Marketing Foundations
Here are my top 3 foundational marketing strategies for boutique studios looking to make sure they have a good foundation for connecting with prospective new customers. This is where I always start marketing conversations.
How Did You Hear About Us?
a sample intake form that spells out "how did you hear"
A huge area of opportunity for studios is to accurately track and assess “How Did You Hear About Us?” also known as Referral Types by studio management software. Ask it on your intake form and ensure you are tracking it somewhere. Your business management software might be the easiest place to track this but you could also track it in spreadsheets. You might need to assign this task to someone to help ensure it’s tracked as new clients coming in from apps, website, and front door will have different requirements surrounding the data. How do you know where to best spend your marketing efforts if you aren’t considering what is actually working or not?
New Students
You want to pay attention on a regular basis to the number of new students (first visitors) you are bringing in. You have to ensure you are bringing in enough new students to counter balance the retention challenge we all face in the boutique space. Yes, it’s a big challenge!
Intro Offers
Offering new customers a pricing option (intro offer) that’s designed just for them, that is to talk about, sell, and is an easy lead up to an ongoing option begets better retention that not having an option. I’ve seen this first hand and Mindbody also confirmed this with a huge data analysis a few years ago. Is it time to offer an intro offer or change up your existing offer perhaps?
Website Traffic (Bonus)
It’s pretty helpful to pay attention to where people come from when they visit your website. You can use something like google analytics that usually integrates easily with existing website content providers like Squarespace. This will help you focus your digital marketing efforts appropriately.