A Quick Marketing Checkup:
Are You Spending Your Martial Arts
Ad Dollars Wisely?
By Christopher Caile
There is an old story that goes that most businesses
waste 50 percent of their ad dollars on advertising
that isn't effective but that they can't do anything
about it because they don't know which half. Well,
here is a quick check method you can actually use
to see if the dollars your martial arts school spends
to recruit new students is actually bringing you an
effective return. It might even tell you that you
should change the very way you recruit. Of course,
this assumes your school is actually successful enough
to have a budget of some sort.
First, you want to add up the yearly cost of all
the telephone book yellow page advertising, newspaper
advertsing, Value Pack coupons, printing of flyers,
counter displays --everything you use. Second, count
up all the new students who have joined your school
for the same time period. Now divide the second into
the first to get the average cost of recruitment per
student. For example, if during a one year period
you recruited 50 new students and spent $1000 on advertising
(here we are using totally abstract numbers) your
average cost of recruitment per new student would
be $20.00. This isn't bad.
Your ideal cost per student, of course, should be
a low as possible, but realistically it should run
between $10.00 and $20.00 and sometimes as high as
$35.00 in larger urban markets. But, if you are spending
$8000 dollars a year on advertising and you are only
getting 150 new students, your cost per new student
is over $53.00 and that's too high. This should tell
you that you are spending too much money to recruit
the average student. And unless you have a phenomenal
retention rate, it might also signal that your budget
is out of whack and that you might be in trouble.
This impacts the viability of your school. It also
directly takes money out of your pocket because every
dollar wasted is a dollar that could potentially be
pid to you or used for your school.
Thus if you are paying too much you should carefully
examine how and where you are advertising. Also examine
where and how your students are recruited. These factors
can provide some essential clues on how to adjust
your spending to reduce wasted advertising and recruitment
dollars.
About The Author
Christopher Caile has been a student of the martial
arts for over 40 years, and a teacher for more than
35 years. He has an MA in International Relations
with a specialty in southeast Asia, and has lived
and traveled in Japan, Okinawa and south and southeast
Asia. He is 6th degree black belt in Seido karate
under Kaicho Tadashi Nakamura, a long time student
of aikido under Roy Suenaka (Wado-kai aikido), as
well as a student of other martial arts (including
daito ryu aikijujutsu, judo, boxing and several Chinese
arts) and Zen. He is also a teacher of qi gong (Chinese
energy medicine), in which he trained under Master
Zaiwen Shen and is Vice-President of the DS International
Qi Medicine Association.
In his business career he has been a newspaper journalist
and entrepreneur of several business ventures, and
he designed innovative telecommunication and marine
products which were developed in companies he founded.
In 1999 he founded FightingArts.com (which went live
in August 2000) and its parant company eCommunities
LLC.
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