La Bene Vita

Marketing and other chaos

Student Count = 271.5.

To the point made by Robert Waltz in the comments section yesterday, I could see how the SEO race would be much more applicable to Internet-only businesses like WDC, for example, or Amazon. For a brick-and-mortar local business like MTMS  , it's just one of a dozen ways to generate traffic (foot traffic, not Internet traffic) and sales leads. We do collect marketing data, and here are some statistics:

Total enrollments (ever): 715 (a little skewed because we changed the way we collected this data about six months ago, but close enough for this analysis.)

Marketing referrals:
205 signage
159 existing customers (a student added another instrument or class, returned after a break/two-month trip to India, or enrolled a sibling or other family member)
134 customer or employee referrals
98 unknown
87 Google/website
22 print ads
The rest are miscellaneous.

SIGNAGE: Includes a 30-foot sign facing Hamilton Road ($3000) and a 12-foot sign facing the parking lot ($1000), along with a couple smaller $100 window signs advertising our summer camps, what we teach, and how to find us online. The best advertising investments we've ever made (not counting the lease agreement that places us so visibly on Hamilton in the first place.)

EXISTING & REFERRALS: Clearly, we are a large referral business, and that's something we need to cultivate.

UNKNOWN: Yikes. We need to collect better data.

GOOGLE/SEARCH/WEB: Here's the thing: about half of these are just strictly "website" referrals, which means they enrolled online. So we have no way of telling how they stumbled upon our site in the first place. Did they Google us? Bing us? If they did use a search engine, what did they type? Music lessons in Gahanna? Or "Michelle Tuesday Music School" because they drove by and saw our sign?

PRINT ADS: Easily the most expensive marketing tactic we employ, with ads ranging from $150 for a tiny business-card sized ad to $1000 or more for a full-color, full-page ad, all in a one-time printing that probably ends up in most people's trash bins before it makes it into the house.

Our sign works for us, and it requires no ongoing marketing maintenance (besides occasional burned-out light bulbs that the Plaza handles). Referrals work so well for us that we need to find a way to encourage it. Print ads seem to be an evil necessity but maybe a bit of a waste. Either we're printing in the wrong publications, or our ads are not compelling, or people just don't read print ads. We're about to find out, because we did a very expensive direct mailing, meaning we're right on the cover of the thing that appears in your mailbox (as opposed to Page 7 of a booklet or ads inside of a local town newspaper.) But if it doesn't pan out, print may be the wrong direction for us.

That leaves Google and Internet searches, which in my opinion are an opportunity for us. The thing about marketing and advertising is that each venue attracts a certain crowd. You have a certain group of people reading those town papers, and they may or may not be the same people who go to Google first for their kids' activities. I think we're leaving a market untapped by being optimized for "Michelle Tuesday Music School" (which requires customers to seek us directly) instead of "Music lessons in Gahanna" or even "Music lessons in Columbus" (although, this is a local business, because people don't want to drive their kids across rush hour traffic from the other side of Columbus for a 40-minute music lesson every single week.)

All things to consider, and reasons why I'm looking at SEO now. It's something of an experiment. Our Google PageRank is 2, which is somewhat typical for local area businesses. I'd be thrilled to bump that up to a 3, but even more thrilled to optimize for new keywords. The majority of our traffic comes from people who have already seen our sign and know we exist. Could we tap into a new market of people if we optimize for people who don't know our name? I'm thinking maybe. But it still annoys me that I have to play the game.

I did leave a comment on a piano teaching blog yesterday. Maybe one per day is a good target.