| Friend,
We're just about ready to wind down this series on direct response marketing. But before we do, I'd like to step back for a second and talk about why I spend so much time on marketing.
Why Focus On Marketing?
Simple... marketing is the one area that trips martial art school owners up more than any other area of martial art school management.
Most school owners or would-be school owners will spend hours on curriculum, planning their schedule, working out how they'll do belt exams, and so on, because that's their wheelhouse. Martial arts instructors are comfortable there.
But when it comes to getting potential new students to walk in their front door, they're clueless. If you think about it, hardly anyone learns about marketing in school. And, most of us never grew up having to drum up new customers for a business.
So, this is the area where we struggle, because we've never been taught how to generate new customers for a business. And that's why I spend so much time on marketing on my blog, in my coaching group, and in my newsletter.
Marketing Is The Key Component To Your Success
Despite the fact that folks almost never learn it in school, marketing is really THE key component for a new business to achieve success.*
And as I said, in most cases school owners will have the other components in place. They'll pour their heart into teaching great classes, they'll bend over backwards to please their students, and they'll work 24/7/365 to make their dojo the best it can be.
But none of that matters if you don't have anyone on the floor. None of that matters if you don't have enough cash flow to stay solvent. And none of that matters if you're struggling to pay the bills on your dojo each month.
I often say that 90% of the challenges new school owners face can be solved with more and more effective marketing. The reason I say that is because most of the issues new school owners come to me with boil down to, "We need to get more paying students on the floor."
You Must Have Benchmarks
When you first start out and you have twenty or thirty or forty students, you soon realize that's simply not enough to pay the bills and pay your salary too. But at that stage in your school's growth, getting to 100 students seems like a daunting task.
It can be, until you understand that getting new students is a numbers game. Your goal is to get as many potential students as possible into the "wide" end of your marketing funnel, because not all of them will make it through all six steps in the process.
Knowing the numbers will make this a bit more clear for those of you who are unfamiliar with marketing metrics. Let's take a look at the general benchmarks you should achieve in your numbers in order to grow a school to 100 or 150 or 200 students: - Wide end of the funnel -> You should be generating a large number of solid leads and new student inquiries a month. This number will vary depending on certain factors, but a good target is 30-40 leads a month.
- Middle of the funnel -> You should be setting appointments with 70% of those leads, and getting 80% of those appointments through your front door, and getting 100% of those who make their first appointment to attend a second intro lesson or first group class.
- Narrow end of the funnel -> You should be enrolling 90% of the people who take a trial lesson or intro course.
- Overall, your goal should be to enroll about 50% of the people who contact you to inquire about lessons.
Note that once you are aware you need to hit the benchmarks above, then you can calculate how many leads you need to generate in order to hit your target enrollment numbers.**
Therefore, numbers dictate everything you do in your marketing; how much marketing you do, how often, and how much you need to spend on marketing each month.
How Many Leads and Inquiries Are Enough?
For most martial art schools, 30-40 leads and inquiries a month is plenty. However, if your sales skills need more work then you might need to generate more leads than that. And if your sales skills are very good, then you might need less.
So, your target for the number of leads you seek to generate each month might be different than a school across town or a school across the street. This is not something you should "guesstimate," however. Any target you set should be based on actual performance metrics in your school.
Regardless of your actual lead generation and enrollment goals, the bottom line is that marketing is a numbers game. So, the more people you get in the wide end of your funnel, the more people you will end up enrolling in your dojo at the other end.
In reality, the number of leads you generate with the same amount of marketing will fluctuate from month to month. Therefore, your goal in marketing should not be to do the exact same amount of marketing all the time.
Instead, it should be to get as many people in your funnel as possible, month after month, no matter how much marketing it takes to do so.
Coming Up...
Tomorrow I'm going to take those six marketing funnel steps I told you about earlier this week, and I'm going to apply them to how they might work in a marketing funnel in real life.
This is going to give you the big picture with regards to marketing your school.
Once you see how a consumer might go from someone who doesn't even know you exist to enrolling in your dojo, it's going to make it a lot easier for you to plan your marketing.
So, stay tuned. This next email is really going to help you visualize your marketing, and how to set up systems from start to finish.
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
Quick-start Guide to My Books and Resources: - Looking for a list of books and resources I've written? Click here! - Need business coaching to grow your dojo? Click here…
P.S. - *Remember, good marketing is just the vehicle you use to get people to your front door. Once they enter your dojo, it's really about how good your programs are and how you treat them -- that's what's going to make the difference in whether or not they enroll, and whether or not they stick around. In my opinion, the fact that you have to teach a quality program is a given. But again, none of that matters if you don't have anyone on the floor training.
P.S.S. - **This is one of the main reasons why you need to track your numbers in your school -- leads, appointments, intros, etc. Show me a school owner who doesn't track their metrics, and I'll show you a struggling school owner, every single time. | 