A Great Start Shooting School – Marketing Case Studies by C E Snyder Marketing LLC.
In 2022, A Great Start Shooting School (AGSSS) was faced with significant marketing challenges. Those challenges were hindering both growth and the ability to make sales. The founder, Brooke Cheney, struggled to coordinate and track new leads and nurture existing ones across multiple services and platforms. Namely her business website, training calendar, and sales pipeline.
AGSSS: Big problems, innovative solutions
One of Brooke’s top concerns was the amount of time and effort she had to put into maintaining her business. For example, communication with students, multiple online calendars, and scheduling classes. It was a lot to handle by herself using multiple calendars, scheduling software, and personal email accounts.
Brooke realized she needed a marketing professional to help her overcome these challenges and drive sales growth. So she turned to Charles and C E Snyder Marketing LLC for advice. We quickly researched AGSSS and Brooke’s local competition. But we also discovered many issues that were adding up to restrict scaling her shooting school.
A Great Start Shooting School: Major Problems
During our research, we found that many key factors were holding A Great Start Shooting School back. The major hurdles included a website using obsolete plugins and an uncommon WordPress template. Also, her Facebook efforts were divided by multiple business pages, and little or no presence on any other social media.
Here are the top five major issues we found:
- Obsolete and/or outdated WordPress themes and plugins
- A lack of social media presence beyond Facebook
- Multiple Meta/Facebook Pixels, business pages, and broken Google Analytics
- No CRM, LinkTree, chat widget, or funnels
- Forms and surveys were handled by generic services or plugins that are little more than spam-magnets
This is far from being an exhaustive list. But understand that most small businesses (more than 80%) fall into the same trap. You simply do not know, what you do not know. Much less being capable of doing anything about it if you don’t know something is wrong.
Big Problems for Small Businesses
First, here is a brief overview of why some of these problems are causing many small businesses headaches. Foremost is sending a potential customer to your website and expecting sales – it doesn’t work. Another concern that is costing most of you making more sales is page loading speed on mobile devices. Also, a website sucks at selling your offers because it has lots of options that confuse people.
Always Remember: Confused customers will not buy!!
Additionally, there were issues with analytics not displaying proper traffic statistics. If you’re not getting precise analytics or none at all, how can you make remotely informed decisions? It’s impossible! Also, if you’re website is not secure, is slow-loading, and has a lot of links, you’ll never get sales.
Lastly, another critical hurdle was a lack of pictures and no videos. In contrast, this may seem like a minor issue if at all, but it is a big problem. Studies consistently show that images and videos get way more love on social media and search engine results. So why is it that most small businesses don’t use video?
Because they don’t know what they don’t know.
Rebuilding AGSSS’s Marketing Plumbing
The first solution was simply rebuilding and correcting the needed analytics and integrating ROI Ninjas CRM. Once AGSSS’s CRM was set up and integrated, we built several funnels to replace sales pages on the website. But a real breakthrough moment came with the addition of a custom LinkTree for their business. Within just a few hours, Brooke received new subscribers for her newsletter!
Next came replacing the spam-magnet forms and linking to funnels from her website. Also, we placed the ROI Ninjas CRM Webchat widget on her website and funnels. This added yet another channel for visitors to her website and funnels to start a conversation.
For website visitors, it looks like any other number of chat widgets. But on the back end, our CRM tracks a visitor’s clicks and any form submissions. Also, once we fixed her Meta Business account, that data was fed to her single Facebook Pixel.
But, this also required going into Brooke’s Facebook (Meta) Business Manager and correcting a few errors there. Also, it required looking at her pixels and eliminating some duplication to make things less complex when running ad campaigns. This included duplicate business pages, redundant ad accounts, and multiple pixels. Once we figured out what accounts to use, we deleted the unused tools to simplify things.
A Great Start Shooting School: Brand Awareness
After the first month of fixing things and getting her analytics straight, we realized that there wasn’t enough website traffic. Brooke has a brilliant concept of working with women interested in self-defense. But the biggest problem was that most local women had no idea who she was, much less what AGSSS offered.
So we quickly changed gears, discussing the need for her to run a brand awareness campaign. Unfortunately, this is a common error that most small businesses skip.
Think of it as a stranger approaching you on the street, asking for money. That is a bit of a turnoff, right? Now imagine how your potential customers feel when you approach them for the first time. If people do not know, like, and trust you, they will never buy from you. That’s human nature!
Within days, Brooke saw nearly double the amount of traffic coming to her website! Better yet, she began booking more students every month!
A Great Start Shooting School: More Challenges
AGSSS was still in the “awareness building” phase of business growth. This is a common error that many small businesses make, skipping over the unsexy part of marketing. That is, making people aware of your business and building trust. In marketing, it is called brand-building or building brand awareness.
Going back to the Marketing X-Ray Report for AGSSS, it was clear that more problems to fix—specifically, search engine information. Out of 95+ search engines and portals, AGSSS was on 15 of them and the listing information was 72% inaccurate.
So we had to have an honest conversation about getting her listed on more search engines to boost traffic. Getting people to know, like, and trust you is the only consistent way to make more sales.
Corrective Measures
The first step was getting the correct website, physical location, and other contact information correctly listed. We offer Yext listing services at a discounted rate, so this was logically a top recommendation. Right away, some of the search engines picked up her correct information and she saw the results. Within just a few days, there was an increase in website traffic.
Next, we recommended using her contact database to send out a monthly newsletter. Ideally, this would keep her school top-of-mind with potential students and generate more opportunities. Predictably, each time she emailed a newsletter, there was a spike in website traffic.
Finally, we recommend creating social media content to help drive interest and more traffic. Using the social media calendar and posting tools in ROI Ninjas CRM, she again noticed more traffic. Also, with more traffic came more subscribers for her newsletter and classes.
More Thoughts on Branding and Building Trust
With branding, the biggest thing to remember is to stay consistent. The lack of consistency is what limits growth for every small business. But once consistency becomes a habit, there’s no stopping the growth in traffic, trust, and sales!
So Charles gave Brooke suggestions of how she could attract more attention while establishing herself as a “Go-To.” The first of which goes back to creating a newsletter on a regular schedule. Be it weekly, monthly, or longer. But the biggest trick here is being consistent. If you want people to sign up for a quarterly newsletter, you better publish one every quarter!
But another great way to reach a wider audience is with video content. Especially “how-to” or reviews-style videos that help people make better choices or fix problems. Something as simple as offering hacks or easy-fix solutions drives video views and website traffic while building trust.
A Great Start Shooting School: Small Changes Add Up
As part of our consultative approach to providing services to our clients, we always recommend taking tiny steps. Each step alone will not produce stellar results. But added together, they add up over time. However, the impact of implementing changes is cumulative, resulting in growth as time goes on.
For example, AGSSS is now using the Yext listing service available through her CRM account. Also, she’s been using the integrated chat widget with her account to have more conversations. Furthermore, she is now using the spam-filtering forms she can build in her ROI Ninjas CRM account.
Also, all CRM clients are automatically added to our ROI Ninjas Weekly Kicks newsletter. They also get free access to ROI Ninjas University and the CRM Quick-Start Guide. Also, they get first dibs on all upcoming webinars, workshops, and educational content.
*Please Note: Brooke is a premium client, so we do a lot of work for her. Creating templates, forms, surveys, automation, funnels, her LinkTree, and more!
Simpler = More Sales
Another problem area was how AGSSS made sales for special classes and workshops. Visitors would have to click on her events calendar to click on a class of interest. Yet customers paying for classes would have to go to a third step to make a buy.
But from experience, we know that adding extra steps to a sale only reduces the likelihood of making a sale. So simplifying the process easier and customers jump through fewer hoops will increase sales. Because annoyed and confused people never buy. Fewer steps to give potential customers what they want is a surefire way to increase sales conversions.
All of the above are now funnels for classes. Brooke can run advertising traffic directly to them. Also, people visiting her website or LinkTree can now click directly to the class sales funnel they want. This effectively eliminates two steps that interested parties would have to take. All you have to do is make it easier for them to say yes.
A Great Start Shooting School: Marketing Strategies
Another primary element of our marketing strategy for AGSSS is their email marketing. Before becoming our client in mid-January, Brooke was building a marketing list. But, she wasn’t leveraging it to increase her sales. So we promptly set her up with a branded newsletter template and made some recommendations.
Overall, the marketing strategies that we implemented have made a significant impact. Besides improving AGSSS’s social media presence and email marketing, there was also a 650% increase in website traffic. Additionally, her increasingly precise listings continue to boost Brooke’s lead generation and sales monthly.
That’s more than double the accuracy rating and nearly 6x the number of listings in one year!
Our Foolproof Playbook
Charles Snyder wrote the book on small business marketing titled ROI Ninjas Marketing Master Guide. Originally written for the HVAC industry, its sound marketing advice applies to all small businesses. Our book explores real-world applications with branding, lead generation, and boosting conversions.
Essentially, everything in the marketing guide is step-by-step what we are doing for AGSSS. The book is the blueprint for how we are growing our agency. Also, it’s how we are helping our customers to grow and scale. It’s a roadmap to scaling to seven figures and beyond.
Furthermore, we are also taking into account feedback from our coaching customers. The updated version of our Marketing Master Guide includes those experiences as well.
*Please Note: The current HVAC Marketing Master Guide is only available to ROI Ninjas CRM subscribers via ROI Ninjas University. We are working on finalizing an updated version for small businesses soon. We are looking at a possible release date in Q1 2025.
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