| How
I Do It: Advertising and Marketing
Successful
marketing is essential to every business throughout
the world and is one of the key factors that determine
whether a business fails or succeeds. Marketing can
be a very complex subject and large organisations have
Marketing Departments to promote their products and
services. Small businesses do not have the luxury of
being able to employ specialist knowledge and the owner
has to make important decisions about how to promote
their product or service.
Having
taught for two American chain schools, namely TC Dance
Clubs and Fred Astaires, I have learnt how they promote
their products to the social market. In 1987 I started
my own dance school based on a network of local halls
teaching social dancing to adults. In 1993 I purchased
premises and today run a successful studio teaching
social and competitive dancing to adults and children
and have a large theatre section that covers Ballet,
Tap and Jazz.
In
order to be successful in marketing your dance classes,
you have to advertise them. This can be done via leaflets
and posters or local advertisements in newspapers and
magazines, supermarket display boards, telephone directories,
web sites, mail shots/discount vouchers. There are pros
and cons for most of the above and I would like to offer
practical advice on each medium based on my own experience.
Leaflets
and Posters
These are essential for general enquiries and to send
to prospective clients that telephone enquiring about
classes. The quality and design are extremely important
as this will tell enquiring clients about you, they
will judge from the literature you send whether to attend
your school or class. In today’s market place
I believe it is essential that leaflets and posters
are professionally printed and not just printed from
your PC.
Colour
printing is preferable if your budget can stretch to
that additional cost. Other commercial dance groups
such as Ceroc, Salsa UK and some dance schools produce
full colour leaflets and you must compete with these
and not look second best. The cost of colour print has
significantly reduced in recent years, as a guide price
5000 single side A5 leaflets cost around £350.
The bonus is that no VAT is payable on leaflets so check
your invoice that you have not been charged VAT.
Door
to door leaflet drops can be very hit and miss and more
often than not produce a poor response. They are hard
work and time consuming if done by yourself but may
prove fruitful if used in conjunction with other advertising.
Leafleting commuters at your local train station is
always successful as you can hand out a large number
of leaflets in a relatively short space of time and
to the market you are trying to attract.
Newspapers
This is the best form of advertising for our type of
business. It advertises to a large number of people
in a short time. You must select which local paper to
advertise in carefully. Generally speaking the more
expensive the paper is to advertise in the greater response
you will get. You must select whether to advertise in
a free paper or one that is paid for. I would choose
the most widely read in your area and one that has a
good mix of news and adverts.
Remember
never pay the rate that is first quoted to you. It is
standard practise for local newspapers to heavily discount
their normal adverting rate. As an example we pay 55%
of the normal advertising rate but this discount has
accrued over the last fifteen years. You should, with
some tough negotiating, be able to reduce the normal
rate by 20% but you may have to book a series of 6 adverts
to achieve this discount.
Magazines
There are a number of magazines in your local area that
you could potentially advertise in. These may be local
interest magazines, cinema guides or school/local authority
magazines. Whilst some of these may be good publications
to advertise in, many will not bring you any new clients.
I have on a number of occasions paid three or four hundred
pounds for an advert and got zero response, and that
really was money down the toilet.
Having
learnt from experience I now ask all magazines trying
to sell advertising to send me a copy of their last
publication. I then contact a few of the advertisers
in that publication and explain that I am considering
advertising as they did, but before I commit to advertising,
I wished to gain from their experience on whether they
felt it was money well spent and would they advertise
again. This approach has saved me thousands of pounds.
Supermarket
Displays
There has been a trend over the last five years to sell
advertising space in large supermarkets in the form
of displays around stamp machines and post boxes. Whist
visual awareness is important it is cheaper and better
to advertise in local newsagent windows.
Telephone Directories
This form of advertising brings a steady stream of customers
and helps to maintain class numbers throughout the year.
As with all classes the steady flow out must be replaced
with a steady flow in, thus keeping class numbers constant.
Adverts can be of varying sizes depending on budget.
Unfortunately no discounts are offered and the price
they quote is the price you pay.
Thomson
directory is a cheaper option but in my experience never
as good. Both companies offer to design your advertisement
for you as part of their service. The adverts they produce
are often not very good with poor access to clip art
and poor layout. You will perhaps be better designing
the advert your self and let them finalise the layout.
Web Sites
This can be a cheap way to attract new business. A web
site gives you a shop window in which to tell and sell
your lessons and classes. It gives you a chance to display
photos and entice prospective new clients to telephone
to book classes and lessons. One of your students may
be able to assist you in setting up a web site cheaply.
Mail
Shots/Discount Vouchers
There are marketing companies that will send out discount
vouchers to specific postcodes advertising your organisation.
The idea is each household will receive an envelope
with perhaps ten companies advertising discounts on
products and/or services. This approach seems to work
best in less affiuent areas and may be worth considering
but only send to postcodes very local to your classes.
It
is best to advertise using a number of mediums and not
just rely on one approach. To successfully launch a
new class might mean spending hundreds of pounds to
promote it. So often I hear teachers complaining about
the low numbers they have in classes. You cannot expect
to have lots of new clients if you do not spend money
to make money.
I
hope that you find something useful from this article
and that it helps you to spend your advertising budget
wisely. Remember, once you have chosen where you are
going to advertise it is just as important to think
about what that advert should look like and what it
should say.
Martin
Bishop
Member of the
Ballroom Dance Teachers Committee
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