Facebook 101: How to Grow Your Student Base Using Facebook Ads
Now that martial arts studios are slowly opening back up for in-person classes, it’s time to start thinking about how you can grow your business and add new students to your studio. Using Facebook ads is a simple and cost-effective way to reach a new group of prospective students. In this article, we will give you an overview of why this tactic is beneficial to your business and a step-by-step guide on how to create ads of your very own.
Why You Should Use Facebook Advertising
Generating a positive ROI with Facebook ads is not just a possibility, it’s a probability! The average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is on average $7.29. That’s a thousand people targeted specifically to view your profile for about the cost of a coffee and a breakfast pastry. These costs do vary according to the size of your audience, quality of your ads, and the overall success of your campaigns, but that’s exactly what this article is for!
The advertising opportunities on Facebook allow your martial arts studio to reach a new base of people that have the same interests and lifestyles as your current students. According to SproutSocial, overall impressions on Facebook have risen by 37%. With COVID-19 and people being forced to stay home, many are on their phones more frequently, driving the cost per impression down. For those who are unfamiliar with success tracking on Facebook, impressions are the number of times an ad is shown to your target audience.
Other notable performance metrics for Facebook advertising include:
- Reach – the number of users your ad reaches
- Frequency – the rate of how many times your ad is shown to the same user
- Cost per click – the average cost the ad generates per the number of times it’s clicked
Using these metrics will allow you to gauge the overall success of your campaign strategy, and give you the daily progress to adjust your ads based on performance. It’s important to make sure you are keeping your advertising strategy dynamic and flexible! The name of the game on Facebook advertising is people-pleasing, so remember to play towards what your audience wants!
When bringing in new students into your martial arts studio, Facebook can certainly become a useful tool. Audience creation capabilities allow you to target both parents and students with separate messaging and unique images to tailor your ads to garner the best engagement possible. Narrowing your audience will show your ads to the exact users on Facebook you want to target, whether that means targeting friends of those who follow or like your page or targeting users who have interests in martial arts and martial arts learning.
The targeting possibilities don’t just end there; features like geographic targeting narrow the scope even further. Setting the location targeting close to your martial arts studio ensures that you will be reaching the correct audience in your area that are within driving distance. Those users will be more likely to make the trip to see the studio, learn more about what you do, and what you teach.
What Are Cold Leads:
When beginning to create your ad campaign, there are two types of leads that are accessible via Facebook advertising. Combining these two types of leads will give your campaign targeting the fully rounded out audience it needs to succeed.
The first type is cold leads. Cold leads are users who have maybe never heard of your martial arts studio or engaged with it in the past. Brand awareness is the first step in getting cold leads to filter through the advertising funnel. These types of customers are accessed through advertising strategies like demographic and geographic targeting or general audiences who are interested in techniques like Jiu-Jitsu, Karate, or Taekwondo in your area. Once you are able to establish yourself to this audience and they engage with the ad (like, comment, share) or visit your website, you can consider them a warm lead.
What Are Warm Leads:
Warm leads are those who are aware of your martial arts studio and have visited your website or Facebook page, but haven’t followed through on signing up for a class. These types of leads are typically more likely to result in a conversion since they have shown interest in your ads and visited your website to learn more about you. This audience can be targeted with additional ads through remarketing tactics. Remarketing is advertising only to people who have interacted with your Facebook page or visited your website.
Think of remarketing ads as the “low hanging fruit”. These types of ads can have a direct call to action on your website, whether it’s filling out a form or calling your studio to schedule their free class. Having these ads in your strategy gives your campaign a two-pronged approach that will ultimately result in more students. On average, consumers need to be shown an ad seven times before they are likely to make a purchase or take action on the ad. With that thought in mind, it’s important to remember to keep your ads engaging and relevant to your audience! We will give you a step by step guide on how to create remarketing ads in another blog post, since the set up is slightly different than for a cold leads ad campaign.
Step By Step Ad Setup For Cold Leads