| Friend,
Yesterday I established that a lot of marketing sucks. Not just within the martial arts industry, but in general.
And much of that has to do with ad agencies and marketing firms looking to win awards for the prettiest or most clever ads, instead of simply creating ads that sell products and services...
...but some of it has to do with the fact that even the "experts" often have no idea how to create effective marketing.
Which brings me to the first reason why martial arts marketing fails...
REASON #1: WRONG AD/WRONG COPY
"Copy" is the actual content of the ad - the words that make up the message in the ad or marketing piece. Words do the bulk of the selling in any ad, no matter what you might have been told in your college marketing class or in that NPR piece you listened to last week.
Yes, visuals also serve a purpose, and certainly a visual in an ad has to jibe with the copy... but generally speaking, visuals are just window dressing. They don't do the heavy lifting, and they are only there to reinforce the overall theme and message of the copy.
So here's why a lot of martial arts marketing fails:
PRETTY PICTURES, BUT COPY SUCKS.
Yes, it's that simple. A lot of martial arts marketing fails because whoever created the ad doesn't know the first thing about writing good copy.
Case in point - I was hired many years ago to write several sales letters for what was at the time a very prestigious and well-known martial arts industry association, by one of the names you'd immediately recognize as a well-known business consultant.
I slaved for days and days over each of these sales letters, and crafted some really powerful copy using every single copywriting and sales tactic I knew. I also did an incredible amount of research to back up everything I claimed in the sales letters, citing respected sources and using specific numbers to reinforce the claims.
After all was said and done, I wished I had written those sales letters for my own martial art school websites, because I knew they were a lot stronger than the copy I had on my own site at the time.
And guess what? The famous martial arts consultant guy hated the sales letters. HATED THEM.
And you know why he hated them?
Because he didn't have the slightest idea how to write strong sales copy, or what goes into an effective ad!
And here's the kicker... I rewrote a lot of that copy he rejected and used it on my own sites, and those sales letters went on to produce a ton of new business for me over the course of several years.
In the years since, I've written dozens upon dozens of sales letters for martial art schools, mostly in the course of creating martial art school websites for various clients. And I've fixed some pretty hideous copy in my time (along with some really hideous websites).
That being said, you should know that I don't try to build "pretty websites". That's because I know that the website is merely a vehicle to deliver a marketing message.
And while I do build "clean" websites, I'm not going for any graphic design awards when I build a martial art school website.
Nope. What I'm shooting for is a website that doesn't distract from the marketing message (the copy), but instead reinforces it.
Because like I said, the copy is what does the selling on the site. And when you see martial art school owners who were getting anywhere from zero to two or three leads from their site a month go to getting two or three leads a day, you know that it's not just theory that is driving the performance of those sites.
And it's not pretty graphics, either. It's strong sales copy.
But here's the thing that trips a lot of people up who realize that they need better sales copy for their martial art school...
They suffer from a very common disease that afflicts martial arts instructors everywhere, known as "icandoitmyselfitis". Guess what? Doing it yourself is how you ended up with a website that doesn't work in the first place!
The truth is, not everyone is a decent writer. Not that you can't learn how to write strong ads, it's just that it takes time to learn. And, some people will never have the knack for it.
My advice is that you hire someone who knows what they're doing to write your copy for you. Someone who has studied the great copywriters, and who understands how to write marketing copy that works.
Because copy really is the engine that drives every single ad. It's the one thing that will most definitely make or break an ad. And, it's the reason why even an ugly ad or website will often outperform a prettier marketing piece... by a wide margin.
So, get yourself some strong copy for your website and ads. You won't regret it.
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
P.S. - Remember that series I did on copyright a short while ago? I know some of you might be thinking that you'll just copy someone else's copy. Don't. Not only would you be violating someone else's copyright in doing so, but also there's that pesky Google duplicate content penalty. Yep - if your content duplicates that of another site, it can result in a ranking penalty against your site that could tank your traffic. So, make sure you have original content and copy on every single page of your site!
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