you confuse the process and you actually lose a little bit of culture and lose a little bit of why you are and who you are to your students. So if it's always about getting new members then people are going to think that you're just grabbing at that money or grabbing at those students. So you're going to make sure that if you are running events, you are doing events that had just for your students and by all means, they can bring a friend, all that sort of stuff as well. Or specifically run events that are for your students, and for them to bring a friend in or multiple friends, or family members where they can then come and experience the joys of martial arts and they have experienced as well. Graham: While it's in my head, Phil, talking about slightly, I don't want to say reinventing wheel by putting a new spin on things. It's a shout out to Kyoshi Kevin Blundell from Kumiai-Ryu. He shared with us a fantastic idea of just using a spin wheel, or more so that gift card. I know that most schools will hand out a V.I.P. card some way, shape, or form. And it gets a little bit old when you're just handing it out. So Kevin shared with us a little bit of an idea of utilizing the spin wheel to really get students excited, qualify them to be able to earn one of these cards, and give them to their mates. Look, I'm not going to give you all the secrets now because we want to obviously contact Kevin if he'll share it with you, or contact us, guys. But we're here to share as much as we can. So [email protected], and drop us a line. We'll certainly give you all the goods in regards to that. It's a big process that takes a little bit longer than what time we have today. But that's just another way on sort of gift cards. Referrals goes along the same way. Gift cards, referrals, referral campaigns. Phil: Referrals are definitely, if you're not getting referrals in schools, something's wrong. And that should generally be a one of the higher stats on getting new members. It's always been at our school and it always is concerning when it drops down because you're always thinking, "Well, aren't they enjoying it? Why aren't they talking to friends about it?" That concerns me. If you don't have referrals, if people aren't talking about your school, if you don't have raving fans, something's wrong at your school. So you need to investigate that a lot further. Graham: Something that Phil and myself do very, very well is don't assume that people are just naturally talking. You've got to encourage them. You've got to prompt them. You've got to remind them that it is okay to share with their friends what they're up to. Because people get busy. They just get in a routine and go, "That's right, I forgot to mention that." But at the end of the day, when they're pumped, it will generally ooze, and people will ask them why they look different or why they're energized. And generally, it's an easy sell to be able to say, "Hey, it's because of my martial arts class, and this is why." So you've got some referrals in there. What about our print marketing? And we head on to our fetes and campaigns shortly, but what about our print marking? What we do nowadays to actually get ourselves out there? And what sort of mediums do we use? For some of our listeners and obviously the viewers, gone are the days of Yellow Pages print ads. Yellow Page, I think they're still around online, but something we haven't done for decades. But what are we actually using now in print? Phil: I don't know to be honest. Graham: Throwing it to him. Phil: Yeah, we are definitely in some of the community type stuff. So just being known within the community. People still read the community paper. People still at schools read the school newsletter. Things like that. So again it's just another touch point but we don't need to go and spend lots of money on print ad, that's for sure. It's got to be either a low cost or a no cost because at the end of the day it's not a massive way of getting people to ring the phone. Graham: Just to add to that, what we are I guess I say currently using as in 2016 is we hit up some of the parenting papers. We hit up some of the targeted adverts in the local papers. It's not something we do all the time. It may be once a quarter if we have an event coming up, let's say a holiday camp, or a lady's personal protection class, and you get a good rapport and a good deal with the paper. It's not something you do want to weekly bases, but certainly it's a targeted ad. We know what our return on investment and also the cost going in to it. So that's sort of where we use that print. I know there's another stream that we use and we print a lot of handout fliers and whatnot for fights, our brand spacing which you hear us talk about that often. So although it's in print, it's not in a magazine, it's not in a newspaper, but it's something that somebody can take with them. A we have probably a dozen or more different forms of different marketing that send the similar message depending on the client we're attracting. So it could be kids. It could be the parents. It could be a youth age that we're sort of targeting, and that print material will be able to take it. And they'll be able to run with that. Anything else that we sort of have? We have 20 different streams going at any given moment. Each having their own intricacies, and to be honest with you, one or two inquiries from each one of any given time is great. So it's certainly having that consistency where we're not relying on one stream, hence why we said we don't put all our eggs in to Facebook marketing. We do it, but we don't do it wholeheartedly, and that's all our marketing budget goes towards. Phil: I think the real message here is within your community, within your area, wherever your school is, we have three schools spanning all over a particular area so we can market quite broad. But at the end the day, you want to be doing many things and not just one thing. If you do put all your eggs in one basket, people will say about it, "What happens if Facebook crashes, or something happens?" The algorithm changes, or whatever, you know what I mean? I don't know about all that type of stuff. I'm not too techy, but you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. You want to just put your marketing out there. You want have really good quality fliers, good imagery, great quotes, good branding, good messages that you put out there, and just be seen every where, from grass signs to wall signs, to your branding on your school, to your social media, to your print ads. It just needs to be out there consistently because you never know when someone's going to see your ad in a paper, then on Facebook, then at an event. Graham: One more thing I'm going to add to this and this is probably a keystone in some of our building of our brand, is business-to-business and building relationships with different organizations and different let's say, school groups. So for example, business-to-business, myself and Phil have had our marketing stream, we are coordinating hand in hand with a movie company over here, or a movie cinema company over here called Grand Cinemas. And they've got six locations across Perth. They hit us up any time there's a kids rated movie that comes out, and says, "Guys, do you want to be on board?" And for example, we just recently had a whole cinema for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. We were able to brand the posters and all this all for zero dollars paid to them. The only cost to us is to print the material and they'll hand it out on our behalf. They'll hand out gift vouchers and whatnot. Plus we've done that with Lorna Jane. We've done that with primary schools, we've done that with high schools. These guys are advocates who are building our brand in the community. We're becoming that go-to school, and it's not just one stream. So that one, business-to-business is a huge one. So, guys, hit us up if you want to find out more because that one there is Pandora's Box. If I talk about it, I'll be here for another 30 podcasts. So guys, hit us up and we'll be certainly happy to help you with that. Phil: Cool. Guys, well that's a wrap for today. Look if you've enjoyed today's podcast give us a thumbs up or thumbs down. If you have any comments or thoughts or any other ways that's working for you, whether it's online social media, new age, conventional, let us know, gang. We'd love to hear from you. We will see you on the flip side and have a fantastic week. Graham: Take care.