December 2007 -- Why are you not maximizing the money you are bringing into your business? You work very hard giving lessons and trying to drive sales through your pro shop, but the proceeds do not meet your expectations. Why not?
USPTA Professionals are experts at teaching tennis, not experts at marketing. Not to say that we are not good marketers. But you may not have used your marketing muscles for many years. What I want to do is give you some general questions to answer that will start you on the path to increasing your sales through a strong marketing plan.
You only have a certain number of hours in the day to teach lessons and to run your pro shop. You get your money by being out on the court. If you are consistently sitting inside doing marketing tasks, you are not maximizing your revenue potential. What you want to do is to periodically pull back and go through these series of questions that I am about to give you. Then, let the marketing do the sales work for you. Instead of going out trying to drum up business, which takes away time from your teaching, let the marketing pull people into your shop to make purchases or sign up for lessons. Marketing does not replace sales, it helps support it.
The first question to ask yourself is: Who is your target market? In other words, who is it that you want to reach? You may say, I want to reach tennis players. That’s not good enough. You need to be more specific. What type of tennis players? Beginners? Tournament-caliber kids? Women in a 10-mile radius of the facility? Your target market should be those folks from whom you will get 80 percent of your business. You will not turn away business that comes from the other 20 percent, but you will not spend a lot of time marketing to these folks. You will go where your target is.
Now that you have answered who your target market is, what are your key messages to them? If you had to pick one message to have them hear, what would it be? The problem that most people and most businesses have is that they try to be all things to all people. They say that they want to go after a certain target group, but their message is for all of the groups. The end result is that the customers are confused as to what the person or company is about. Customers will focus on one or two key messages and no more. If you give them more, they will be confused and will take their business to someone who they know understands their needs and can deliver.
You should spend most of your time in crafting the right message. Once you get the right message, you need to hammer that home in all of the communication you plan on doing. Through signs, brochures, your Web site, e-mails and phone calls, make sure people hear this message over and over again.
The third question you need to answer is: What are your strengths? Or said another way, what are the benefits from choosing you over one of your competitors? As you develop your marketing initiatives, you will need to refer back to these strengths and make sure that they appear on all of your material. The reason you do this is to make sure people understand what makes you special. It is the reason they will choose you over someone or something else.
Equally important to answer is: What are your challenges or weaknesses? For example, a challenge may be low participation in your events. Or it may be a lack of awareness of the tennis program at your country club. These are challenges that you face, which the marketing plan will address. It is important to identify all of your challenges upfront, because you will need to develop programs to attack the most important of these. It is also important to look back at these when you develop a program to make sure that you have addressed and answered these issues when you launch a new program.
Finally, you need to determine who your competitors are. Clearly, the most obvious competitors may be other teaching pros and programs. However, what I have found is that these are not the real competitors. There are other things that are taking away your lessons and taking away your purchases in your pro shop. For the adults, I have found the chief competitors to be the golf program at the private clubs and kids activities in general. What I mean by that is that the parents end up taking their children to soccer or ballet or basketball. And clearly, these activities take kids away from taking tennis lessons from you.
From your pro shop’s perspective, you compete with the large sports retailers as well as the discount chains like Marshall’s or TJ Maxx. Plus there are the local tennis and fitness shops in your area. In looking at these competitors, you need to make sure that your message is different from theirs and equally appealing, if not more. Again, this should drive you to look very hard at what your strengths are and how they can be different from your competitors.’
After answering these questions, you can begin building your plan. Start your plan with things that you can do in the short term. Outline five to seven initiatives that you can implement in the next four to six months to increase revenue. The big thing to keep in mind is that you need to have an adequate amount of time to promote what you are doing. One or two weeks is not enough. You need to be able to hit people three to seven times with your message in a short period of time, such as three to four weeks.
The great thing about marketing is that it does not need to cost a lot of money. You can use e-mail, phone calls, signs and postcards to get your message out. Also, don’t be afraid to use the face-to-face approach either. However, do not rely on just one of these. Use them all. See which ones are most effective for your target markets. Change it up to keep things fresh. Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to start small and learn. What is working and what is not? If you bite off more than you can chew, you end up feeling slammed, your customers feel frustrated at the lack of execution, and the programs are ineffective. You know your customers. Build a couple of successful programs and you start to gain momentum. Your customers will start talking about how things that you are doing are great. Before long you will be bringing in more revenue, with very little extra effort.
The key to making your plan successful is twofold. The first is you have to plan. This will take a little bit of time upfront, but will pay huge dividends down the road. Outline for the next six months what programs you are going to run. Yes, this may take some time staying up at night or getting up early to do this. Just as you do not want to go into a lesson unprepared, you want to be prepared as to what plans you are going to execute. Assign dates to them. If you have a staff of folks under you, divvy up the tasks to make someone accountable for each one and when it needs to be completed. Again, this will take some time upfront, but your target market will see how effortless it seems and how professional it comes off.
The second part of making your plan successful is to measure your results. In your planning stage, determine what your goal is for a particular initiative. If it is a sale in your pro shop, determine how much money you want the sale to generate. If you are doing something to attract more lessons, put down how many more lessons you expect to get from it and how much more money that will be. As you implement the program, track the results. If you do not track the results, how will you know if the program is a success or not? Be as specific as possible. Ask people. During the process if you are tracking the results and they are not what you want, you can tweak what you are doing. Many great marketing plans started off slowly or badly, but just a minor tweak made them explode. However, you will not know this unless you are tracking the results as you go.
So now you have the tools to build a successful marketing plan. Although the process seems very easy, it will take some discipline to go through it. However, this process is a proven success. You are already very successful in what you do. These steps will help further your goals and grow your business.
Pat Guerry is a USPTA P-1 teaching professional and serves on the faculty of Emory University. He owns Guerry Marketing Solutions, a consulting company based in Atlanta that helps small and medium-sized businesses generate more revenue through marketing.
