Cross Marketing with other Sports

[EricEpee]

If you want to get serious about increasing membership in your club, you may need to sometimes think outside the box. I do not own a club, but know several club owners who tend to focus just on building the facility - with the notion - build and they will come. For instance, if you have a fencing club in NY, NJ or Conn, you should contact Tiger Schulmann's Karate MMA and offer a 10% discount to TSK members to learn fencing. TSK has dozens of franchised Karate centers in the Northeast and is a juggernaut when it comes to driving membership. Additionally, most of the kids at TSK are not allowed to use weapons until they reach a certain status. No problem, since fencing is a martial arts sport, I would presume that a lot of further along Karate students would see this as supplementing their martial arts training. I KNOW their parents would love it because of the college implications later on. All you need to do is to align yourself (maybe even offer a bounty) with a Karate based school in your area.

[jeremyb215]

If you want to get serious about increasing membership in your club, you may need to sometimes think outside the box. I do not own a club, but know several club owners who tend to focus just on building the facility - with the notion - build and they will come. For instance, if you have a fencing club in NY, NJ or Conn, you should contact Tiger Schulmann's Karate MMA and offer a 10% discount to TSK members to learn fencing. TSK has dozens of franchised Karate centers in the Northeast and is a juggernaut when it comes to driving membership. Additionally, most of the kids at TSK are not allowed to use weapons until they reach a certain status. No problem, since fencing is a martial arts sport, I would presume that a lot of further along Karate students would see this as supplementing their martial arts training. I KNOW their parents would love it because of the college implications later on. All you need to do is to align yourself (maybe even offer a bounty) with a Karate based school in your area.

That's an interesting idea.
How many fencing clubs or acadamies are taking advantage of marketing through social media? For example, how many have a serious Facebook presense if they have one at all?

[griffindm]

The three largest fencing clubs around my area (Baltimore) all have FB presence. (DC Fencers Club, Baltimore Fencing Center, and Maryland Fencing Club). They have been on FB for at least the past 6 months or more.

[oiuyt]

@EricEpee: How much of an incentive do you have to provide the TSK franchisee to convince him or her to allow you to raid the TSK student base? What conversion rate are you expecting from that?

Any actual experience to back that up?

-B

[Mr Epee]

I KNOW their parents would love it because of the college implications later on.

Which are what precisely?

If in 2011 your elevator pitch to parents of prospective fencers includes references to NCAA competition (particularly scholarships), then you are doing yourself and your club a significant disservice. It is generally considered unwise to market a product which you do not own, and cannot guarantee.

This is lazy and unhelpful.

[darius]

I don't know if it's unwise, given that parents are highly motivated by the idea of Junior going to a good college. It might be somewhat dishonest, depending on how the marketing is done.

We certainly have banners of NCAA fencing schools with alumni names underneath in a very prominent place. We're marketing the association between our program and those schools. It's certainly correlation, not causation, and the best thing a prospective student can do is to get good enough grades/SATs to get into the school on their own.

darius

[cattos]

While "build it and they will come" is not a sound approach to running any business, I have certainly found success in building a better facility, providing higher quality of service and advertising. I'm not interested in cross marketing with competing organizations, because ultimately, we are all concerned only about our own bottom line and retaining students. I have several youngsters involved with multiple pursuits ... baseball, lacrosse, karate, gymnastics, etc. Not a week goes by that I don't subtley push fencing as "the" sport to do.

Now, working with other businesses that don't offer competing services is another story. I worked-out a discount with a nearby ice-cream shop for my youngest students.

I agree with Darius in that I don't tell students training hard and performing exceedingly well in competition will give them a free ride into college and onto a NCAA team. Granted, I have had no NCAA fencers (yet), but I do have students at ivy league schools with NCAA fencing teams and they are still fencing.