Okay, so I'm back in the office and this week I'll be finishing up our series on why dojo owners fail. And to round out this series of email messages, I'll be speaking specifically on the topic of marketing mistakes all week long.
Because frankly, 90% of the challenges that martial art school owners face can be solved with more, or more effective, marketing. So, let's get started...
- Not marketing enough or consistently
- Marketing the wrong message, or to the wrong audience
- Unprofessional marketing
- And, weak marketing
I'm going to speak to all of these marketing mistakes this week, starting with...
The Problem With One-Time, Inconsistent Marketing
One of the most common marketing mistakes I see school owners make is to treat marketing like it's a one-time thing you only do when you need more students. They look at getting students like a hunting expedition, when they should be treating it more like farming.
A hunter decides they want to bag an animal for their meal that night. So, they go out and hunt specifically for a single meal. Fine, their belly is full for that evening, but guess what? When the meat runs out, they have to go out and do it all over again.
This is a huge mistake, and it's also an inefficient way to survive.
Looking At Marketing As An All-the-Time Thing
But a farmer cultivates his crops, preparing several fields at a time as he plants various different types of plants that grow in different seasons. He treats his work as a cyclical, never-ending process and harvests from many fields and orchards at different times of the year.
And, he makes sure that he grows enough to store up for the winter months, when the fields are dormant or snowed over.
In the same way, the inefficient marketer decides they need more customers, so they'll do a one-shot marketing method, hoping they get a ton of new students from that one-shot deal. And if it works out, they coast on the results until the next time their floor and bank account are looking empty.
But the smart school owner looks at marketing as a cyclical process. They realize that the best way to get new leads and students is to have many different marketing methods working for them all at once, all the time. They never stop marketing.
The Results?
They have a constant stream of leads and students coming into their school, week after week, and month after month... even during the so-called "slow" months.
So, if you find yourself getting "feast or famine" results from your marketing efforts, it might mean you need to change the way you look at marketing your dojo.
Instead of looking at marketing as a single-shot deal, start looking at it as something you do all the time that never stops.
