Have you ever spent a lot of money on a marketing project for your dojo, only to see it fail miserably? I know I have...
- Advertising on bus stop benches. It seemed like a GREAT idea when the sales rep described it - my business plastered on mini-billboards, all over town. Unfortunately, what he didn't tell me was that he was selling me the bench seats, not the back of the benches. So, my ad saw more asses than eyeballs the whole time it ran.
- Paying for inclusion in one of those cute illustrated business maps. Yeah, the ones that no one ever looks at, because if someone wants to use a map they're going to use a real map or go to Google. So, that was a total waste of many hundreds of dollars.
- Getting display ads in EVERY yellow pages book in the area. Yes, it was redundant, and this was also at a time when the yellow pages were being replaced by internet search engines. So, not only did I waste a lot of money - also, my ads were that much less effective when they ran.
Sure, all these ads bombed. But in every case, they bombed because I used the wrong marketing channel, not because the ads were necessarily bad ads.
Although, I will say that back then there were so few marketing channels, if you just got your ad in front of people you'd get a response.
But in today's marketing environment, that's simply not the case. Now, if you want your ads to work you really do need to understand the basic elements that go into an effective marketing campaign.
The reason I bring this up is because I work with a lot of school owners. And one story that I hear over and over again is, "We spent X dollars on Y marketing method, and it didn't work so we canned it."
Now, granted - if something isn't working, there's no sense in continuing to spend money on it. That's just throwing good money after bad.
But, if it's a marketing method that other school owners are using successfully, then you need to ask yourself WHY it isn't working for you. Because, if you know that the marketing channel you're using is reliable, then it has to be the WAY that you're marketing that's killing your efforts.
And that's why you have to study marketing if you want to grow your dojo. Just spending an hour a week reading up on what goes into a great marketing piece can pay off in dividends a year from now. Imagine how much better your ads could be if you invested 52 hours into studying great marketing...
But, if you just quit the first time something doesn't work, and then sit on your hands and watch your meager enrollment continue to dwindle, you're soon going to be back at your 9 to 5 wondering why your life sucks so bad and what you did to deserve such misery.
So, let's prevent that sort of an impending tragedy, shall we? Make a commitment to spend just one hour a week studying marketing for the next year.
I guarantee you, next year you'll be glad that you made that investment.
