Marketing tips for fencing clubs

[Craig]

Marketing a fencing club is just like marketing any other small business. There really isn't a lot of mystery to it - the basics are the same, but the specific make up of your tactics may vary.

Most of this stuff is not rocket science, but it does involve math - so make sure you have a good spreadsheet program that you can use to track your expenses, revenues, and other metrics. (If you don't have Office, you can use Google Spreadsheets for free.)

Before you get into any of that, however, you've got a question to answer. The answer will guide you and will probably be tough to get to because I don't think many club owners have really thought it through.

Who is your target market and What is your product?

I can see it now "Oh, that's easy - we target fencers and our product is fencing - we're a fencing club, stupid."

Yes, but what kind of fencing club? Who is your specific market?

The product/marketing strategy and tactics for a recreationally focused club will be much different than from a competitively focused club. While you can have both kinds of fencers in any club, the club will be predominately one or the other. Instead of making the mistake of being all things to all people, pick one focus and build around that.

If your love is the recreational side of fencing, then build a recreationally focused club with the programs and pricing to match. If you want to build a club that is competitive and strikes fear into all of those in your section, then you'll have a different focus.

Figure out that first question. I'll be back to post some more ideas on the "blocking and tackling" of marketing later.

Craig

[jjefferies]

One suggestion we've had is to ally yourself with the local parks and recreation district and offer a minimal beginners program through them. In some areas this also puts you in touch with the schools as you can go to them to advertise your parks and recreation program. The gentleman who suggested this approach to me had used it himself. He wound up printing a small blurb about the parks and recreation program on a half page advert (with his club's name and telephone number for informational purposes). He personally delivered some 40,000 of these to the schools in carefully divided and packaged piles suitable to be routed to the teachers to be distributed. I forget how much the printing cost him but I think less than $0.01/sheet. And he did mention that it took him almost ten days to deliver them all. I think he owns something like three clubs and they appear to be growing.