In this week’s blog, I am going to take a look at some of the upcoming marketing trends for 2016; giving you some insight into what this means for your marketing, what you can do to prepare for it and how you can utilise it.
Mobile is bigger than ever
Mobile web traffic has been growing year on year, seeing its biggest surge in 2015, thanks to the ever-growing popularity of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. While desktop traffic will not disappear entirely, it is mobile traffic that now dominates.
This means now more than ever, you need to ensure your website is mobile friendly. Google offers a free tool that tests your website and makes suggestions on how to fix any issues, which may prevent your website from being displayed properly on mobile devices.
When adding content to your website, you need to bear in mind the user experience from a mobile perspective. For example:
- Is the content too long?
- Are the images too big?
- Can people easily navigate through the web page – most importantly is there anything stopping people from booking?
If you are not sure about the answers to these questions, simply try viewing your website on your phone and imagine you’re a first time visitor. Try taking this one step further by asking friends and family to ‘book a lesson’ through your website on their smartphone, as this will give you more rounded feedback on how your site performs on mobile.
Online Video Advertising
Online video advertising is nothing new by any means, but it’s something that’s been growing in popularity and is set to grow even bigger in 2016. Google even includes YouTube videos in it’s search results for relevant keywords, making video good for advertising and search engine optimisation. As well as YouTube, you can promote video through other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Vine to mention just a few.
While video adverts offer a great way to showcase your business and martial arts classes, they can be quite expensive to produce if you’re looking for a full, professionally edited video. There are alternatives for people with a smaller budget, however, such as simple clips recorded on your smartphone, perhaps of a class or lesson. These videos can be uploaded to your Facebook page and used as content for an advertisement or post-boost. Remember to make sure though that the video you post is appropriate for your audience and you have permissions to use it.
Regularly uploading short videos of your classes to your Facebook business page, for example, can help with generating content and also give prospects an idea of the look and feel of your martial arts classes, which can help you attract more leads and enquiries.
Healthy living
2015 saw the rise in popularity of wearable ‘Smart Devices’ with a recent YouGov poll suggesting that 6.1 million people in the UK will have them in the next year. This growth could be attributed to people seeing these devices as a way of monitoring their calories, steps and overall fitness and exercise as a result. While it would be great to advertise directly to these devices, this is still some way off as it’s still early days. This does, however, give you something you are able to target with your advertising material, in the form of ‘a healthy lifestyle’.
Promoting the health benefits of martial arts to adults, especially in January, can be a great way to convince people to come along and, at least, have a trial lesson. Also mention the additional benefits that martial arts can provide, such as increasing confidence, making new friends and self-discipline. Don’t forget that there are the free January campaign materials available in myMA that you can use in your advertising.
If you would like to know more and ask any questions, you can send me an email marketing@nestmanagement.co.uk I would love to hear what you have to say.
