One of the biggest mistakes businesses often make when crafting their marketing message is trying to make a “one size fits all” advertising campaign, often talking about what they do rather then how it helps the customer.
Broad, generic ads are very unlikely to resonate with anyone, and will often produce disappointing results.
Before you can connect with a potential customer, you must first understand them – their interests, their personality and their motivation to make a purchase.
A laser-targeted sales message will make your prospect feel like you are reading their mind. You want to connect to their pain points on an emotional level and provide a solution that resonates with them.
Identifying your Customer Avatar will allow you to do just that.
Also known as a “customer profile,” “buyer profile,” or “buyer avatar,” a customer avatar is a fictional individual who you design your marketing towards, a pretend “ideal client/member,” so to speak.
You are going to have a few different customer avatars in your martial arts marketing, and you will need to decide which one you will want to direct your marketing message to before crafting it.
For example, if you were creating a Facebook Ad targeted at women, the gender alone cannot be what you focus on. If you got more specific, and decided to target Mums you could still have very different profiles;
I purposely used the example of a mum for all the above situations, because clearly even though these 4 women are all mums, they have completely different pain points.
These different pain points cannot be addressed with a generic ad message such as “MUM, CHECK OUT OUR WOMEN’S FITNESS PROGRAM, 3 CLASSES FOR £19.” You can, and most of the martial arts schools I see advertise on Facebook do exactly this, but you are unlikely to get results.
Your marketing message needs to be designed to speak to each one of them in a way that they instantly feel like you are reading their mind.
As you will often see me do in this blog, I am not going to list all the different marketing platforms available both online and offline for you to advertise your martial arts programs. This information is readily available with a quick Google search.
This information is readily available with a quick Google search.
You already know what you are doing to advertise your school, and likely what you are not doing that you know you should be doing, or you wouldn’t be reading this article right now.
Listing a bunch of unlikely platforms that will just make you feel bad about your marketing efforts is 100% not what my goal is here.
So I will just go under the assumption that you do some kind of print marketing, like ad cards to put in neighboring businesses and local events.
You probably dabble in Facebook posts. Some of you will have done paid Facebook Ads with mixed results, and others will have just struggled to get some likes on their page. Sometimes you get 3 likes, some posts are more popular then others.
If you take anything out of reading this blog, this is where I want you to begin the paradigm shift of all your marketing efforts moving forward. Prior to deciding to do any kind of advertising, decide exactly WHO you are wanting to speak to.
Who is the PERFECT RECIPIENT to your marketing message, the person that would benefit most from what you are promoting? Before making any decisions on HOW you will market to them, decide who they are, and work from this starting point.
How do you determine who the ideal person to direct your marketing message is?
You will want to take out a pen and paper and create your customer avatar by addressing your customer’s demographic info (age, gender, income etc), their goals and desires, and most importantly, their pain points.
You also will want to think of their objections to what you are selling! This creates a fairly complete picture of your fictional customer.
I HAVE A STEP BY STEP METHOD THAT I USE THAT I CAN SHARE WITH YOU. It is a simple questionnaire with the exact process I have learned from some of my marketing mentors, that I have revamped to create the ultimate martial arts prospect customer avatar.
Once you understand your customer, you can create copy geared towards their specific needs.
Just as there’s usually not one type of customer, you’ll likely want to create more than one customer avatar.
Determining your customer avatar will be of immense value to you every time you create any kind of marketing for your martial arts school or fitness studio.
If you have done any kind of dabbling in Facebook Ads, you may have seen something called “relevance score”. This is a score that Facebook assigns to your ads, and it reflects how people are reacting to your ads.
If you create broad, non-targeted ads, you will have a low relevance score and your ads will not only be shown less, but they will actually cost you as much as 10x times what an optimised campaign could run you.
It is imperative if you want to advertise online that you understand who your customer avatar is, and have a good understanding of different traffic temperatures, and where your prospect is in the customer journey.
Once you understand who they are, what they desire, and realise that where you are promoting to them determines your marketing approach, you will see your marketing efforts convert in ways you never imagined before.
Please make sure you check out the article on “Understanding Traffic Temperatures” and download our free “Martial Arts Customer Avatar Profiler.” Do this and you will be picking up some brown belt marketing skills even if you are white belt marketer!
Onwards and Upwards!
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