It's Officially Holiday Season!

Walk into Wal-Mart, Target, or Home Depot, and the Holiday decorations are front and center (and have been for weeks).

So what does this mean for you and your academy?

It means it’s time to put together your Holiday Specials — specifically your Black Friday special.

Black Friday may look business-driven, but it’s the consumers who actually started
this shopping event. It was first observed in Philadelphia where there was always
high traffic the day after Thanksgiving.

SaleCycle reported that in 2019, Black Friday online sales surpassed all previous
records, reaching $7.4 billion, up by $1.2 billion from 2018’s $6.2 billion record.

That’s huge!

This is a serious holiday that every merchant with an online or brick and mortar
store should observe.

Our holiday tips will help you to get a cut of the Black Friday sales so you can
settle in for a prosperous holiday season.

Step 1 - Choose Your Offer(s)

Black Friday is really a great time to be selling PAID TRIALS.

People are going to be spending the money. They are PLANNING on spending money.  Ditch the free trial for now.  You can use it again in the future.

Having a lower-barrier offer with your paid trials is the best way to get people in.
Provide them with a great service and then convert them to a long-term member.

Some ideas for your Black Friday Special:

Train for the Rest of the Year Special 

MAIA’s Holiday Trial Special 

Be careful not to make your Black Friday Special too low of a barrier.  You’ll end up wasting a lot of precious time on follow-ups with people who never even come in.

Step 2 - Increase Your Ad Spend

During the Black Friday weekend, advertisers will be spending way more than
usual.  And because the Facebook Ads platform is an auction, the more competition,
the more money you’ve got to spend.

This typically means that your cost per click (CPC) will be higher than normal, so
consider raising your ad spend for Black Friday.

Step 3 - Create a Promotional Content Calendar

As Black Friday gets closer, you’ll want to solidify your overall posting
strategy on social media. The easiest way to do this is to create a content calendar
with the content you want to share with your followers.

Start your promotions the week of Black Friday so your followers know you'll be offering some sweet deals!

Create graphics for your social media posts (we love www.canva.com).

Take it a step further and change the cover photo on your business page as well as
add a pop up to your website.

As video is becoming more and more of a non-negotiable, you can also create
promotional video clips through www.canva.com as well.

Once you have your content together, go ahead and schedule it out. It will
ultimately make your life easier. With the constant need to put out fires as a school
owner, having this done ahead of time will ensure that it actually gets posted when
it’s supposed to.

Did you know that MAIA Edge has a done-for-you Social Media Calendar that has graphics and promotions you can use as well? 

Also, don’t sleep on your email and sms marketing. Craft your email and sms campaigns and blast them out to your list.

Okay Cris, but what about the big Black Friday bucks?!

Many schools opt to do large Black Friday sales for their programs.

While they can absolutely be successful, we follow MAIA’s guidance and choose
to host a Holiday Event the 1st Saturday in December.

This is the biggest event of the year where we offer the largest discounts on our
programming, retail, and special events.

It’s a 4-hour event and in 2015, the first year we ran it, we collected $16,000.

2016, we did 34K.

2017, we did 50K.

2019, we did 69K

My recommendation is to check out the FREE Holiday Kit that myself and Mr.
Mike Metzger put together on how to run your Holiday Event.

You can access it at https://www.maiahub.com/centuryholidaykit