10 - The 3 Trick Pony - Hit All Your Pillars In One - Mini Marketing September Edition

In this episode of the Mini Marketing Podcast, Abi Jacks unveils a powerful strategy to optimise your marketing efforts across multiple objectives without spreading yourself too thin. 

Dubbed the "Three Trick Pony," this approach is a game-changer for anyone juggling various marketing goals in the competitive world of children's activity organisations. 

Abi breaks down the method into clear, actionable steps, ensuring you can implement it right away to enhance your campaigns. 

Tune in to transform how you manage your marketing resources effectively!

Stay tuned for more insightful episodes from Steps2Success, where we help you navigate the challenges of running a children's activity organisation with practical advice and expert insights.

Created with pride by LoveAdmin

Edited with finesse by Making Digital Real

Transcript

Hey everybody, I'm Abi Jacks, director of marketing and growth at LoveAdmin, and you're listening to the mini Marketing Podcast where I'll be taking you through the world of marketing for your children's activity organisation with no buzzword bingo as a promise. 

Welcome back to mini marketing. I hope you enjoyed the last session on getting your content off if you haven't heard it, then check out the full step to success channel and add 10 minutes to your listening experience. The topic I'll be talking to you about today is something that's helped me over the years, make the most of whatever resource and time I have as an activity provider, I'm sure that you're juggling lots of different things and are wearing many different hats. 

Plate spinning has become an art, and in that way, I can relate as a marketer, I'm always looking at the different objectives I'm trying to hit. Those of you who've listened to my podcast will remember the first one that introduced the key marketing pillars, and it's those pillars that we're always juggling time on. When you're wanting to grow your organisation and support it being successful, you need to balance between attracting new customers, keeping your current ones happy, and coming back and looking at ways to increase your capacity or ways to earn more money so that you can put them back into the club. 

Those are your pillars, and depending on where your organisation is in their journey, they may have differing levels of priority, but they'll all need to get done. So how can you spread your very thin resource across all these areas and still be successful? I like to call it the three trick pony, because with one campaign, you can cover all your areas and not just one. Nobody wants one trick ponies anymore. Let's let them retire happily in a field. So what is a three trick pony and How on earth does it work? Let me take you through it now. Number one, what tricks do you need it to perform? Think about what you need to know you're wanting to achieve. Write them down and make sure that they're a specific B, realistic and C, measurable. An example could be as a growing Gymnastics Club, my three tricks are to one, increase the awareness of our club with parents of seven to 10 year olds. 

Two, increase bookings of our new artistic session held throughout the week. And three, improve engagement with existing club members. These are my three tricks that my pony needs to perform. So now, at number two, you need to know your audience. So you need to look for any themes and links between the three tricks that we've just talked about. This is a nice opportunity for a quick brainstorm with team members to gather information who's running the new artistic sessions. They could be helpful with what people like about them and what they're interested in, plus, they probably know where the idea came from to run these new sessions, who is working reception and speaking to parents day in day out, because they will know what themes and topics they're interested in, and who currently teaches your seven to 10 year old groups. 

Are there any similarities between the kids who attend, where they're from, how they're developing? This might sound hard to start with, but it's really not. Grab some lunch and a whiteboard or some sticky notes and start asking questions. If you need some inspiration, then you can start with these. Grab a pet. A, who are we talking to? B, what attracts people to this session? C, what do they like the most about this session? D, what do they want to know more about? E, what are the traits of people who sign up or attend this session. F, what do they care about and G, what are the other clubs talking about? 

Who are similar related to your trips? Of course, if you have any data from your booking system reports or your CRM, then this can also help you. At this point, you're trying to paint a picture of your audience and what they may be interested in hearing about. This part is really important and will help you make the link to tie all your three tricks together. Once you have that link, then you can build the messaging and campaign to hit all three objectives at once. If you want to know more about understanding your audience and why it's important, then check out my earlier podcast on the topic. Remember, I'm layering in episodes so they follow a path and build on each other. So it's worth going back and listening to them in sequence, back to our tricks. So number three, what do we. Do now. So now you know what you want to achieve with your campaign. You know who you're targeting and what they're interested in. You can start throwing down some ideas for what your core piece of content could be, and it can be vague. Ish at this point, don't worry about perfecting a title. Popular things that I've seen can be research and insights, training guides or videos, competitions, events. 

Have a think about your resources and what's achievable for you. For example sake, I'll continue with my imaginary Gymnastics Club, and I'm going to choose to blend a training video and a competition, because I want to highlight my ACES coaches for my new artistic sessions. And I know video always goes down well on my Insta and Facebook accounts, you can see that I'm already thinking about my three tricks when I choose my content attract new seven to 10 year olds. Check because my training video will show some starter artistic moves for seven plus age ranges. Increase bookings for my new artistic sessions check. 

I'm going to use those session coaches, and we'll show them in action in a class, and only tease the first few learner moves with a sign off, saying that they can learn more when they do a trial session and then increase engagement with existing customers, check, because I will be sending the content to those people in other classes, highlighting this new add on, plus there's going to be a competition run throughout the club regarding who's picked up a series of artistic points through perfecting techniques across the year. This is the point of a three trick pony. I'm going to run one campaign, but it's going to help me hit three objectives. So now you have your idea. You can start building out your campaign plan. 

List out all the channels that you can use to spread your message. And think about what images you need, what message you'll use, and what action you will want people to take from it. For example, I'm going to post on all my social media channels, so I need a short teaser video or GIF promoting the video, some copy to accompany that which is short and snappy and the action I want them to take, I want them to click on the video and watch it. You can choose where to host your video. Mine will be embedded on landing page on my website, complete with information about the coach, why artistic is so important to developing gymnasts, and next to a nice form to sign up for a free trial of the artistic session. I might also want to do an email to my existing database, or I'll pop it in my next newsletter as the top item. 

I'll keep the email short, but we'll make sure to get those points in as to how artistic is growing, why kids love it, how important it is to gymnast development, and how, of course, we're running a great friendly competition that's free for all kids to enter. In this case, I might put a couple of actions in there, one to sign up for the competition and one to book a free trial. You can build out the campaign to be as large or little as you choose. Some of my three trick ponies have run for six months, and I drip feed related content each month to keep it alive. 

That way, if people don't bite the first month, you have plenty of opportunity to get their interest again, perhaps with a different channel or message you haven't tried yet. Now, I mentioned earlier about making your tricks measurable, and this is important for when you want to do one again. If you measure how well this one's performed, you can get buy in from people if you need a little funding or you want to try something bigger next time, but you can also see what doesn't work for your organisation and where you need to change your message or your channel to get better engagement next time. 

Don't worry about everything being perfect first time or every time, because marketing is about testing and learning, which you can't do if you don't measure anything. So to summarise, three trick ponies can help you run a single campaign that helps you support multiple goals for your organisation, you need to fully understand and write down what those goals are. You need to know your audience and what will be relevant to them. Use the resources you have available to create some core content that addresses all these goals. Plan out your channels and be clear on the actions you want people to take from each one and your three trick pony can trek on for months, as long as you keep feeding it, you're enjoying my practical pods. Subscribe to the step to success channel, and next month, I'll take you through how you can build a communications calendar, which is very helpful. All for three trick ponies.

I'm just one of the experts dedicated to helping love admin customers achieve success. We've recently created a school of marketing where you can learn things like this and much more. Visit LoveAdmin.com, forward slash school, dash or dash marketing to register your free place, of course, if you're looking for a software provider that gives you more and will help you grow, visit love admin.com, to see what working with us looks like. I'll see you next time you.