Martial Arts Professional Magazine

We constantly remind our Maximum Impact members that many factors contribute to make a school successful. One of the biggest factors, which must never be ignored, is profitability. Your goal is to make all components of your school as profitable as possible, especially marketing. As I’m sure you’ve discovered, it’s very easy to spend plenty of your hard earned money on marketing.

If you’re not careful, it’s even easier to waste plenty of your hard earned money on marketing. It’s no secret that wasting precious marketing dollars is one of the quickest ways to decrease your profitability. Don’t let that happen to you!

To make your marketing more profitable, take full advantage of the resources you already have in place, before you spend another dime on additional marketing activities. Don’t let the precious leads you’ve already “paid for,” die on the vine. Instead, maximize them! To ensure maximum marketing profitability, I recommend you work your current resources over like a cheap heavy bag, before any new money is invested. Otherwise, you’re just leaving profits on the table and increasing your expenses unnecessarily. That doesn’t make sense!

Fully maximize the opportunities you already have in place with these five tested and proven strategies, before you invest additional money in marketing.

1. Obtain referrals from your existing students.
Referrals are the least expensive and highest quality source of new business that you’ll ever receive. In fact, many Maximum Impact members report that referrals are their number one source of new students.

Clearly, you too can capitalize on referrals by implementing several different effective referral programs and then using them consistently. Remember, the profitability on referrals is huge because referrals are free.

Let me also mention that the members’ section of NAPMA.com contains an outstanding and comprehensive report titled, “Referral Systems: Easy, Affordable and Effective.” This report includes 20 tested and proven referral systems that you can incorporate into your school, immediately.

2. Re-enroll your former students.
All schools lose students that your various marketing efforts generated. They drop out for dozens of reasons. Usually, it’s not because they dislike you or your school. It’s because certain events take place in their lives that caused them to take a break from their training.

The good news is that you can inspire many of your former students to return to classes, if you make the effort. Take the time to contact them and a percentage will rejoin. Often, this happens because whatever circumstances caused them to drop out of your school, no longer prevail. They probably meant to contact you, but never did because they’ve been busy or were embarrassed to touch base.

A simple phone call or a handwritten letter is often all it takes to break the ices 50 they can return happily to training at your school once again. Rejoin campaigns really do work and the best part is that they’re typically free or extremely inexpensive to conduct.

3. Work your existing prospect lists
If you’re like most school owners, then you’ve accumulated a valuable list of prospects. The mistake that many owners make is that they spend more money on marketing, to generate more leads, before they ever work their existing prospect list to exhaustion. Some don’t work their list at all.

I can’t tell you how many times a school owner confesses to methat he has a pile of leads in his desk drawer that he’s never pursued.Yet, he continues to advertise and so do the advertising bills. This isa flawed strategy, especially if you’re on a tight budget. A smarterapproach is to be disciplined and maximize the leads you’ve already accumulated, before you throw more money at marketing.

4. Improve your current marketing efforts.
If you’re a “White Belt” marketer who’s making all the basic mistakes, then you should stop the bleeding immediately. The last thing you want to do is invest more money in more marketing that doesn’t generate results.

Actually, cleaning up your preexisting marketing is relatively simple. By becoming a member of NAPMA’s Maximum Impact program, you will immediately and dramatically improve both the tactics and strategies of your school’s marketing. You’ll begin receiving more professionally designed marketing tools than you can shake a stick at; plus, you’ll learn the strategies of many of the savviest marketers from inside and outside of the industry. Obviously, all of these added resources would enhance your marketing results and profitability, as well as save you much precious time and stress, in trade for an investment that’s so small it isn’t even worth mentioning.

In summary, many owners erroneously think that the solution to increase their school’s enrollments or profitability is to pump more money into marketing. Not always. Often, the correct strategy is to utilize fully the untapped resources that exist right under your nose. Follow this strategy and your marketing profitability is guaranteed to rise.