This Brooklyn martial arts school is nailing old school marketing. Big time!

 

Tim: G’Day listeners and welcome back to another episode of Australia’s #1 marketing show. I am your host, Timbo Reid, coming to you from Melbourne, Australia, by the way. And you, so much more importantly, are a motivated small business owner ready to crank out some great marketing to build that baby of yours into the empire that it deserves to be. That is what this show is all about. It is there to help you do that. And we are brought to you by the very good folks at NetRegistry, who are there go get your online marketing sorted. So they are there to kind of help you along the journey to building that empire. They can get you domain names, website design and hosting, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, you name it, NetRegistry can sort you out. So head over to NetRegistry.com.au and tell them Timbo sent you.

We have got a very big show today. Oh by the way, welcome to all the flying soloists over at the flying solo community as well.

Big show today. We have got a listener question about launching a new business whilst managing a young family. I have got feedback from a listener who has a physical therapy business, who has achieved some greatness. And I have got a wonderful, oh my God, listen, this guest. This episode was actually meant to be aired in a couple of weeks’ time, but I can’t sit on this interview. It would be doing you an injustice. It is with Carmen from Urban Martial Arts in Brooklyn, New York. And we have a fantastic discussion about the old world of marketing and how it sits alongside the new world of marketing. They are not mutually exclusive. They can work together. It is absolute marketing gold.

Oh, you have got to love that song. Hey, let’s get stuck into a listener question. This is actually quite a long show today, but boys and girls, I promise that really there is marketing gold dripping from the ceiling in this episode. So stick with it. You might have to listen to it in two or three chunks.

Okay, listener question. This is from Carl. Carl says “Hey, Tim. I have been listening back through the episodes in random order and have been really enjoying the variety of guests you have. A bit about me. I run a direct mail business that started in my bedroom three years ago. I now have three staff, got a second office having outgrown the first. While it is not groundbreaking, I am pretty proud given the declining market of snail mail.” Yeah, you should be, Carl. I think all small businesses should stop. We should all stop every now and then and just kind of beat the chest, stand back and look at what we have created. “Having said that, whilst I love my business and my staff, I feel that I am starting to find my passion on a day-to-day basis dwindle, where I am now just working a job.” Well, that’s not good. Got to find your passion, Carl. “My real passion lies in a social enterprise idea I have that aims to assist homeless youths create their own enterprises and break the cycle of homelessness in Australia. My big problem: I have a young family, a mortgage and other day-to-day issues, so I just can’t put it all in the red and take the gamble.” Okay, I know where you’re going with this, Carl. So you’ve got a business, starting to become a job, got a passion, want to know how to launch it. “My question is with my current business not being one that can simply be set on autopilot and left alone and dearly wanting to spend time with my eight month old, how can I get this other business off the ground? My biggest concern, of course, is investing time in what is a great business with a worthwhile cause, but does not necessarily provide me an income, or should it?” That’s a good question, Carl. “I know you might be able to answer this on the podcast,” – oh yes I will – “as my waffling would take on an episode to read.” Hey, Carl, Carl. What about my waffling, mate? “I am hoping you can draw on your experience with Dan from Thankyou Water, etc, etc. I am sick and tired of people telling me about nondisclosure arrangements.” Yeah, don’t listen to them, Carl. “I want to shout this one from the rooftop.” Good on your mate. I will help you shout it.

Carl, four things come to mind, not necessarily ideas, but questions that you need to answer yourself and some resources to look at. Number 1: My question would be why can’t you step back from your current business and automate certain aspects of it? Look, I am sure you’ve looked at it and I am sure like all of us, all our small business owners, we’re control freaks and  our way is the best way, but again, go back and have a look, Carl. What can you automate? Have a really, really hard look. The world of outsourcing, the world of having virtual teams is possible. Yes, there are some things you have to have people on the tolls for close to home, but there are other things that I am sure you can outsource. I love the heart surgeon model. The heart surgeon, where he comes in, he does all the tricky stuff, but he has everyone else do all the rest, the prep, the cleanup, the stitch up, and he just kind of focuses on that five minutes of fame, if you like. Have a think about that, Carl. Number 2: Why can’t the new business provide an income? Absolutely it can. Think of it as a social enterprise and not a charity. You are still doing good and reflect back on the interviews that I did with Rebecca from Streat and Daniel from Thankyou Water, both social enterprises, both people who chased their dreams down the rabbit hole and brought some amazing brands to life. I’ll put links to those in the episode show notes of this show, episode 163. Number 3, Carl: What does your minimum viable product look like for this new idea? Minimum viable product, you’ve heard me talk about it before, it’s a concept from the Lean Startup book, and it talks about just getting your product, your idea to a point that is minimum viable and get it to market in a very, very simple form that you’ll look back on 12 months and go “Gee, wasn’t that a joke, but boy oh boy, at least we got it to market.” And then you let the market sharpen your offer, so you sharpen your offer on the stone of the market. Don’t wait until it’s perfect. Don’t wait until every “t” is crossed and “i” dotted. Just get your minimum viable product to market. My last point, Carl: Be careful who you listen to, mate. There are a lot of people who will say “You’re crazy, you’ve got a good business, you’ve got a young family, you can’t do that.” Just be careful who you listen to, Carl. People don’t like change. There will be family members who just don’t want to see you change from what you’re doing because they’re comfortable with “Carl, the direct mail guy.” So be careful who you listen to, use your judgment. Cash flow is important, but so is spending time with a young family. But when you are passionate about something, your family is going to love it.

Carl, thanks for the question, mate. Listeners, if you have got a question, head over to SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com. You can send me a voicemail which I can play on the show. Or you can do what Carl does, send me an e-mail and I will read it out and answer it, or at least I’ll try to. Thanks, Carl.

Alrighty. A couple of educationals coming up, which as you heard me before, as small business owners, we should never, ever stop learning. Every now and then, you’ve got to take the foot off the pedal and go and learn something new and grow. I’ve got a Content Marketing Accelerated Program coming up on Wednesday, December 4, between 9 and 11. It is delivered via Webinar, so you can join in from anywhere in the world. That’s 9 until 11, Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time. Content marketing has been so, so good for my business in the last four years. It’s increased inquiry out of control, it’s got my Google rankings on page one for key searched terms. It’s just been the best marketing that I’ve done. It’s been a buzzword for 2013, but you know what team, it is going to be a marketing priority for 2014. Content marketing is here to stay. The most recent update to the Google algorithm, called Hummingbird, demands that we that we create content that is relevant and useful. Join me for this webinar on Wednesday, December 4, from 9 until 11 Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time. Head over to SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com and click on the webinar banner at the top of the page and you can join in very, very quickly. I would love to see you there. Already, lots and lots of virtual seats are being filled

NetRegistry has also got something on December 4. Who would have thought? Theirs is a live event and it is free for small business owners in the Sydney area. It’s an online marketing class run by Sam Shetty, their online marketing guru. He is going to go through search engines, online marketing best practices, social media, how to implement an online marketing strategy, conversion rates and key factors in online marketing success. It is free for Small Business Big Marketing, $99 for others. It’s 10 to 1 on Wednesday, 4 December in Broadway in Sydney. Head over to NetReg2.EventBrite.com.au and use the secret code SBBM13. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that as well. As I said team, we can never stop learning, so I would love to see you on the webinar. If you can’t make the webinar, you want to head over to NetRegistry and join Sam. Either way, you are going to learn lots and grow that little business of yours into an empire.

Here we go team, let’s get stuck into this interview. I am so excited about this, I couldn’t hold it. I had to get it out to you. Thank you Melissa Brisbane, one of our long-time listeners of this show, who suggested that I speak to my guest today, Carmen Sognonvi, from Urban Martial Arts in Brooklyn, New York. And Melissa just thought she would be a great guest for this show. Now, let me tell you about Carmen. Carmen is the owner and the GM of Urban Martial Arts in Brooklyn, New York. She runs it with her husband. She also blogs at CarmenSognonvi.com, she will talk to you about that later on, where she shares tips on running a successful small business, a bricks and mortar small business nonetheless. And when I spoke to her earlier on to see whether she would want to come on and have a chat, she said that she would love to. She said the one thing that I am very passionate about is sharing with business owners that old-school marketing techniques like flyers, signage and booths still work incredibly well, even in the digital age, and especially if you link them to your online efforts, you can really turbo charge your results. I am so excited about this because we do have a lot of discussion around the new world of marketing, which is invariably online. But boy oh boy, when you get your online working alongside your offline, your new school working alongside your old school marketing, boy oh boy, you are going to see some unbelievable results. And Carmen, this is almost a “How to,” this is almost a lecture. Get your pen and paper out guys because I am really excited about it. And hang around afterwards because I have summarized my sort of top however many tips that I got from it for you at the backend of this interview, which goes for about I think it is about 50 minutes or so, but as I said, grab a cuppa, pen and paper and here is Carman.

Carmen Sagnonvi from Urban Martial Arts in Brooklyn, welcome to Small Business Big Marketing

Carmen:       

Thanks for having me.

Tim:   

Absolute pleasure to have someone on the other side of the world come over and talk to us about what is going to be pretty much an old-school marketing conversation. But before we get stuck into that, Carmen, tell us about what Urban Martial Arts is and how it came about.

Carmen:     

Sure. So Urban Martial Arts is a martial arts school that my husband and I run. We opened it in 2008. We offer karate classes for kids and then for adults we do fitness kickboxing.

Tim:  

Pretty much your family-run business?

Carmen:    

Absolutely.

Tim:      

Okay. And it is for all ages too, yeah? So from kids to grownups?

Carmen:     

Exactly. We usually start kids at around four and up and then we train them all the way through to when they are adults.

Tim:       

Now I was watching, well, I hate that word, corporate video, but it is a bit of a story. You’ve got a nine-minute video on your site that talks about the business and how it came into being. Interesting story. Your husband had a car accident. He was working in corporate America. He had a car accident and a bit of an “aha” moment.

Carmen:    

Yes, exactly. My husband and I, this was before we were married, before we had any babies, we were both working corporate jobs and we also were both working actually one-to-two side jobs on top of that. So he was working security at a restaurant and bar, I was doing some hostessing on the side and I was also actually launching kind of a separate career also working also blogging and speaking about race. I was very involved in racial justice activism. One night, he was coming home from having worked what was probably close to an 18-hour day and he got into a really bad car accident. He got out of the car, the car was totaled and miraculously he came out without a scratch. The emergency responders couldn’t believe what they saw. I remember he came home that night and it was really one of those classic wakeup calls where we realized “You know, we really need to make a change in what we’re doing,” because it just felt like we were like hamsters on the wheel; we were running and running and running, but not getting anywhere and we were really working hard but not smart. And then also for Serge in particular, he also felt like he needed to start doing something where he was really making an impact on people’s lives. He felt like that was really missing for him. And so he actually started training again in martial arts. He had been doing karate since he was about 10 years old, but he had taken a break from it when he entered the working world. So he started training again and six months after that car accident, we actually signed a lease on the karate school. Then a few months after that, we opened our doors. So it was really kind of all stemming from that one incident.

Tim:     

How inspiring. It is interesting here you talk about that whole escaping the corporate shackles thing. It has been a bit of a theme on this show the last few weeks. You probably don’t know, but when I introduce this show, I welcome back all the motivated small business owners, yet I know for a fact that there are a lot of people listening to this show who are trapped in the cubicle, as I say. So hearing that kind of story and having the courage to actually go and chase a dream is I think fantastic.

Carmen:     

Yeah. And I think too those people who are still trapped in the cubicle, sort of speak, you can absolutely do it, but I would also say, just to play devil’s advocate, I am a big fan of hanging on to your day job as long as you can. Think of it as a way to fund your business. It is just a source of financing. Work you day job as long as possible. In our case, Serge had actually kept his day job for the first six months of our business and I hung onto mine for the first year and a half. It was really at that point that we felt like “Okay, we feel comfortable letting that go now and just living off of the business.” And I think that because we did that, it put us in a better financial place and we were able to kind of operate from a place of financial strength and not making decisions based on fears, that can ultimately I think have a good long-term impact on your business, just something to think about.

Tim:     

Yeah, now interesting. Well, there are two sides of the coin, isn’t it. There is the insurance almost of maintaining that day job and allowing it to bankroll what it is you want to do, your dream, and then there is the other side of the argument, which is if you are going to really lean into something and chase it, then you have got to have a 100% focus on it, so you’ve got to have the courage to leave your day job, not have that insurance. But, you know, cash flow is the reality there.

Carmen:    

Yeah, yeah. And I think you would find the right time for yourself.

Tim:   

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Now, you’ve got this martial arts school, I was going to say karate school, but it’s a martial arts school, it’s going along really nicely and part of that I imaging there is no shortage of martial arts schools around Brooklyn and the greater New York area. You spend a lot of time and you’re very passionate about old-school marketing techniques, which really excites me because we spend a lot of time talking about online marketing techniques. Why the passion?

Carmen:   

Sure. I have to admit I am also a big fan of online marketing. I am a bit of a geek when it comes to that, and so I am thoroughly onboard with online marketing. But I think what sometimes people forget is that offline methods are still incredibly effective. Just because you’re doing a lot of online marketing, that’s great. But that does not mean you should sort of throw out the offline baby with the online bathwater. So you want to keep that offline piece. And you know what, I recently did an analysis of our customers and kind of where everyone comes from and I found that, and this is today, a third come from word of mouth or referral, a third come from online marketing, and then another third come from offline marketing. So if we were not doing the offline piece, our business would be a third smaller than it is. So, I think that is really something powerful to think about.

Tim:    

Yeah, absolutely. So let’s talk offline techniques. What are you specifically doing?

Carmen:     

Sure. Well, I think the three most sort of major offline or old-school marketing techniques we use are promotional booths, flyers and signage. And I will talk about promotional booths first. By that, I mean any kind of an event, where you have a table or booth where you’re promoting your business. So you are not selling anything at the event, but you’re really there to kind of let the people know that you are here, collect leads. So if you’re in a business to business situation, that is very often a trade show. If you are business to consumer, that could be any other kind of community event. So for example, for us we do a lot of street fairs. Especially in the summer time, there are a lot of street fairs all over New York City and so we will work a lot of those street fair where we’ll have a table and we’re really getting out there promoting our business. And I think that with promotional booths, one of the mistakes that a lot of companies make is that they focus on giving out tchotchkes. I know that’s kind of an American term, so tchotchkes meaning promotional items, so pens with the name of your business on it, stress balls.

Tim:            

How do you spell that?.

Carmen:     

I believe that’s a Yiddish word. I think it’s T-c-h-o-t-c-h-k-e-s. Maybe some of your listeners will correct me; something like that.

Tim:    

We call that sort of merchandise-type thing, so like here’s a stress ball, here’s a pin, here’s a key ring, boring.

Carmen:       

Yes, exactly. Well, boring, but also there is a bigger problem. We actually made this mistake when we first got started. The first year we were in business, we attended the street fair that was really the biggest event for the neighborhood that we were in, which is called Ditmas Park, it’s part of Brooklyn. And so this particular street fair, we felt like “Okay, we really need to go all in because this is our big break.” And so I had this brilliant idea to have a couple of hundred red tote bags made, great red with our logo really big on it and I thought “You know what, we’re going to give out these tote bags and everyone’s going to walk around with this tote bag and they’re going to be like walking billboards for our business.” So it went well in a sense that the tote bags were incredibly popular. We were out of them within an hour or two. They were walking around with our logo. However, what I realized is that there was nothing about giving out tote bags that was helping us narrow down to our ideal prospect for either karate or kickboxing classes. So we were not attracting the demographic that was really interested in our classes. Instead, all we were doing was attracting the demographics of people that were really interested in free tote bags. So what I really strongly advise businesses to do instead of just handing out stuff is instead to offer some kind of a trial or sample of whatever is your product or service. In our case, we did group classes. Whenever we do a street fair, we’ll offer two free weeks of either karate or kickboxing classes. The reason that’s so much more effective is now you’re immediately narrowing it down to the people that are actually interested in taking classes with you.

Tim:     

Yeah, gotcha.

Carmen:    

Not everyone is going to follow through with it, but at least you’re now starting to narrow it down. And then, even those who don’t actually sign up for a program, you can still continue to market to them because you have their contact information.

Tim:      

So Carmen, are you signing them up there and then at the information booth or are you just handing out some kind of coupon to get them to come down at some point in time.

Carmen:        

We are not signing them up into an actual membership, but what we are doing is collecting their name, e-mail and phone number, and then we basically let them know that “Hey, we’re going to call you next week to schedule your first class.” And then also, to that point, one of the biggest mistakes that also people make when they go to an event and they collect a lot of leads is that they don’t do any follow up. This is something that I’ve fallen victim to as well. You come home with a few stack of business cards, let’s say go to a trade show or in our case it’s a big stack of names, and we don’t do anything. So one of the ways that we are really combining old-school marketing with new-school marketing is we use the software which, you may be familiar with it, some of your listeners may be, but is called Infusionsoft, which is essentially kind of a CRM software or they call it all in one sales and marketing software. So what we do is we kind of create an internal form that just has the basic contact information. So when we come home from a fair, I’ll give the stack of leads to one of our staff members. All they’ll do is just input the data into this form so they’re in our database, but the magic happens behind the scenes. So basically I’ve programmed this web form to automatically tag this person so that we know exactly what program they’re interested in and we know that they came from this particular street fair. It automatically adds them to our e-mail newsletter. So the next time we go to send that out, they’ll automatically receive it without me having to do anything extra. And then it’ll also automatically send them a text message and an e-mail from us saying “Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you at the street fair today. We’re going to get in touch with you next week to schedule your first class. But in the meantime, check out this link for more information about our program.

Tim:        

And they opted in at the fair?

Carmen:    

Yes, exactly.

Tim:          

By you saying “Hey, can we grab your name and e-mail in exchange for a free trial. We’re going to put you in the database and expect to hear from us on e-mail and by phone?”

Carmen:    

Exactly. So now the worst case scenario, even if you completely drop the ball and you totally forget to call anyone back to schedule their two free weeks of classes, they’re still going to hear from you because they are automatically subscribed to your e-mail newsletter which they’ve opted into. So that means that you’re not going to fall into this trap of forgetting to follow up with people.

Tim:     

Beautiful. I like that and Infusionsoft is a very cleaver way, because you are not just dumping them into one big list either, Infusionsoft allows you to segment quite deeply. How are you segmenting your list?

Carmen:   

Yeah. It’s very good at segmenting. We use tags so we capture as much information as possible. We’ll always tag them based on how they came to us, so whether they came to us through an event or through an ad or they came to us through a flyer. We note down what program they’re interested in, so are they an adult interested in doing kickboxing or do they have a child and they want to put their child in karate. Once they’re in our database, then we also do a lot of other stuff. So we’ll sort of have some automation going on with certain links in the e-mails that we send out. If they click on an article let’s say about weight loss, then we’ll tag them that way so we know that “Okay, this person is kind of interested in weight loss.” So we do a lot of fancy things like that. But I would say primarily the important thing here is how did they come to us, what was the source and then what program are they interested in.

Tim:   

Because all of a sudden, that is really interesting, because it allows you to create very tailored messages, so it’s not just in the fact that you are sending something to a group of like people, like for example parents wanting their child to start a martial arts course, you can then craft a message that is very tailored and personal.

Carmen:       

Yeah, absolutely. And then it also really helps you figure out on the marketing side what the ROI of each marketing thing that you’re doing.

Tim:       

Okay, so information booths, I like that. Tell me, just with that, you go to those street fairs or expos or whatever they are with, it may be just a table and a couple of staff members or have you got some additional things where you’ve swooped it up and you’ve got printed fold-out signage and all sort of branding going on as well?

Carmen:   

We do both, most of the events that we work; it’s a very simple setup so we just have a folding table and we have a vinyl banner that covers the front of the table. We do have our flyers there. We do hand out some of them. But really the primary goal whenever we work an event is to collect leads, not to just hand out flyers. One of the mistakes that I see a lot of businesses do is if they’re at an event, whoever is working it just sits behind the table. This is something that you should avoid. So whenever possible, if you’re working an event, it’s best to have at least two people, so one person should be at the table and the other person, I recommend, should just be circling, walking around the whole event with a clipboard and forms and just going up to people saying “Hey, hi. How are you? I am Carmen from Urban Martial Arts. We’re offering everyone two free weeks of classes today. If you’re interested, can I just get your name, number and e-mail and we’ll call you next week to schedule your first class.”

Tim:   

Carmen, I love this. Melissa Brisban, who introduced me to you, a listener of my show, and suggested that I talk to you. One of her comments in the e-mail was “This business is a small ma and pa business as you in your own words say, but they’re punching way above their marketing weight,” which I love. You know you are. You’re a business on the street in Brooklyn, but I can already see why she’s saying you appear so much bigger than you are, which is kind of an interesting strategy in itself. Is it something that you try to be or it’s just by nature of the type of marketing that you do, you appear bigger than you are?

Carmen:    

That’s interesting. I think that when my husband and I first opened the business, we felt very strongly that we wanted to really have this school have the warmth and friendliness of a mom and pop business, but then the professionalism and the level of service that you would expect from a Fortune 500 company. So when we opened the business, we were very deliberate about that. Even when in the startup days when we had very little money, we really invested some money in quality graphic design. We had a really nice logo made; we invested in things like colored uniforms as opposed to the traditional white karate uniforms, which everyone else around us was doing. We invested in getting the customized with a big logo on the back so when students were walking back and forth from class, people could see them and say “Oh, wow. They go to that school.” So we were really focused on differentiating ourselves from the beginning, in fact so much so that a lot of people, when they would first walk in would say “Oh, so where are your other locations, where are your headquarters,” because they would think that we were a big franchise when really it was just us. I don’t think that we necessarily want to appear big, but we do want to be professional. So I think we are able to kind of strike that balance between that. Then also in a lot of our communication and our e-mail newsletters, every e-mail newsletter starts off with a note from me and Sensei Serge, which we call him Sensei Serge at the school, and it’s got a picture of us, so it’s very clear that we are a mom and pop store. So we are able to kind of have some of the professionalism in terms of the visuals, but then the experience when you come in is very personal. We know everybody by their name, we send people birthday cards, so they kind of have that warm feel.

Tim:          

You know, I love it Carmen because all these things that you’re talking about, they’re not costing a lot of money, they’re decisions. They’re decisions around discipline and consistency. The decision around the uniform was a color one and there was a smart strategic reason why you had color uniforms versus the traditional white. That’s still going to cost, there was going to be a cost attached to them, and I am guess that the cost differential was either nothing or very little. So some of these marketing ideas, it’s just smart marketing as opposed to “You know, we’ve got to have deep pockets.”

Listeners, I am talking to Carmen from Urban Martial Arts in Brooklyn and I love speaking to someone in Brooklyn because so far we’ve had the mandatory Brooklyn siren police car drive past over in the background.

Carmen:       

I am sure you’ve heard that.

Tim:     

I am guessing you live near the subway, because I hear the rumbling trains go past.

Carmen:

No, shockingly that’s just cars.

Tim:

Oh, wow. Big cars.

Carmen:

It’s that noisy.

Tim:   

Alright. Let’s get stuck back. Information booths, we’ve talk automation with Infusionsoft so that already you’re integrating the old with the new. You mentioned a couple of other old-school marketing techniques, Carmen, in signage and flyers. Do you want to just touch on what you do there?

Carmen:    

Yeah, sure. Let’s talk about flyers. Flyers are I think the ultimate old-school marketing technique. But they still work incredibly well.

Tim:        

Do you drop them out of planes and they just fall all over the streets of Brooklyn?

Carmen:      

Yes. That’s all we do.

Tim:  

Right. I thought so.

Carmen:   

When we first opened the school in 2008, within the first six months, we got from 0 to 100 students. At the time we didn’t think that was particularly impressive, but later on when we got to know other martial arts schools and kind of became more involved in the industry, we realized that a lot of martial arts schools had been around for 10 years and had never broken the 100-student mark. The thing that is interesting is that we actually got our first 100 students purely through these old-school marketing tactics. We had a website, but it was doing nothing. We essentially got our first 100 students just through flyers, actually, which was what was the biggest marketing push that we were doing at the time. It is still very powerful, even to this day.

Tim:     

Letterbox drop or what were you doing?

Carmen:  

We were doing a lot of different things with flyers. Hand to hand distribution is something we would do a lot of. I think one of the mistakes that businesses make is that they just hand out a flyer to anyone with a pulse. What you may not realize is that flyering, even though it’s old school, it actually allows you to do some pretty sophisticated demographic and geographic targeting that would cost you a fortune if you were doing it through direct mail. Let me give you a very specific example. One of the programs that we have at Urban Martial Arts is we have an afterschool program where basically we pick up kids from a few of the neighboring schools, we walk them over to our location, they get karate classes five days a week, they stay until 6 o’clock so they’re able to work on their homework and then parents come and pick them up. So it’s kind of a combination between martial arts classes and then also an alternative to babysitting for parents who need to work late. For this particular program, we know exactly who our target customer is. It’s a parent with elementary school-aged kids, so meaning kindergarten through fifth grade; they are a parent that works a nine-to-five job and that is really our target customer. Everyone September, the first week of school, we do a big flyer ad push for this particular program. And so what we’ll do is we’ll go to five schools that we pick up from and we’ll hand out flyers to the parents in the morning as they’re dropping off their kids. There’s a reason that we do it in the morning versus the afternoon. The parents that are dropping off their kids in the morning are more likely to be our target audience than the ones that are picking up at 3 o’clock, because if you’re able to pick up your kid at 3 o’clock, you probably don’t work a nine-to-five job or you don’t need our service because obviously you’re able to get there are 3 o’clock. And so already by picking the timeframe, we’re narrowing in on our audience. Now, as we’re standing there handing out flyers, if we see a single guy walk past with no kids in tow, we’re not going to give him a flyer. If we see a dad walk past with let’s say an infant and a two year old, we’re not going to give him a flyer because visually it doesn’t seem like he has elementary school-aged kids; the kids are too young for our program. Let’s say we see a mom walking past with a six year old and an eight year old. Now we know those kids are the right age for our program, but let’s say she’s in her pajamas, we’re probably not going to give her a flyer because it doesn’t look like she’s on her way to work. She probably doesn’t work a nine-to-five job. She may work. She probably may work nights or something like that, but she doesn’t work a nine to five. So just by sort of eyeballing who it is that you’re handing out flyers to, you’re already able to target them if you have an idea of demographically who’s your ideal customer.

Tim:

You are cleaver, you and Sensei Serge. I mean they’re targeted flyer dropping, I love that. In fact, I’ll build on that idea and if you do walk past a single block or if you do walk past the mom with the young kids, then maybe you should have secondary flyers on your back pocket ready for them as well.

Carmen:          

Sure. And we do. It’s not to say we don’t give them anything. But, you know…

Tim:    

I love that. I often talk on this show, Carmen, about message versus medium, so it sounds like you’ve really nailed the medium. The message on those flyers is just as important, because okay cool, you’re targeting a particular demographic of parents dropping their kids off at elementary school and that’s who you’re after. But what appears on those flyers is really critical, because at that point, they’re going to read it once they arrive at work or at some point. Do you spend a lot of time mulling over the copy?

Carmen:    

Somewhat. Yeah. I think that with our flyers, we always have one large photograph rather than a bunch of little photographs they can’t see very well, so one big eye-catching image. I am sure you’ve already talked on this show many times about the importance of having an offer and a call to action, so we definitely have that on our flyer. But then also, what we actually do is we specifically design our flyers so that they’re really designed to extract the leads’ contact information to us. So in another words, I think when you think about flyers, you often think “Oh, this is a broadcast medium, so I am broadcasting my business’s contact information to prospects.” But we really think of it as really a lead generation medium. For our call to action for this particular program, let’s say for after school, the call to action for us will be “Get the prices and details now,” and they have a couple of different options. They can either text a particular keyword to a phone number and they will then automatically receive that information or we also have a custom URL that takes them to a specific landing page that talks about that program. Now if they input their e-mail address into that landing page, they’ll get all the information that they’re requesting. But again, through Infusionsoft, I’ve set that landing page up on the backend so that I know specifically this person is interested in afterschool, this person heard about us from a flyer and depending on what kind of campaign we’re doing, I actually will have different landing pages on different flyers if I want track at even on a more granular level.

Tim:      

Oh, I love that. Just to be clear too, going to those targeted landing pages or requesting a text message will require them to input some contact details in the granular list, yeah?

Carmen:     

Exactly.

Tim:

Love it. Love your work, Carmen. This is fantastic. Infusionsoft will help you with the landing page. They’re not helping you with the text service, are they?

Carmen:   

Not within Infusionsoft out of the box. They don’t really have the texting. But we use a separate service called Fix Your Funnel, which integrates with Infusionsoft. They have this really cool thing called SMS Conversations. The way it works is you text let’s say the word “School” to a particular phone number. Now what you get back from me is a text saying “Hi, this is Carmen from Urban Martial Arts. Thanks for requesting info on our afterschool program. May I have your first name please?” So they input their first name. Then they hear back from me again. And “What’s your last name?” They write that in. “Great. What e-mail address should I send the information to.” They put in their e-mail address. Now the beautiful thing about that is that what it’ll do in the backend is automatically create a new contact inside Infusionsoft and it’ll input the first name, last name, e-mail address, phone number into all the correct fields, tag them exactly the way that I’ve set it up so I know they’re interested in afterschool, they got to us from our flyer and again, automatically add them to your e-mail newsletter that they’re opting into as well.

Tim:       

Do you find the more contact details that you request, the higher the drop off?

Carmen:      

Yes. For our landing pages, we actually usually only ask for an e-mail address. I find that using the SMS Conversation, the drop off isn’t as much because it feels more like a back and forth, not so much that you’re filling out a form. So definitely, the more contact information you ask for, the lower your response rate is going to be.

Tim:      

And that’s okay, by the way, because you’re drilling down into quality.

Carmen:       

Yeah, and then also, can I share kind of a little ninja trick that we use as far as that goes.

Tim:    

Well, you’re a ninja.

Carmen:   

So what we do with our landing pages, as I mentioned, we only ask for an e-mail address, we don’t even ask you for your first name. Now, once you submit that, then you’ll get the e-mail saying “Hey, can you just click this link to confirm, blah, blah, blah” but immediately after you submit that, instead of just going taking you to a generic “Thank You” page, we say “Hey, check your e-mail for that confirmation e-mail, but also here’s another thing. Join our birthday club. Get a free gift on your birthday” and basically I have a form under there where it has much more information that I am asking for, first and last name, mailing address, birth date. And so essentially, it’s kind of a way to ethically bribe them to give you more information. And then because we’re collecting a mailing address, now we’re also able to reach them via direct mail. If you implement that kind of a two-step process, not everyone is going to take that second step, I would say on average 20-50%, depending on what audience we’re working with, will opt in for that extra birthday club. It doesn’t have to be the birthday club. That’s something that I honestly came up with off the top of my head because we didn’t have anything physical to mail to them. If you have something physical that they would be interested in, whether it’s a physical brochure, maybe it’s a book that you’ve written, maybe it’s a CD, and instructional DVD, something physical and tangible that they understand you would need their mailing address for in order for them to get their hands on it and obviously make it something relevant. That’s definitely something to try.

Tim:         

That is marketing gold right there, Carmen.

The other thing too they’ll wonder whether it would be a good thing in having had three kids go to between ballet and basketball and all those other things, we never did martial arts, I know that whole experience is that it was nice to do it with another parent, so whether at some point in that automation process, you could kind of give them the ability to say “Hey, who else would you like to come along with you when you’re child’s doing martial arts?” Just the ability to refer I suppose is the idea.

Carmen:    

Yeah, definitely. We do, do a bit of that, but it’s really after they’re become a member.

Tim:       

Okay, so we’ve gone information booths, we’ve gone flyers, we’ve gone into automation, text messaging. Let’s talk signage.

Carmen:  

Sure. Believe it not, I know several business owners who are paying a premium for ground-floor retail space in New York City, so you can imagine how expensive that is and they do not have a sign on their door. These are not businesses are trying to be the best kept secret, they’re not trying to be that cool place that you need to know about to get into. They just don’t have a sign. So I think mistake number one is you’ve got to get a sign. A bad sign is better than having no sign. So I think that’s the basics. The other mistake that I see people make is really relying just on their main sign, so meaning the primary owning-made sign that you have outside of your store. Obviously, that sign plays a really important role, but because it is such an expensive and fairly permanent fixture of your store, you’re probably not going to put that level of detail on there or to phrase it another you, you’re only going to put on that sign the things that you’re pretty sure are not going to change probably for the next five-to-ten years. So it’ll be limited to the name of your business, your basic contact information and maybe broadly speaking what it is that you do. So, you know, “We do martial arts, we do karate.” So what you want to do is really explore using temporary and then also indoor signage. What I mean by temporary signage is things that you can put up maybe inside your store window that would be suitable to promote maybe the sort of seasonal specials that you’re running or maybe you’re launching a new program, you’re not sure if it’s going to stick around, yet so you want to use that to promote that. And then for temporary signage, I like to use vinyl banners that have grommets, sort of holes in each corner and then we stick them into our window using suction cups on the side. It looks really clean, looks really neat, but at the same time, it’s very easy to just take off and replace if we need to. That way, you’re able to get the word out about other things that you do that you might not really want to put on your main sign because it doesn’t really have that kind of permanence. In terms of indoor signage, that’s something that I think for those of your listeners who are in the retail industry, they probably already doing a lot of this, but maybe other businesses are not as up on indoor signage. Indoor signage is a really great way especially to promote things to your existing customers. So as much as we would like to think that our customers know everything that we do, the truth is that they probably don’t. They probably only know the piece of your business that they particular buy into and they may not know kind of the breadth of services that you offer. So let’s so for example that you’re a bakery and you’re best known for your cupcakes. Everybody comes in and buys your cupcakes. Well, let’s say that you actually do custom birthday cakes. That’s a great opportunity to use an indoor sign, where you can say “Hey, we do custom birthday cakes,” and then again, make sure you have some kind of a call to action. So maybe the call to action is “See our portfolio of sample cakes and get a present list.” Hopefully you would say it pithier than I did. That’s the call to action. Indoor signage is really important for kind of educated your customers about what else you do that they might be interested in.

Tim:  

I think you’ve identified a couple of things. One is that too often small business owners look at signage as something permanent, like we get the signs done and our work is done. We’ll never need to do those again. I am imaging some of those really old signs on really old shops. So number one, rotate it. Because what happens, when a marketing touch point remains unchanged for a long time, it becomes wallpaper, it fades into the background. You end up not noticing it. So changing it often I think is fantastic. The thing that you’ve done too is using signage to remind people about different aspects of the business they didn’t know about, but also actually you’ve still got the call to action. You’re a call to action machine.

Carmen:    

I try.

Tim:   

I say that with all the love in the world, because I think, again, the question is with any marketing output that we do, as small business owners is what do we want people to do as a result of it? That should be a primary question, almost the first question. Having seen the sign, having received the brochure, having looked at the website page, what do you want that person to do? Therein lies your answer to the call to action. I think on that, I am on soapbox now Carmen, so sorry, but too often their call to action is “Well, we want them to call us,” or “We want them to buy from us,” but you’ve got to excuse the kind of French, but we’ve got to have a bit of foreplay. We’ve got to get to know each other. And that’s what you’re doing so brilliantly. I knew there was a reason I got you on the show. Now listen, I am very conscious of the fact that it must be about 20 to 11 of an evening in Brooklyn right now, is that right?

Carmen:     

20 to 10.

Tim:     

20 to 10. Okay. Alright. Oh, we’ve got plenty of time. No, look I won’t keep you for too much longer, but I thank you so much so far for sharing this marketing gold.

We’ve covered flyers, signage, information booths, automation. You are doing a lot online. It’s not as if you’re disregarding the brave new world of marketing as I call it. You are quite prolific in video production with your YouTube channel.

Carmen:

Yeah. We definitely do a lot of video, which makes sense especially since we are a very visual business. I think for those of your listeners who are in visual business, that’s something that they should think about, anything that’s food related or hair and beauty related, fashion related. I am often surprised by some of the businesses that I frequent as a customer that are sort of very visual, I am often surprised that they’re not posting more pictures. I am a big fan of, this is speaking to some of my ladies now, I am a big fan of tacky nail art, so general manicures…

Tim:      

Me too.

Carmen:   

I like tacky nails, essentially.

Tim:  

What have you got at the moment? What have you got at the moment? A bit of bling?

Carmen:     

Right now, I have white on all of them, except my ring finger, which is totally bling out.

Tim:   

Oh, I love it. I love it.

Carmen:      

But this place that I go to really specializes in gel manicures and the women that work there are artists. They do really incredible designs, all by hand, using these tiny little paint brushes. They are somewhat active on social media, but sometimes I think about the fact that they’re turning out probably 20 amazing works of art every single day, there’s nothing to stop them from posting at least one every single day.

Tim: 

Absolutely.

Carmen:    

So if you’re in a visual business, definitely, you should do that. So again, back to the video that we do; we’re big on videos, so we do a lot of events throughout the year. We used to not do video and at one point I realized, and this is at a point when we had a much more static website, “You know, our website really wasn’t communicating all the cool stuff that’s happening at Urban Martial Arts all the time.” Every quarter we do a belt promotion, we is essentially our version of a graduation ceremony, when all of our students perform what they’ve learned and then everybody receives their new belts. We do five to six karate tournaments a year. We do a lot of little parties, workshops and camps and so visually there’s a lot of events going on that it makes sense for us to communicate, capture on video, and then share with our students so they can kind of share with each other. And then also for those people who aren’t able to make it to the event, they’ll watch that and realize “Wow, this looks really cool. I need to make sure that I make it next time.” So video is really important for us, for sure.

Tim:         

And tell me, because there are so many blockages to small business owners cranking out some video, do you keep it really simple? Do you just get the iPhone out and wander around or do you get a professional crew in on a semi-regular basis. How do you do it?

Carmen:       

Yeah, we’ve done both. The bulk of our video I just shoot on a little Canon camcorder, it’s pretty old at this point. It’s like a Vixia HD20 that I got like five years ago. So it’s just a consumer HD camcorder that we use for most of the video that we shoot ourselves. And then for some of the sort of more promotional videos that you see on the main pages of our website, that was done by a professional, so I don’t have that level of quality.

Tim:         

I am going to embed your story of Urban Martial Arts. It’s a nine-minute video that really shares your “why” and introduces you to the business, your family, it’s fantastic. It’s such as a wonderful story. You know, as a potential customer, you’d look at that and go “I’m in. Count me in,” which is obviously the intention. Looking at your YouTube channel, breaking it down, you’ve got videos about your programs, you’ve got your karate tournament videos, you’ve got parties and event videos, you’ve got karate belt promotional graduation videos and, again, on every single video, there is the call the action. There’s your phone number, dedicated URL’s. Cleaver, cleaver. Are you using LeadPlayer?

Carmen:  

No, because I don’t know what that is.

Tim:          

Here’s a nice little add on for you. So LeadPlayer is a little bit of code that you drop onto your videos and it will talk to Infusionsoft and you can ask people to input their e-mail address right inside the video.

Carmen:   

Cool.

Tim:        

Yeah.

Carmen:   

I am all over that. And that works with YouTube as well?

Tim:       

Yes it does. Absolutely. It talks to YouTube. And in fact, LeadPlayer, oh I’ll get into trouble for the people who invented LeadPlayer, but the reality is there is a video hosting service called Wistia, and I’ve had Chris Savage, who created Wistia, on the show about 18 months ago. Wistia is a beautiful video hosting service, got some great analytics. They’ve just introduced a free add on called Turnstile and Turnstile actually does exactly the same, which is it allows you to embed a registration field into your videos and it talks to Infusionsoft as well.

Carmen:        

Oh, that’s fantastic. Thank you.

Tim:   

There you go. You are going to be all over that because every single one of those videos are manual subscriptions. I imagine you’ll see a decent increase. I am just interested, because again, I am looking at your videos and I one them has got 815 views, one’s got 20 views, which again, people could look at that raw number and go “Oh, that’s not much, that’s not much,” but again, it’s not about, well, I don’t think it’s about quantity, it’s about quality. What’re you kind of thoughts on the traction you’re getting with your video strategy.

Carmen:   

Yeah, I guess I don’t really stress the viewership numbers too much or maybe I shouldn’t more. I guess, to me, it’s really a bigger part of the content marketing stuff we do, which I can talk about a little bit. So what I try to do on the content side is, obviously, whenever we have events, we’ll post a video of that, so that’s kind of based on whatever the events happen to be. But then in addition to that, what I try to do is we send out a weekly e-mail newsletter. We have one version that goes to prospects and one version that goes to existing students. We used to have just one single newsletter that went to everybody, but I realized very quickly that it was getting a little unwieldy because there are a little things that prospects don’t really care about, like they don’t need to know that the next tournament is coming up and they need to register now, because they’re not even students with us yet. Conversely, our existing students don’t really need to see me selling some kind of a membership special we’re doing. So we decided a while ago to kind of split those into two different newsletters. So what I try to, the subject line is always going to point to one sort of informational piece of content that I created specifically for that newsletter. What that will essentially be is a blog post on our blog. I try to alternate it because we do have these two separate audiences just to add to the level of complication, we’ve got prospects versus students, and then within that, we also have karate, people who are interested in kids’ classes versus people who are interested in classes for themselves. There’s some overlap there, but not necessarily. So what I try to do is alternate. One week, I’ll have a blog post that’s of interest to parents and then the next week I’ll have a blog post that’s of interest more to the kickboxing person, so someone that’s interested in fitness, nutrition, weight loss or kickboxing. And so I kind of alternate between the two. To me the videos are just kind of an add on to the main piece of content we push in each e-mail newsletter, so we’ll kind of push that main content and then underneath that we’ll also have links to “Hey, did you check out the video from our latest event, blah, blah, blah.” I see them more as almost as a customer service thing, if that makes sense.

Tim:       

Yeah, I get you, I get that. What’s your open rate on e-newsletter. I sometimes get a bit of chill up my spine when I think of the newsletters; because there are many of them I receive and don’t open. What’s your open rate like?

Carmen:     

You caught me. I have not checked the open rate in a while.

Tim:     

Okay. Good. You are human after all. Up until then, I thought you were a superhuman martial art karate kid meets Giganta woman.

Carmen:    

I am a call-to-action machine, but not an open rate machine.

Tim:          

Correct. Correct. You can get a t-shirt. I am a call-to-action machine. There’s a good t-shirt actually. I like that. Tell me, just to finish off Carmen, I so appreciate this, social media. You’re active on Facebook, Twitter. Is there a particular role social media plays in the business?

Carmen:    

I don’t really feel like I am that social media guru, to be honest. Twitter, to be perfectly blunt, has felt primarily like a bit of a waste of time for us, and maybe it’s because we’re business to consumer, I still feel like even though a lot of consumers are on Twitter, I don’t know, it just seems like mostly people that follow our account tend to be just other martial arts school owners. So there are other martial arts schools kind of checking out what we’re doing, which is great. So Twitter seems better for kind of professional networking. Facebook is a little more appropriate, I think, for our audience. But I have to admit that I haven’t been as active on Facebook as I should have, because for a long time I was really pee’d off by the fact that Facebook was making you pay in order to reach the people that already like your page. So I’ve been kind of out of site for a long time; I was just kind of ignoring Facebook. But recently, I’ve kind of gotten more into it and especially since they’ve made a lot of changes to their advertising platform and I feel like there’s much more interesting and specific targeting that we can do, I feel that it’s becoming a more relevant platform for us. So I don’t have any major tips yet for Facebook. I am still kind of in the experimenting phase right now.

Tim:      

I love that because, gosh, how many small businesses do I come across and maybe you too as well that just think that social media is the silver bullet, and it’s not. It can be. Every now and then I come across a business that is using social really cleverly, but, boy, you know, if you think about time committed versus return on that time, it can be a real time suck for many small businesses and lead to just massive disappointment. And they think the whole online marketing thing’s not good and lose faith in it. I think what you we’re doing, it’s really wonderful to have this old school discussion. Is there any marketing that you would love to try, we talked about Facebook, but anything that’s sort of in the pipeline that for whatever reason you’re not doing but would love to?

Carmen:     

Nothing that we’re not doing at all that I can think of. I think I want to just dive a little deeper into our social media efforts. I’ve been experimenting a little bit on Pintrest and we’ve gotten a bit of results through that, so I am interested in kind of continuing that. But just to your point about social media, how it can be a time suck, I would definitely encourage people to not forget about e-mail marketing. I think e-mail marketing is still incredibly important. For us, that has been a huge growth driver for our business. As you have heard through this interview, we are very focused on always adding more people to our newsletter database. And the reason for that is that I found that the lead time for signing up for a program can sometimes be a lot longer than you would think. So we have people that let’s say we met them at a street fair three years ago and they’ve been on our e-mail newsletter ever since and they’re now joining a program. So they’ve know about us for three years and we’ve invested time in that relationship and building that trust, and then whatever change in their life where they felt like “Okay, now I am ready to this,” they came to us, not to anybody else. Also, looking at our stats, what I have noticed is that any given month, about 20% of the new members that we sign up are people who’ve been on our e-mail list six months or longer. So about 80% are kind of just fresh brand new leads that came, they’re ready, they joined, but then about 20% are people that we’ve been nurturing for a long time. So if this is not something you’re already doing, if you’re not already sending out some kind of a regular e-mail, and maybe it doesn’t have to be e-mail, it can be a physical newsletter, but just that continuing communication, that could possibly added 20% or more to your business.

Tim:    

And what a long-term play and what a wonderful realization, because to think that if you were doing all these marketing efforts and not getting that immediate return, again, you could lose faith, but knowing that you’re investing in the long term here. Sometimes it takes three years for someone to decide to do a martial arts course, but they’re going to choose us. That’s good.

Carmen: 

Yeah. And I want to kind of emphasize that point. When we first started doing these promotional booths, we would sometimes get discouraged because we would come home with let’s say 100 leads, we’re only able to book let’s say 23 trial classes and let’s say only 10 people showed up and out of the whole thing, we only signed up two people. And so we would feel like “Wow, that was a complete waste of time or such failure at this.” It wasn’t really until we’d been in business for a few years that we realized that it is all about the long-term play and that you have to really think about this as you’re collecting these leads now and you want to bring them into your fold and just nurture them and nurture them. I think also something you have to understand is it’s not people don’t buy on your time, they buy on their time. So you may have sort of captured them at that point and they were interested, but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t like what you had to say. There could be any number of reasons why they were not ready to jump in yet. Maybe their money wasn’t right, maybe their schedule wasn’t there, they didn’t have anyone to bring their kids to class. Whatever it is, what you want to do is make sure that keep in touch with them, stay top of client so that when it does come time when they are ready, they think of you, they don’t think of any of your competitors, because you’ve already built that relationship.

Tim:      

Couldn’t have said that better myself. Terrible way to finish on, but I have to ask and I know that we have listeners going “How much do you reckon she spends on marketing in a year?” Are you happy to reveal a kind of ballpark figure?

Carmen:     

I guess. I am not even too sure. Let me just kind of think about it for a while.

Tim:   

I’ll play some kind of “be on hold” music if you would like.

Carmen: 

Sometime of music. Not that much. A lot of the things we do are pretty inexpensive. It’s really just the cost of printing a lot of these flyers. Printing is so inexpensive these days, especially if you use an online printer. Let me just kind of break down what are the categories of things that we spend money on. Printing I would say is one category and that’s really fairly inexpensive; signage same thing, very inexpensive these days, other than your big, big sign. These street fairs that we do, again, pretty inexpensive. It’s usually just a couple of hundred US dollars, to have a table at one of these things. There is of course I have to pay my staff to be there, so there is that added expensive, but the actual booth is pretty inexpensive. We have experimented with some TV commercials this year. That is obviously much more expensive than some of these other things that we’re doing, but again, in terms of that, we’ve only spent a few thousand dollars, kind of experimented with that, doing some test runs. So, I don’t know, I think we don’t really spend that much. Definitely I would say less than 10% of our revenues, for sure.

Tim:     

Yeah, okay. Brilliant. I love that. You are betting way, way above your marketing weight, as I assumed before you even came on. Carmen, thank you so much for coming on the show and all the way from Brooklyn and sharing really what is marketing gold.

I find it inspiring to hear this kind of old-world marketing talk and hearing how it’s working so well for your business. May it continue to work well over the future.

Carmen:     

Thank you. It was a pleasure. If I may, I do have a not-very-often-updated blog, where I talk about local bricks-and-mortar marketing, so if you’re interested in this topic and you’re interested in some of the things you’ve heard, I have some videos that go into a little more depth on some of those. That blog is basically CarmenSognonvi.com, so my first name, last name dot com. And if you don’t know how to spell that, I have URL shortcut, so it’s CarmenBlogs.com and that’ll take you there.

Tim:       

Oh, that’s cleaver too. Call to action guru. Thanks, Carmen.

What about that. What about that. Let me give you my kind, I don’t know how many I’ve got here, there were so many marketing tips in there. Info booths, I love the whole info booth thing. Grabbing contact details in exchange for a free trial being your objective as opposed to handing out as many flyers as you can or sitting behind the desk and just saying “Hello” to people. That info booth strategy is a ripper.

Automation. Not enough of us are automating. I am going to get a bit deeper into Infusionsoft, maybe even get to do an exclusive interview with them. I think we’ve got to learn a whole lot more about that because that is incredibly targeted marketing.

Speaking of targeted marketing, flyer drops outside the school, going for that lead generation with a strong call to action. This is cleaver. Strong call to action, targeted call to action. I don’t think we think enough about what we want people to do having seen our marketing, whether it be our website page or a flyer or a talk that we give. What do we want people to do? Build that list. Aim to get people’s contact details so you can have that conversation with them going forward. As Carmen said, people buy on their time, not our time, right? Three years down the track, she is getting sales on stuff she did three years ago. I love the idea of grabbing people’s contact details and having that conversation with them over an extended period of time. That’s why at SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com, I ask for your e-mail address in exchange for a 20-minute video on marketing wakeup calls and then I can have an ongoing conversation with you. Carmen’s doing the same.

The texting that she’s doing in terms of having that conversation, that cleaver plug in that plugs into Infusionsoft, I love that.

The use of landing pages, oh my God. There’s lead pages, I will find the guy who invented lead pages. I might have to put some of this into the Small Business Big Marketing forum, because that’s invariably where the training lives. Suffice to say, there was absolute marketing gold there, so big thank you to Carmen.

And guys and girls, if you do want to join the forum, head over. It is rockin’ in there. SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com, click on the Forum. It’s a dollar to join for the first seven days and if you love it, if you love it, I know you will because it’s just full of marketing discussion by motivated small business owners, including myself, then it goes to $49 a month. There are a lot of small business owners getting great value from it.

Alrighty. Let’s wrap things up. I reckon that might have been one of the longest shows, longer episodes of the Small Business Marketing show ever, but hopefully there was plenty in there for you. I am going to hold the listener feedback for another time. Suffice time to say future guests in the coming weeks, as I mentioned last week, I have Dr. Snip coming on very shortly, I’ve got another episode of Funny Business. Andrew Griffiths, the leading small business author in Australia joins me for an episode of Funny Business where we talk about what is on our collective business minds. I am talking to a lady again over in the States somewhere who is running a business and her clients are happily getting themselves tattooed with her logo. So that’s just a little bit of what’s coming up in future shows.

Thanks so much for being a part of the Small Business Big Marketing movement. I love the fact that you join me each week. It makes my job easier knowing that there are people listening. A big thank you to NetRegistry for being the sponsors of this show and making it happen. Head over to NetRegistry.com.au. Remember that you can join them for a free event in Sydney coming up in December. I’ve got my Content Marketing Accelerated webinar happening in December. I would love to see you there. You can find all this information over at SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com.

Enough. Enough. May your marketing be the best marketing. See you next week.

You’ve been listening to the Small Business Big Marketing show with Tim Reid. Want more marketing goodness? Then visit SmallBusinessBigMarketing.com.