Announcing Brain Picking by the Hour / Minute

Here are True Voice Media, we help our clients understand how all components fit together in the pursuit of social business.  Today we’d like to tell you about ZAKTi, a boutique fitness studio specializing in Strength and Endurance Training, Flexibility and Sustainable movement, Pain Management, and a Body Assessment test called Body IQ.

The ZAKTi challenge

When ZAKTi came to us, they had an extraordinary program, a small but loyal customer base, a passionate and motivated staff, and a list of questions.  They couldn’t figure out how to get past simply talking online and get to the part where people were coming through the door.

This is a problem that is all too common for today’s small business.

Social Media can be an incredible tool for today’s small business, because it’s inexpensive and can really help spread awareness.  The problem is that there isn’t a playbook, what works for one company may not work for another.  And we’ve heard it time and time again “Don’t sell on social media!”

But is it really true?

Small Changes

So here’s what we did…we came in and took a look at everything and determined a few things.

1. The email newsletter needed to change.
2. Headlines needed to be more catchy
3. Content needed to move from “what can you buy from us” to “here’s something interesting and valuable for you”
4. All content needed clear and prominent, yet non-intrusive, calls to action.
5. Focused every goal on getting people coming through the door.

Those were the changes we made and while we are still weeks away from getting to the results of these changes, but in the meantime we have some interesting updates to share.

What a difference small changes can make

Picture for a moment that you are a person that likes to workout, maybe does some Yoga from time-to-time, and occasionally needs to work out some small nagging pain.  You meet a gentlemen named Pete Mattis one day and after some brief conversation, you decide that you’re going to check out his website for ZAKTi.  Once you get there, you decide that while you aren’t ready to commit to coming in for a class that you are willing to subscribe to the newsletter.

If this story happened 2 months ago, you might receive a newsletter like this:

Headline: “Down to the Wire”

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but if this was your first newsletter, you might get the impression that the only purpose of the newsletter was to sell you upcoming classes.  If you didn’t know what ZAKTi was, you might not even be sure what the classes are all about.  You might think, “what problem does this solve for me?”

By contrast, look at the first newsletter to go out since we’ve made the change:

Headline: It’s easier than you think to get rid of that nagging pain.

So now we’re looking at how to solve a problem and we’ve written it in an intriguing way.  If you have any nagging pain, this headline might get you to click through to the article, I mean IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK.

In addition to the improved headline, the entire article is about solving a problem in an easy, straight-forward way.  

We also made sure to include the proper call to action…inviting new subscribers and non-clients to come in for their first class FREE.  We’re asking for social shares and asking for people to connect with us on Social Media sites.

We only made small changes but now…

• Instead of writing a newsletter AND a blog post, ZAKTi writes once and gets the benefit of search traffic and email subscribers.
• The email list is segmented, and customers get different emails than prospects.
• The calls to action are prominent yet come into the frame only after valuable information has been delivered.

Even More…

We’ve also made some small changes to the ZAKTi website, created a lead capture strategy that involves each member of the ZAKTi team, and created a full content strategy that will last for the next 3-6 months.  Be sure to take a look at ZAKTi.  They do great work, and thankfully, now people will know about it.

We’ll post a new updates as we find out about the results of these small changes.