Do you have the right Marketing Mix in your Children’s Activity Business?
When it comes to baking a cake, I must follow a recipe otherwise it turns out to be a complete flop. If you have ever watched that TV programme called Nailed It that’s me! I can’t bake for toffee, but every year I attempt to make cakes for my girls and my partners birthday instead of just buying one from the shop.
Why do I follow a recipe? because I have more chance of it being a successful bake than if I just throw all the ingredients in a bowl and hope for success. My last cake proved this theory. It looked like an actual cake instead of a pancake.
I use this analogy as you can apply the same principles to your marketing. If you haven’t identified who you want to attract into the business in the first place, you’ll end up with no one. If you haven’t got the right messaging going out in your content, you end up with people who don’t value you. If you don’t have the tools in the business to do the job properly, you end up giving yourself more work to do. Basically, you end up feeling deflated, a bit like one of my cakes – and we don’t want that.
That’s why you need the right marketing mix in your business. When I say mix, I mean have a marketing plan in place that you can follow that gets you the results you want to see. You want the marketing activity to actually generate sales, which enables you to hit your goals.
Let me explain this further. There’s no point being on social media if the aim is to get more eyes balls on your business, but you don’t get any engagement or reach. There’s no point collecting email addresses if you’re not going to do anything with them. There’s no point paying for adverts on Meta if you haven’t set them up correctly. Do you see where I’m going with this. Make your marketing meaningful and intentional.
First, you need to understand the goals in your business i.e., what do you want to actually want to achieve in your business. Be it a personal, business, or financial goal what do you want from your business. Once you have identified your goals, write them down and put them somewhere you can see them every day. There’s nothing like a visual to give you the kick you need every day to take action.
Then your going to work backwards from that goal (I call this reverse engineering) so for example if your goal is to award 5 new franchises in your business in 2023, then what steps do you need to put in place to make that happen. What actual marketing do you need to do to make that a reality. I would say website, online presence, paid ads, email marketing would be where I would be placing my attention and budget as a starting point. If you need help with your growing your franchise then you can learn more about working with me here.
If your goal is to have 200 children in your progamme of activity every week, how many classes do you need to deliver to achieve that goal. Then what actual marketing activity do you need to do to fill those classes. Is it social media, paid adverts, optimized website, online presence? Or is a mixture of all of the above through an integrated Marketing system, which is what I teach in the Market Like A Pop Star Programme. It could be that trial classes are your marketing tool to achieve that goal, so then you look at how you are going to market trial classes.
What I’m getting too is you need to drill down into your marketing activity, because if social media isn’t bringing you in the sales, but your email list is, then where should you place your attention? I would say growing that email list would be your priority. Then the marketing on social media should focus on listing building, getting people to join your list so you can market to them. If we know first time parents are looking on google or TikTok to search for activities, then there’s the clue of where you need to be with your marketing.
If your marketing isn’t quite working for you right now, then now is the time to set your goals for 2023, look at your current marketing activity, review what’s working and what’s not. Then look at your overall goal, and work backwards in steps and figure out what marketing activity you need to do at each stage to get you to your goal.
To help you with this I have created a Marketing Calendar spreadsheet, so you can map out next year for just £9.99 which also includes 15 minutes of training on how to use the calendar. This would give you a starting point to get a marketing plan in place for your business that actually delivers you results.
