[Video] Interview with a Small Business that Successfully Used Facebook Advertising to Grow

I recently interviewed one of my clients about their experience working with me to grow their business using Facebook advertising. You can watch the first part of the interview here, or read the transcript below.

How have advertising trends changed since you’ve been in business?

Madeleine: Ok, hi David, how are you doing?

David: I’m doing well, thank you.

Madeleine: Good, thanks for joining me today. So David owns a martial arts academy in San Jose California, can you tell me a bit about the academy?

David: Sure, yes, we are Wushu Central Martial Arts Academy in San Jose. We have been in business for about 15–16 years, we’ve been around for a while, we’re a fairly large school.

When I first started working with you, we were riding at around 440 students, right now we’re about 485, so we’ve increased by about 10% since we’ve started, so that’s been great, so we’re growing as an academy, the combination of what we’re doing with you and some internal changes as well, it’s really starting to boost our business and we’re seeing growth now, which is fantastic.

Madeleine: Amazing! That’s awesome. So as you said, we’ve been working together for a few months now, and the work that I’ve been doing with you is generating new leads for the academy using Facebook advertising.

So do you mind telling me a little bit, how has your experience of this process been, just in general?

David: Sure, absolutely. So one of the things that we’ve been noticing is effective advertising is changing. So we used to get a lot of leads from our print advertising and now we get very very few.

So as businesses we have to keep up with what are the new modes of advertising that are going to be effective, and Facebook has been really really great because it does hit the section of the population that is most likely to be interested in our services and our product, so I think as an advertising method it’s very very strong.

Particularly working with you has been very easy, because for the most part it’s been very hands off for me. I think what we really rely on is your expertise and your experience to know, for example, what are the right demographics to hit, what’s the right copy in the ad, how we effectively use a video in it to draw in interest, and so these are all things that I think for most people would be kind of trial and error and just guesswork until they figure out what’s wrong and what works.

And in your case we were able to skip right past all the unknowns and get right to what was going to be effective. So within the first 2 months we were starting to see a very very large number of leads, double what we were getting before through our other methods of advertising. So it’s very effective and we got a very very high return on investment on our advertising and that’s why we’re continuing.

Madeleine: That’s awesome, that’s great to hear, and it’s interesting to see how you’ve seen your marketing evolve from the print to maybe going more into the digital, I think that’s really interesting.

What do you do when your business stops growing?

Can you take your mind back a little bit to when you first reached out to me and approached me and said can you do some advertising in martial arts. What were you hoping to achieve, why did you reach out, what was the real pain point that you had at the time?

David: Sure. As I mentioned before, we had about 440 students in our academy, which is considered large for a martial arts studio, so we weren’t suffering. But we had stopped growing for several years, we just hit a plateau, and I knew that we had the capacity to grow further but we weren’t just getting enough new enrolments in our academy, and that really stemmed from not having enough leads coming in.

We have a very very good sales process here, almost everybody who walks in the door will enrol for full membership, more than 50% of them, so it was just a matter of getting people to come in, that means just getting our name out there, and getting people to decide that they want to come in and do a trial with us. So really that’s what it was all about, getting our name out thereand getting people to come try our class, and once they do, once they come in they love it.

Madeleine: Yeah, definitely. And one thing that I’ve seen from you guys, I can verify for myself, you have a really strong sales process, because I know that you’ve been able to reach out to a lot of the leads that we’ve seen coming through and you have been able to successfully get them to come in and become members, which is amazing. And I think that makes a whole lot of difference if you have that in place as a business when you’re starting to advertise, so I think that’s awesome.

How have Facebook ads helped your business?

So we set up a FB ad campaign for you, it was specifically designed to generate leads. You said you’re signing up 7–8 new members a month roughly at this point, having worked to get the system running and stable, can you tell me what kinds of returns you’re expecting from the members that have signed up since we’ve started working together for example?

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