| Friend,
It's finally time to wind down this email series on direct response marketing for martial art schools with the last two messages.
And today, I want to discuss the mechanical components of a marketing funnel, and how it might look when you build your direct response marketing machine.
Again, A Caveat...
Before I get into this, once more I want to provide a caveat to what I'm about to share. First, this is not intended to provide you with THE template for setting up a marketing system.
Instead, it's only intended to be an example of one way you might set up your marketing for your dojo.
And there are several different ways you could do this. Not millions, but several at least. I know successful school owners who focus on SEO, who focus on direct mail, who focus on Facebook marketing, and those who focus on other offline marketing methods.
I also know of successful school owners who get the majority of their leads from inviting people to their school in face-to-face settings (sometimes known as direct sales).
My point in telling you this is to emphasize that there's no one BEST way to set up a marketing funnel. However, there are proven ways to do so. What follows is one of them.
Developing Expertise
Also, I want to make it clear that this email series is not intended to be a detailed how-to approach to direct marketing. Instead, its purpose is to provide you with the big picture, so you have an idea of what you need to do to create a successful marketing system for your dojo.
The how-to part is the next step, and that's something you need to pursue further beyond the constraints of this series. My marketing system course might be one place to get started, or you might pick a marketing method that appeals to you and resolve to become an expert on that approach.
And how do you become an expert? By devouring every piece of information you can get your hands on regarding that approach to marketing, and then seeing what works in real time through trial and error.
If you're looking for a shortcut, my apologies, because there isn't one. You have to get in the ring and get your nose bloodied a few times if you want to enjoy the benefits of empirical evidence.
Okay, now that you know the score, on to the meat of this topic.
The Mechanical Components - One Approach
I often counsel my coaching clients against trying to find one "holy grail" approach to getting new students. For starters, I don't think one exists. And second, I don't like my clients to have all their marketing eggs in one basket.
Instead, I'd rather see them using several different methods to generate leads and inquiries. Sometimes this approach is called "the shotgun approach" to marketing, and while experienced marketers may scoff at it, it's actually the best way for marketing newbies to get started.
In one of Dan Kennedy's books on direct response marketing, he cites the story of a healthcare practitioner who followed his methods to great success. Someone (it might have been Dan) asked this business owner how he was able to attract so many patients - in other words, what was his "best" method?
The man replied, "I don't know one way to get 100 new clients, but I know 100 ways to get one. And I use them all." That's the shotgun approach to marketing.
How To Fail (And Win) With The Shotgun Approach
It's actually very hard to screw up that approach to marketing your dojo. Basically, implementing it is very simple: - You write good ads and offers...
- You do a heck of a lot of marketing using as many methods as you can all the time...
- Repeat.
The way most people screw this up though is by either by not doing enough marketing, or by not marketing this way all the time.
See, many school owners look at marketing as an expense and not an investment. That's because they don't understand that every dollar you spend on GOOD marketing is going to bring you a profit down the road.
No Wasted Marketing Dollars
Sure, crappy marketing is throwing your money down the drain... but we aren't going to do crappy marketing.
We're not going to spend hundreds on a useless yellow pages display ad. We're not going to waste money on pens and erasers and stress balls with our school name on them. And we're not going to get our business listed on a cartoon aerial map of our city that no one is going to read.
No, we're going to focus on stuff that works. An amazing website. Good search engine optimization (no gaming the system, but instead focusing on Google best practices). Facebook ads. Rack cards. Snipe signs. Direct mail marketing. Email marketing. And so on.
We're going to write great ads and come up with killer offers. And we're going to get those offers in front of as many people as we can using proven methods.
Invest... Then Reinvest
If that means we spend $2500 a year on our website, $300 a month on online ads, and $500 a month on printing, then that's what we do.
Because we know that spending $1,000 bucks a month on GOOD marketing is going to return $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 or more each month. And we know that every month we hit our enrollment goals, our monthly tuition revenue is going up.
So we're building our income every month we invest in good marketing that grows our dojo.
Which is why we're going to keep reinvesting part of our profits back into our marketing so we can scale it up, month after month after month.
That's what smart marketing is all about. It's a lot like investing in that regard. You put your money where it's going to return the most for your investment, and you keep doing that, over, and over, and over.
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Okay, enough on the shotgun approach and looking at marketing as an investment. I think you get the point. Tomorrow, I'll be back to close out this series with a final recap and wrap-up message.
Stay tuned!
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. - If there's one thing I hope you take away from this email series, it's that to achieve effectiveness in your marketing you must be a constant student of the same. The people who are most eager to learn about good marketing are the ones who inevitably become the biggest winners in marketing their dojos.
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