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1. How many of you use or have used Groupon in your school's marketing?
2. What was your experience?
3. What was your ratio to sign-ups?
4. Did it work for you, or was it as soon as they used up their groupon, they were out the door?
5. How did you convert them over to your regular program?
6. What incentives did you use?
7. Would you do it again?
Ask your current students if they subscribe to groupon. It'll give you a quick demographic survey.Quote:
Originally Posted by TenTigers
Any advertising I ever did was never worth the money and currently don’t have a single student from it.
For me word of mouth has always been #1, plus I like it low key and under the radar anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TenTigers
1. Good luck getting on Groupon, Living Social or Amazon Local. They typically don't accept martial arts schools. And if they do, if they already have a school listed within 50 miles of your place you more than likely will not be accepted.
2. I had a Living Social deal and labeled it boot camp fitness. In my area they were not accepting anything martial arts related. It's a crap deal that will loose you money.
3. Usually got between 80-90 buys
4. As soon as they used the deal they left. They were bargain shoppers looking for cheap deals.
5. It didn't matter how much weight they lost, how in shape they got, how great they felt or how much fun they had it's very difficult tho convert them to regular prices after a Groupon/Living Social deal.
6. Groupon/Living Social's prices are incentive enough. Use anything more to get conversions and you're basically giving away your services for free, or as I call it, "whoring yourself out just to get sign-ups".
7. Not a chance. Not for my industry anyways. I feel Groupon, Living Social and the likes are great for restaurants, salons, travel services, etc, where you get a free or discounted first time to get you in the door to try the product or service and then sell them on repeat business. But for what we do, we have to give away too much and usually don't see a return.
Here's how it works: You make your add and set your prices, if approved, they discount your regular price by 40-60% off. So if your regular prices are $100 per month they'll probably sell your ad at $40 per month plus they may want you to throw in a free uniform. From that they'll take 50% of the monies from your buys (as a finders fee) so you've just now made $20 per person for a uniform and month of classes.
Now here's what people over look. Say you get 50 buys. Times $20 per person you've just made a fast $1,000. And they'll run your ad every other month to every three months. So it appears every other month you make an easy $1,000 which is tempting.
But here's the down side. Say even half of those buys actually come in and take you up on the offer (not everybody does). You've now taken up 25 student spaces in your school at a loss of $80 per new acquisition plus material costs for uniforms. In two months you're going to do it again when they run your ad again. Even if you can convert 50% of these people to contracted students back up at regular prices, you have to ask yourself, do you have enough real estate to accommodate this type of expansion? Most small schools can't. This is why these types of ads work well for the mega schools.
The reality is you probably will only to convert 5-10% of these students to full price. The reason being, people go to these sites looking for bargains. Basically they are online yard sale hunters. This is not the profile you want to build you school off of. The other downside is even though your converting 5-10% which is a solid steady pace of growth, you're still giving up a ton of valuable real estate in your gym, at a loss, to get these new students. Keep in mind, something most instructors over look, if you expand too fast or over crowd your classes you will loose students. Are you willing to sacrifice the quality students now that will stay and pay for a long time just to make a quick buck?
Professionally I would not recommend using this form of advertising, but you need to figure these things out for your school in your area. Maybe what doesn't work for me helps you to flourish.
I'm not a school owner but I have used groupon before for MT. Just thought you might want to hear from the other side.
I used it because I wanted to get a feel for the curriculum, the instructors, the other students, basically the whole thing. This, for me, was the best way to do that because it's hard to get that felling on a one free class or week trial. You don't know if they are outing on a show just for the one day in order to get you pumped to join. This deal gave me a max of 15 classes I could attend over a 6 week period. Unofrtunatley, by the end it just didn't work out as it wasn't something I was interested in mainly because of the classes.
In that way I was glad I used the groupon because if I didn't and signed up after a weeks' classes, I would have been sorely disappointed.
any times money is emphasized, you devalue kung fu.
if u have to use "tactics" to get people to sign up for classes, they wont stay for long.
TT- my wife is in a group that groupons.
they join nothing. they hop from place to place getting the deal then moving on to the next place with a deal. that is the whole idea of groupons anyway.
I think with martial arts, it is still word of mouth, getting out in the community and doing demos, fronting fighters in amateur or small purse events, entering tournaments, sponsoring tournaments etc.
One of the things that really worked well for a guy here in TO is that he contacted the school board and got Kung Fu into the PE curriculum as a voluntary course. this generated loads of business for his club an didn't hurt his reputation at all.
Working with Law enforcement is a good one too for promoting RBSD elements of Kung Fu.
As you know, you gotta get out there and hit the bricks an push it.
Hard work, dedication and voila, you're full up for another year of paying students + gravy seminars!
Here's something I do and this sounds weird. When I think about how I am going to do something, I think about the hardest way i could do it, commit to that and then as it unfolds, I feel better about how easy it really was. :)
Preshow movie ads worked really well for attracting new students.
Ten Tigers,
Groupon is a good way to promote sales of commodities and service like restaurant food, etc. But it is not an appropriate way for training. It makes the service look cheap.
Regards,
Steve Lau
Hong Kong
I did something similar, paid good money but did not work for me.
also, you probably know this, but kids classes and aiming at kids will be your bread and butter.
Adult students that are serious are rare in all models of martial arts clubs.
But even in a full out mma club, most of the people are just there for a t-shirt.
in fact, in pretty much all individual sports clubs, that is the case.
There is always a serious core group in any club.
I've moved a handful of times. Whenever I look for something in my area, I generally either google, or use google maps with a keyword like Kung Fu. It helps if a school is on Yelp too, that can be helpful since some people will comment (though usually it's just people with kids, which doesn't help me much, but it could likely help you).
Once I sort through the schools with the bullsh!t sounding names, I look at the site, read about the instructor, look at videos available, basically try to get a feel for the quality of instruction available.
Then if I'm really interested, I look at the stuff David mentioned:
But of course, I'm a tech-savvy adult with a lot of MA experience. Not your typical student :DQuote:
Originally Posted by David Jamieson