It’s officially the Martial Arts Holiday Season.
Walk into Wal-Mart, Target, or Home Depot, and the Holiday decorations are front and center (and have been for weeks).
So what does this mean for you and your Academy?
It means it’s time to put together your Holiday Specials – specifically your Black Friday special.
Black Friday may look business-driven, but it’s the consumers who actually started this shopping event. It was first observed in Philadelphia where there was always high traffic the day after Thanksgiving.
SaleCycle reported that in 2019 Black Friday online sales surpassed all previous records, reaching $7.4 billion, up by $1.2 billion from 2018’s $6.2 billion record.
That’s huge!
This is a serious holiday season that every School Owner should observe.
Our Black Friday Tips will help you to get a cut of the Black Friday sales so you can settle in for a prosperous holiday season.
Step 1 – Craft Your Irresistible Offer(s)
Black Friday is really a great time to be selling PAID TRIALS.
People are going to be spending the money. They are PLANNING on spending
money. Ditch the free trial, for now, you can use it again in the future.
Having a lower barrier offer with your Paid Trials is the best way to get people in.
Provide them with a great service, and then convert them to a long-term member.
As a valued Grow Pro Client, you get access to MAIA’s Social Media Calendar
Inside of the Social Media Calendar you will find graphics and promotions that you can use as well.
Some ideas for your Black Friday Specials:
Train for the Rest of the Year
MAIA’s Holiday Trial Special
Be careful to not to make your Black Friday Special too low of a barrier, you’ll end up wasting a lot of precious time with follow-ups with people who never even come in.
Also – don’t forget that you’ve got Cyber Monday right around the corner too!
Step 2 – Increase Your Ad Spend
During the Black Friday weekend, advertisers will be spending way more than usual. And because the Facebook Ads platform is an auction, the more competition, the more money you’ve got to spend.
This typically means that your cost per click (CPC) will be higher than usual. So consider raising your ad spend for Black Friday.
3 – Create a Promotional Content Calendar
As Black Friday gets closer nearer, you’ll want to solidify your overall posting strategy on social media. The easiest way to do this is to create a content calendar with the content you want to share with your followers.
Start your promotions the week of Black Friday so that your followers know that you will be offering some sweet deals!
Create graphics for your social media posts (we love www.canva.com).
Take it a step further and change the cover photo on your business page as well as add a pop-up to your website.
As video is becoming more and more of a non-negotiable, you can also create promotional video clips through www.canva.com as well.
Once you have your content together, go ahead and schedule it out. It will ultimately make your life easier. With the constant need to put out fires as a school owner, having this done ahead of time will ensure that it actually gets posted when it’s supposed to.
Also, don’t sleep on your email and SMS marketing. Craft your email and SMS campaigns and blast them out to your list.
Okay Cris, but what about the big Black Friday bucks?!
Many schools opt to do large Black Friday sales for their programs.
While they can absolutely be successful, we choose to host a Holiday Event on the 1st Saturday in December.
This is the biggest event of the year where we offer the largest discounts on our programming, retail, and special events.
It’s a 4 hour event and in 2015, the first year we ran it, we collected $16,000.
2016, we did 34K.
2017, we did 50K.
2019, we did 69K
My recommendation is to check out the FREE Holiday Kit that myself and Mr. Mike Metzger put together on how to run your Holiday Event.
You can access it at https://www.maiahub.com/centuryholidaykit
