Starting another Dojo

[sensei8]

Marketing is very important, especially if you're NOT in a highly visible and high traffic area; where ALL have no choice to see you. This locations are not cheap, but they don't need, imho, a great amount of marketing to attract new students. In these areas, new students darn near fall into your school.

If you're somewhere apposed, then, your marketing game better be all that and a bag of chips!!

[mal103]

We opened last week and had a few so hopefully will get a few more tonight.

I had most leaflets go out in the local paper, we also included an advert for a couple of weeks. Because of this the paper ran an article on us and put a write up and picture in the paper

The boards that we placed around town ended up being a bit small and you could only read the top line from several meters away, I plan to replace the best placed one with a new board soon.

I have gone online and placed a listing in all of the free advert sites and all of the Dojo locator type websites. I've updated our website with as many mentions of the keywords as possible like Karate Warminster, Warminster Martial Arts, Karate Warminster etc.

One of the new students had trained before and said he would try to bring friends along as he was keen to get back into training and we are welled situated.

Also handed out leaflets to all students to pass on to friends in the area.

Thanks for your help and suggestions although not sure how a bag of chips can help....

[Rig]

Malcolm, great to hear how things are going, looking at my student capture statistics 98% of my students were via Google so a good website and website marketing will help.

As PS1 has already mentioned do not let your website be all about you, it's not a place to highlight your ego, make sure it's aimed at the what prospective students will get, i.e. fitness, confidence etc.

There is a very good book on this subject by Matthew Chapman called Black Belt Biz (https://www.blackbeltbiz.co.uk) that contains loads of marketing ideas as well as what to do when you get prospective students as well as retention ideas.