4 Ways to Make Your Online and Offline Marketing Stand Out From the Rest With Suzanne Blake Gerety

Transcription

1 4 Ways to Make Your Online and Offline Marketing Stand Out From the Rest With Suzanne Blake Gerety Suzanne Gerety: One of the things that I ve shared with our members about is that I m very passionate about marketing dance studio marketing. So, let s just dive right into the topic of this seminar, and the seminar I ll be presenting in New York at the Dance Teachers Summit. It s on low-cost, high-impact marketing strategies, which I particularly am fond of. I think there are a few common misconceptions that I d like to clear up about low-cost marketing. I d like to use a dance analogy for it. competition The first is that a lot of times, people think, Well, if it s low-cost, it must mean it s lowimpact. Meaning, if you didn t spend much on it, it must not have a big pop or effect. I sort of disagree with that. I like to use the analogy of self-costuming a piece for, say, a dance recital or a dance competition. Costumes can be simply done, very affordable, but it s the dancing that stands out. It s the technique behind the costume that will stand out. So I sort of think of your marketing, when it s low-cost, as a self-costumed approach, where your technique, your business practices, what you re sharing with the world and what you re doing at your studio is the technique, and how you re packaging it can be very simply and affordably done, especially in today s day and age of technology. You really can make a big impact with a very small budget. The second misconception that people think about low-cost marketing is that you would be attracting the wrong type of students. People have this notion that, Well, if I didn t spend much, or if it was cheap or less expensive, I m going to attract the wrong students. Again, on that, I completely disagree. The most powerful tool and you know this, Kathy in business, and in dance studio business, is the word-of-mouth marketing. It s referrals. Those are completely free. Your word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful thing, and your referrals are the most powerful thing, and it doesn t cost a penny. It does cost a lot of time and energy to build up your reputation, but you re not paying for that. You re generating that from within. Especially in today s day and age of social media and marketing, you can target your approach. So, again, low-cost you can absolutely attract the right kind of students. You can ask for those personal recommendations and referrals. 1

2 So attracting the right students has very little to do with expensive ads or fancy brochures. It has to do with leveraging your relationships and your reputation. Thirdly, the other misconception, before we jump in to some of the real strategies that I m going to share with you, is that low-cost people have this assumption that it means you have to do a little bit of everything to have it work. If you re going to do something low-cost, you must have to do a hundred things. I completely disagree. Let s use a dance analogy again. You don t have to give every trick in the book in a dance routine to have it be memorable and stand out. In fact, the best routines that get the highest marks or the most emotion are oftentimes the ones where you just nail the fundamentals. You do a really solid foundation well, and you can really wow people. I like to think of that too from a marketing approach, which is you can t just try everything a little bit. You really have to do a few things really well, and do them consistently, and you ll start to see results. Again, the dance analogy works there, doesn t it Kathy? It s sort of like, we don t have to do a little bit of everything. We just have to do a lot of a few things really well. So, those are a couple common misconceptions I wanted to clear up about what I consider low-cost marketing, because I do think you can have a big impact with that. So, let s jump into these four key areas. Kathy: Even after 37 years of running a dance studio, in many ways, I feel like a beginner in marketing strategies particularly in low-cost marketing strategies. I ve wasted so much money, like I m sure many of our listeners and members can attest to. What I would say is, having the ability to look back and see what worked and what didn t work, what can be effective for low cost, so that we can put our efforts where they really do belong, which is building such a great product with our artistic work that the referrals come just as a natural outcome of our good work. But when we spend our time and money on ineffective, expensive advertising, it actually ultimately hurts our bottom line and our product. So that s what I know you are going to help us to be able to put our efforts where they belong, which is on the dance floor, and learn how to be more effective in the areas that we have failed at, or that we re not doing particularly well. So thank you for that. Absolutely. So, to piggyback on that, in today s Internet age where we are driven by the Web and making our generating our referrals and our new business oftentimes through the Web, we need to have a video and a Web presence that has an impact. So the first area that I want to talk about that I mentioned in my , regarding the latest rage in having a Web commercial or having a video promotional piece for your dance studio. Not only having a promotional piece, but using video to, you know, expand your reach and to share 2

3 It s like what you just said, Kathy; what is your artistic vision, and what are you offering? What s the product you re delivering? What grade dance classes are you offering? The problem isn t so much in that dance studio owners and teachers, they know what they love to watch. The problem is getting people to watch those videos online. So I want to share a little bit of data with you to help you see the importance of this. The leading data research company online that does look in to rate the watching of videos is called comscore. Their June 2011 data is out, and it shows that 178 million U.S. Internet watchers U.S. Internet users watched online video content in June. YouTube is, of course, ranked at the top of the sites visited for video content. I m on YouTube quite often, looking for sometimes just little tutorials and such. They re watching also with that, 5.3 billion video ads, just in the month of June. Marketers and advertisers know that people have to watch the little ads before you know, if you watch news online, you see that little ad before the clip starts. The problem with that is that we re trained I mean, how many of you have a DVR on your TV, or you have satellite radio. You skip that ad. Everyone sort of wants to make the commercials go away. We re annoyed by commercials. We don t like commercials. The sort of double-edged sort for dance studios, right now, with this rage of Web commercials, is that people are trained to X out of them, to make them go away. I want to help you with that, so that we can make it be that people want to actually watch your video. The first thing is that you have 20 seconds or less to make an impact with any video you create. I m sure many of you listening have either a Flip camera, or there s a video component on your smart phone. You don t need really expensive equipment anymore. You can just get a really affordable, under-$200, Internet-ready video recorder, and really what you have is 20 seconds or less to make an impact. We have a tendency to make longer videos, but again, the comscore data shows that the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes, which is equal to 24 seconds. So that was the average length of time, with all the data they measured 24 seconds, that s about the average. You want to stick to that for a video. That s not long. I think the average TV spot is 30 seconds, so if you have a lot to say, break your videos up into segments. You could have a 20-second bit about your studio tour. You could have a 20-second bit on your classes. You can make it be little segments, and that s always more likely for people to watch them. Okay, here s the next most important thing. I think we ve learned this as well as we go. You have to show the benefits, not just the features of your dance studio. I see this a lot. I get to visit a lot of dance studio Web sites. 3

4 People are saying the same things over and over again: we have a state-of-the-art facility, we have air conditioned rooms, we have sprung floors, and we have talented teachers, trained teachers. If you re doing any video marketing, or even this translates to your print marketing. You ve got to show the benefits. Make your studio stand out from everyone else. Instead of saying, We have state-of-the-art sprung floors, it s, And that means that dancing at our studio is easier on your knees and feet for dancers of all ages, or, We have limited class sizes the benefit is personal care and attention. Try to find the benefit with every feature you express, even on a video commercial or on anything you re writing on the Web. The easy answer to get to a benefit is just ask yourself the question, after you say, Okay, we have a state-of-the-art facility, which means Okay, what does that mean? That will help you answer that question. Make sure you re sharing the features, but the benefits are what make people take action and register. Kathy: On every magazine cover, it will say, Flatter stomach in ten weeks. We really don t want to eat celery sticks, but we want the flatter stomach. So, we haven t even got to how we re going to get it, but there s the benefit right away. Wanting to have happy children you have just opened up a whole new thing. What are the benefits? We make almost the assumption of what benefits are dancers, so this calls me to be creative and precise in my language. I love this; thank you. Right. As a mom myself of younger children, it s nice that you have trained teachers. What I want to know is will my child be in a class of 20 screaming four-year-olds, or will there be limited class sizes, so that my child gets the attention and the personal correction that she needs. Again, put the benefit back on after a question. Every time we say, We have air conditioned studios, which means what? Which means you ll get to dance in perfectly climatecontrolled, optimum conditions for dance. Give it back to the user as what s the benefit for them. So, I guess I can only hammer this home one more time, which is that you ve got to get out your video camera. You don t have to be a skilled videographer; you just want to get some pictures, and actually what s even better, the service I want to share with you I ve shared before. You can use a lot of still photos. So, there are two options around the marketing template. You can go with the done-for-you template, which is a little more expensive. There are services out there online, about $600 or $700 dollars. They ll sort of walk you through the script and do it for you. Or, you can go with the low-cost option, which is They have a Lite version; it s completely free. You can do unlimited 30-second videos. You can do just still photos; you can do still photos and video clips. 4

5 You type in the script. They have all like, hundreds of royalty-free music tracks you can use. You want to make sure you re not infringing on any music rights when you do videos. What s good is you can use the Lite version of Animoto completely free. We have a bunch of members that have used it. Or you can use the Animoto Pro version, which for the entire year is $249. You can have unlimited videos and unlimited length of videos. We had a few people at our studio work on putting videos together that you can package onto DVDs and sell. There s a lot of flexibility with Animoto. If you go that route, you can have lots of options. That s my favorite low-cost option for video right now, So, we ll move on to the next area, which is again, anybody who s listening to the call, you guys know that you can ask me questions on the forum anytime about these things. Second topic: advertising. Offline and online. We have a lot of studios that are just dabbling in Facebook ads. They have absolutely no idea how it s working. I had a studio owner say she spent $400 on Facebook ads and has no idea if it has translated into new students. So, my biggest point I want to say about any advertising you know, spending money on a paid ad is you ve got to have a goal in mind for why you re running this ad. Facebook ads which I m going to talk about here are certainly useful if you have a goal in mind. So let s say that you re, for example Kathy, we stopped advertising in our local paper. We stopped running big ads in the telephone book, etc., because we just knew that they weren t converting. People weren t going there. A lot of those ads were $600 what at one point were we were spending on print ads, do you want to think? Take a guess. Kathy: Oh, thousands a year. Thousands, and a couple hundred a month on telephone ads. Of course, this was back before that this is a weekend in the average paper. It s $200-$400 for a small ad that basically is not read by anybody that s smart enough to come to our studio. Right, exactly. That s what I want to mention. I do think there are some print advertising methods that are useful. They need to have longevity. It could be sort of one of those summer camp print guides, or back to school print something that s going to have a little more longevity than just an ad in a paper, or they have to be some sort of school bulletin, or something where you re going to get a lot of your target market to watch it. I don t think a lot of your target market is reading the local paper anymore. If your target market is moms who have young children, like myself, I use the newspaper to start fires in my fireplace in the winter. That s about it. You definitely want to make sure you re going now if you re trying to appeal to a certain demographic, make sure you know what they re reading. 5

6 So let s talk about Facebook, which is where I spend a lot of my time. Facebook ads. If you aren t there yet, or you don t have a Facebook presence, and you re really ready to jump in, and you want some help with that, I can help you. We have resources on the Web site. If you re already on Facebook, and you re like, We should try these Facebook ads, let me warn you. Facebook ads are, in the whole scheme of things, pretty expensive compared to some of the free stuff. So you ve got to know your goal. It s about a $10 minimum per day on a Facebook ad. You can pause the campaign very easily, just like you can with Google ads, but here s the thing. People are on Facebook because they re trying to be social on Facebook. They re planting their crops in Farmville, and they re sharing their photos. What they don t want to do is be driven off of the Facebook over to your Web site. They want to stay on Facebook. So here s the first mistake, I think: Facebook ads for dance studios that drive them not only off of Facebook but on to a Web site that s not up to date and doesn t have any scheduling information, online registration, or anything useful at the moment. It s just driving them over to the site, and they have no next step. Okay? A lot of people don t know what to do on your Web site. They need some sort of call to action. If you re going to advertise on Facebook, the first thing I would test is test driving them back to your fan page and getting some really good content on your fan page to start to get that conversation started. That s a reasonable goal to measure. You might think, Let s try some Facebook ads and see if we can grow the likes for our page this month. That s useful. But the wording you use in your ads has to be conversational, like people are talking on Facebook. Use that same language. Hey, do you like to dance? You might like our page. Click here to like us. Just something very informal. So, again, we can go into that more, but just remember, if you re testing Facebook ads, if you re driving them off of Facebook, you ve got to have a really good Web site that converts people and gives them some action to take on your Web site. Again, print ads yes, go ahead. Kathy: I just had an epiphany. What would really make a difference on my Web site, on our Web site, is somewhere where they d hook adults in too. Come join the fun! Constantly, I have people say, Do you have classes for adults? We re thinking of starting an adult competitive team, or just for fun. We have a great adult program, but I m just thinking, if someone was just sort of quickly looking through, and they suddenly saw something that said, Adults too, come join the fun! 6

7 Then if they suddenly went to classes for adults, and they see, Oh my goodness, I had no idea that they had all this going on. I danced when I was a kid. I d love to dance again. Exactly. So, definitely have it be relevant to them. I go back to the whether it be an ad you re running offline, meaning a newspaper, a directory, or some sort of guide, or an online ad, whether it be Facebook, whether it be a Google ad anything online gives people a call to action for the next step. I think this is what if I could just make this point be in bold and underlined, so many of us think the next step has to be to register for classes. It s really hard to take a completely cold prospect of a potential new student and have them get to registration. There are a lot of steps along the way that people need information about. How to choose the proper class: have you ever wondered about what dance style you d like? I mean, think about the questions you get on the phone. The next step for people, when you re advertising and marketing, is not always going to be to register. It s going to be an open house. I want to know more about this studio. I want to get to know what kind of classes you have. Really think about that when you re doing an ad. I go back to, there s got to be some call to action. Ask yourself in the goals that you have, if you re running a Facebook ad, what s the action? Do we just want them to like our page? Once they like our page, they get our news updates. Oh, and we better be adding some interesting information on our Facebook page: pictures, next open houses, oh, classes are open. Whatever it is, make sure you re adding some information. From there, you can make the invitation to come in for an open house or a trial class. From there, once you get them in the studio, then you can, you know, hand them the coupon, or invite them for the special early bird registration. You ve really got to walk people through a process. So think about that. You ve got to give people a really, really good reason to contact you. Make sure that you re realizing that people are in certain steps along the way, in the process of researching a dance studio where there are new students, okay? So, let s talk about one more part of this, regarding the advertising, both online and offline, which is that you need to be the easiest dance studio to be found online in your area. There s absolutely no reason why you guys can t leverage this now. Jill Tyrone, our site manager, just did a training on this two months ago for our members about making sure you ve claimed your Google Places listing for your dance studio. It s free. It s how people can write reviews of your site. It s how you re found on the MapQuest directions, where you pull up in relevancy for Google searches. That link is on the site, how to claim your Google listing. That should be the first thing if anybody did anything after this action item, make sure you ve claimed your Google listing. It s at 7

8 Again, I have that all up on the Web site here: "How To Get More Students With Google Places" Lastly, you ve got to know what people are saying about your dance studio online, okay? Whether you claim the listing or not, people are going to write reviews of your Web site. There s Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo Reviews, and all of this. You have to be in the driver s seat in today s mobile age, to be able to say, Yep, we claimed that listing. We re managing it, and we re sending our raving fans, Hey, listen, it would make a big difference if you d write a review of our dance studio online. Don t be afraid of it or run from it. It s actually getting bigger and more of an impact on your marketing. I ve seen too many dance studios that have one review, and it s nasty, and they haven t had a chance to go back. Most of the time Kathy, you and I both know this people who are upset, disgruntled, etc., if they don t have a path to direct their upset, they ll take it online, and they ll say things sometimes that are just not what they would say to you in person. So, you ve got to be able to from an advertising and marketing standpoint leverage your raving fans. Again, we have some training on that on the Web site. I can help you with it if you re stuck. So, that s the second section. I want to move on to we re covering a lot of content here, but I think that it s all important, from a low-cost standpoint. Again, Google Local, completely free. Claiming your listing is completely free, okay? It should be the foundation of your marketing strategy right now with your dance studio. Next thing, I want to talk about mailing. Mailing. Mail you know, offline and online mail. We re talking about mail that comes to you from the Post Office and that comes to you in your inbox. I don t know about you, but I sort my mail over the trash. Do you sort your mail over the trash? Kathy: As fast as I can. As fast as I can. Right, as fast as you can. Here s the thing about mail: it has changed. We all know that, everyone listening here. The cost to mail something is 44 cents for the minimum. We used to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a really pretty, beautiful brochure that would go out to thousands of people in our database. Number one, as you all know, the minute that schedule is in print, it changes. Things change. Classes drop. People move. Teachers switch. It goes out of date as fast as it goes in print. So, so many of us listening have moved to putting everything on the Internet, but there are still many that don t, so I want to say something about saturation mailings, or direct mail. 8

9 I worked with a studio owner recently who was about to invest $3000 into one of those what they call saturation mailings at the Post Office, where they blanket a targeted area. Okay, that s a lot of money to invest in any mailing, you know, to sort of cast the net wide, as they say. The problem wasn t so much in that she was willing to spend that money. The problem was with what was going on with the mailing. I looked at the mailing, and then I said, Well, what are you asking them to do? Remember we talked about what s the next step? Someone gets this postcard in their mailbox. It s like, Take dance lessons at this studio! People need a call to action. If it was, Pick up the phone and call, she didn t have that very prominent. She was directing them, Go to our Web site to register for classes. I went to her Web site, and here s the problem. The schedule couldn t handle even if one percent of that mailing picked up the phone and called, the schedule was so limited. The second thing was, there was absolutely no links to online registration. They had to then pick up the phone again and call back to register. There was absolutely no clear information about the tuition. It was very confusing, and there were no links to social media. Even if that person wasn t ready to make a decision, they couldn t even connect with her on social media. So again, before you start directing people with mail onto your Web site, you ve got to make sure that you have what people are looking for now, which is they need to take some sort of an action. Or, if you re directing them to pick up the phone and call, make sure that somebody really friendly and trained is answering your phone, to make sure they can answer questions about, you know, My child has never danced. They re four years old. What should I do? You ve got to be able to make sure that you have the right people answering the phone. Lastly, you can do a direct mail piece that goes to your current students. That s fine. Again, you can reduce your cost. We use we have used in the past those online mail houses like or VistaPrint.com. Definitely shop around with your local printer to make sure they re giving you the most competitive price on either, whether it s a postcard mailing, or a bi-fold 8.5 x 11. Shop around on pricing for your print projects, and you might be surprised. So let s talk about another form of mailings, which is . Kathy, this has revolutionized our studio business in the last 18 months. We primarily are using our online registration software Jackrabbit for our marketing, but other people again, you can do both using a system like a Constant Contact or AWeber or MailChimp I use AWeber. 9

10 Again, they re all about being very competitive. They re all about people everyone s got too much . It s true. We re overwhelmed by , but parents are used to I m used to communicating with from my children s teachers at school now. So if the dance studio says, Hey, listen, our primarily mode now to update you is by e- mail, the parents won t consider that junk mail. That s useful information. Every once in a while, you throw in a, Hey, we re opening up an adult tap class on Tuesday nights. Let us know if you re interested. That s how we honestly filled the adult tap program this year, wasn t it Kathy? Kathy: Yeah, we just offered that new class, and all of a sudden it was packed. Yes, it s just you re using your existing customer base, but they bring other people. Then you re able to communicate; you don t have to print a flyer. It s low-cost marketing within your customer base, and I ve been on cruises, and I get constant s on those tours from my a company that I ve cruised with before, because they know that I know what they have to offer, and hopefully I m a much easier fish to catch than somebody who has never cruised before. Right. I want to say this, too: to do one mailing of physical mail in the Post Office at 44 cents apiece, to 500 people Say you had 500 people on your mailing list. At 44 cents apiece, that would cost you $220 for that one time. That doesn t count the cost of printing the mailing, paying a person to do the piece you can get unlimited marketing service through a Constant Contact or an AWeber for the whole year for $200 or less, for up to 500 people. So you could about open houses, and you could about special events, etc. You can segment lists. You can break people off to different lists: prospects, and all that. So, I m sure everyone listening is on a lot of lists themselves. Sometimes you get useful stuff. That goes back to making sure that you re sending out really targeted information, and that it s useful to your customers. You definitely want to have some sort of a communication piece in place to just expedite the process of marketing. Like I said, don t be afraid to market to your current students. Like we said, we offered some different classes. They were like, Oh, that s interesting. They ll share that with people. We do a lot of Zumba for a Cause events. We put the word out about that. You never know how useful that s going to be for people. Ultimately, make it easy for people to do business with you. That s another reason why I would say, regarding lists again, if you do an offline mailing, you re sending something to someone s house, a piece of material make sure you re clear on what that call to action is, and how to be very easy for them to do business. If they open it up and they re like, Register online for classes. Hold your spot today! walk through that process yourself to make sure it s as simple as you say it is, okay? 10

11 Alright, so we re on the last piece of the puzzle here, before we get into some questions, which is on video branding. I do love this piece of marketing, because it s really much of the rage now, even what I see in Dance Retailer News and a lot of the vendors I m speaking to. Logo wear and logo items have always been around, okay? They used to be sort of really cheesy, and now they re getting very cool. There are so many different options. So, custom wear logo items are really one of the best purchases you can make in terms of having your business have a walking billboard especially teenagers and adults around town. People will say, Oh, I don t have money to spend on logo wear. You re better off to put $1000 or $500 into logo wear of items that of your current students that already love you to put that sticker on the back of their car than to put an ad in the paper. It s many of you know this, but it s like that resistance to wanting we get so stuck in, Oh, I d better put an ad in the paper, and that will generate I disagree. Again, if you cringe at the thought of matching tracksuits or putting logos on a water bottle, I d invite you to take a look at some of the new companies that are out there I m going to mention one in a minute that we re working with. The next step is you have to have a great logo. So many of our members are new. They re getting started, and they want to cut costs by not having a logo made professionally. This is an area of business that has drastically come down in price. I have never paid more than $250 for a logo. In fact, the logo right there on our Web site was $250 by a talented artist, because I used Web sites such as There s These are all the new sites that are called crowdsourcing, where you actually put the project up and a bunch of designers work on it, and then you pick the one you like best at the end, and then you award you know, you set the price and you award it. You don t have just one person that you re taking a risk on coming back with two designs. You have multiple people working on it before you even award the project. It s very cool. If you don t like that idea, you can go to a site like and find freelancers, but I would highly recommend you competitively shop for a logo for $250 or less. Get it at a high-quality resolution. They call it a vectorized format. You can put that all over you know, logo wear. You can use it on your branding with your Facebook page, and everything. So, if you need time for a new logo, I would say shop around for that. Again, going back to studio branding, a lot of people think, Oh, you have to do door hangers, and lawn signs, and flyer cars, and all of that. I happen to think that s a nuisance and annoying. People put lawn signs in my lawn; I throw them out. Car flyers, all of that what I would call old-school marketing is very notpermission-based marketing that I like. 11

12 Some of the ones that give me a very cool pen, or something useful with a logo on it, I might save that. It won t feel awkward. So, again, think about the longevity of a logo item. I ll just say this, the custom wear that we re going with this year, that we re bringing to New York is Sugar and Bruno, one of the really top dancewear companies, has just launched their custom wear So you can get your studio branded items with the Sugar and Bruno brand, which kids are mental for. They came out awesome, and I m looking forward to sharing that with all of our members too. A lot of these companies are coming out with some very cool and trendy custom wear, so take a look at what might be possible, going into the fall, something cheap. So, I m going to sum it up, and then I m going to open it up for questions. Here s the big one: ideas are just ideas until you take action on something. So everything that I ve shared with people, again, finding the time to get it done is really the hinge point for us. Do one thing. Do one, and start there. You really want to, in today s day and age, optimize all of the zero- and low-cost options first. I just posted a checklist on It s called the Dance Studio Marketing Checklist and it has a list of all those things I talked about: the different sites where you can claim your listings, and we have a lot of the training from the sites. You can outsource that to somebody in your office. Say, Follow this tutorial, and they can do it for you. But definitely make sure you re utilizing that. Take action on one thing and set clear, measurable goals. Really, with money today, you have to really productive with it, because it s your investment. So when you go to spend money on an ad, ask yourself how many students do we have to get for this, and is it worth it for us to do that? Or could we do something more creative? We have a member who said, You know what? $200 buys you a new ipod these days. I m going to do a $200 raffle of an ipod and do a referral thing for these kids. Instead of Bring-a- Friend Week, we re doing a referral. Every referral they get, they drop their name into a ticket drawn at the end, because they re so excited about a new $200 ipod or an itouch. They re very affordable. They re less money than an ad in the paper. Kids get excited about that, and they ll refer their friends. Lastly, low-cost marketing strategies, they re not complicated. The most important thing is you ve got to customize your marketing approach these days to your own studio s mission and vision for them to be most effective. Really put your voice into it and know that you will always be marketing. You ve got to find ways to make the time and fit it into your schedule, so that you ll have a steady stream of students. So I m going to open it up. I think I m five minutes over. I want to make sure I m going to unmute the line. Hopefully this is going to work. We ll take some calls, some questions. 12

13 Okay, I think everyone is unmuted. So, we have a few folks on the line. Does anyone have any questions for me? Debbie: You had mentioned and a couple of others. Could you mention those one more time? Sure, it s They do a lot of things. You can do a project on Web design, business cards, t-shirt designs, all of it, but I particularly think the logo it s very cool to see how it works. There s also or If you Google logo tournament or logo contest, you ll get a lot of those sites in that. Definitely feel free to private message me or me if you have any questions about that, that I can help with. Debbie: Debbie: Okay. Anyone else? Especially where you re stuck what are you focusing on? I do have one more question. We re a newer studio. We don t have a really high-tech Web site in that it s secured to take credit cards. I don t know if you or others have run into what I end up getting, we do have the registration full-on on the site. Last year, we were having people print it out and then just bring it in. This year, we had them you could fill it out, and it would come to myself, but they still had to come in and pay that first time. But then, I was finding that that s where a lot of my falloff was. We d think we d have 12 people in a class and only 4 or 5 of them would end up actually coming to, let s say, the summer classes. Do you think it s better to just say, Print this out and bring it in with your payment sometime in the next two weeks, or is that too old-school? For 35 years, Kathy, we did it that way. We didn t do online registration for the full year until last year. So we did a thing where you would call and hold your place, but you d have to pay your registration fee to hold the class. Were you taking a registration fee to hold the class? Debbie: Well, if they came in, we were taking their registration fee. But because we can t take the payments through the credit card registration, that was the problem. They weren t able to give us anything to actually hold it. And then, of course, I got some fake registrations with funny names. 13

14 Okay, yeah. If you re not ready to take the credit card online, I would recommend you actually go back to that you need to call to hold the space, but we won t guarantee your spot until you come in and pay the registration fee. If they have to get in the car and drive down to do that, that s going to have to be the case. In the meantime, you can take the year to really do some research on, you know, what system might be more affordable, but I think you just need to require that registration fee up front before you process anyone into a class. You know, you could put their name on a list, but to go through the whole process about again, we didn t take registration fees. I m talking about come in, write the check, or can you take credit cards in your office with a swipe? Like, are you able to swipe a credit card in your office? If you could swipe the credit card in person, that would be a first start. Let s start with thatthere s a Web question I want to answer which came in from a listener who wants me to repeat the Google Local. Once you claim your listing, the tutorial, the really easy tutorial on is in the marketing sections. It s How to Claim Your Google Listing. It s That s definitely a place and then someone had asked about the different Facebook laws. You really want to have a Facebook page, a public page. Everyone in here, if you need help with Facebook, we have some tutorials on the Web site. I ll actually get you that link in the I ll post it to the forum. You ve got to have a Facebook page for business. It s a public page. It s search engine optimized. It s very much a huge marketing tool right now for you to use, so I really want to encourage you to consider the benefits of a Facebook page. Now, a lot of privacy settings you can modify, so that you don t have to worry about people doing weird things. We ve trust me when I say that we ve been through it all. There are ways to make it be very useful to you. Our Facebook page is a huge part of our business now. Someone else had said that is helpful as well. There are a lot of sites like that right now. Competitively, I would never pay more than $250 to $300 for a logo these days. Participant: Very useful, thank you. Good. I really do want to help you guys move from information to implementation. That s often the you know, Kathy, at our own studio, we know what it feels like to be trapped under a mountain of a to-do list with absolutely no time. It s like that every day. I mean, it s really about managing your marketing has to be consistent. It s the most important thing, keeping your message out there, but you don t have to spend an arm and a leg anymore. People are using their mobile phones. They re using social media first. They re searching online. They re looking for referrals. 14

15 You really want to leverage as much low-cost marketing as you can, and then sort of move into what would be the next step for us. Gone are the days of the expensive newspaper ads. They just don t work. Open houses, demo days, trial classes, master classes those are the things that are going to help you get the word out. Kathy, thank you for being on the call today. Listen, everyone who s on the call, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to be on this live. I really want you guys to know that I am available on the forum. I really do want to help you guys get anything clarified. We re all here to help you have this be your best year yet. Thanks for being here live! This is Suzanne Blake Gerety from and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks so much. Kathy: Bye now! 15