9 Proven Ways to Attract New Players to Your Coaching Programme or Club
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the sixth episode of the podcast and today we’ll be talking about 9 different ways to attract new players to your coaching programme or club.
Now, none of these 9 ways are special. And they’re also definitely not the only ways to attract new players. I’m sure we could all come up with a bunch of others.
But they’re the most common ones. And they’re common because they’ve been proven to work over and over again.
Which is why we keep using them.
So, this episode isn’t about giving you fantastic and ground breaking ideas that maybe will work or maybe won’t work.
Maybe I’ll explore that on a future episode of the podcast.
But in this episode my goal was to curate a list of ideas that you can come back to whenever you want to step up your efforts to attract new players and be sure that if you implement initiatives using these channels, you’re likely to get good results for your coaching programme or club.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you should run marketing initiatives on all these channels at the same time.
That’s probably going to be overkill for most of us, as we run small businesses and clubs that simply do not have the resources to focus on all of these channels at the same time.
A better approach for most of us is to focus on 1 or 2 at a time and then move on to another 1 or 2 and then another 1 or 2.
You want to eventually try things on each of these channels, but you also want to do a good job with them, which is why it’s more sensible to focus on a few at a time, rather than try to do everything at once.
In fact, now that I think about it, that’s probably good advice for life in general, isn’t it?
Focus on one thing at time, do a good job with it, and then move on to the next one, until you’ve covered everything you need to cover.
I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s good life advice, or not!
Anyway, with that out of the way let’s go through the 9 different ways, or 9 different marketing channels, if you prefer, that you can use to attract new players.
1) Customer Referrals
And I purposefully called this channel customer referrals instead of word-of-mouth, and I’ll explain why.
Most people that work in our industry understand the importance of word-of-mouth.
In fact some coaches believe in it so much that they’ll go so far as saying that word-of-mouth is the only marketing they want or need.
I completely disagree with that sentiment, and one day I’ll probably cover why I disagree with it on another episode.
But for now, let’s just focus on this.
Word-of-mouth is important.
Not just for the tennis industry, but for any industry, especially for industries (like ours) that are made up of small local businesses that can’t rely on big budget advertising.
We all agree on that.
So we should be trying to supercharge word-of-mouth.
We should be doing whatever we can to get as many of our customers to recommend our club or coaching programme to as many of their friends and family as possible.
And one way in which you can do that is to create a customer referral programme.
Where you reward your players for referring other players to come and try tennis with you.
That reward doesn’t have to be massive. It could be a free individual session, a discount on their next course, a discount on their membership, or anything else that you deem appropriate.
But the idea is that by putting something in place you’ll be encouraging referrals to happen more often, which should really be the goal.
So, that’s why I called this first channel customer referrals, instead of word-of-mouth.
To encourage you to be proactive and make something happen here, rather than just passively wait for things to happen around you.
2) Events
Open-days and other types of events are a great way to create a buzz and get people to come down to your venue to give tennis a go.
The important thing here, other than to make sure that everything goes smoothly on the day, is to follow-up with people during and after the event to give yourself the best chance to get them to sign-up.
You can even create a special event offer, that is only available to people who attend the event.
You can communicate that offer to everyone on the day, and then follow-up with them via email to encourage them to sign-up before the deadline for the offer runs out, let’s say 4 days after the event took place.
Of course that this implies that you took people’s names and email addresses when they attended the event, which you absolutely should do!
Ok, moving on to number 3.
3) Schools
Going into schools to deliver tennis lessons is one of the best ways to get children hooked on tennis - I probably don’t need to tell you this.
If you can get paid to do the work even better.
But if you can’t, then I’d submit that it’s probably still worth your while to run some coaching lessons for free in nearby schools, in exchange for the ability to market your coaching programme and club membership to the kids’s parents.
Which brings us to channel number 4.
4) Flyers
Flyers are one of the common ways to get your message to the parents of the children that played tennis with you at school.
But that’s not the only use for flyers, of course.
In fact, flyers can be used pretty much anywhere you think that people who would consider trying your coaching programme or club hang out.
Whether they’ll be worth the money you spent on them, or not is a different matter.
Which is why you should make sure that you put a discount code on them, so that you can track how many people are contacting you because they saw a flyer.
That will allow you to calculate whether the investment has been worth it or not!
Don’t spend the rest of your life guessing if flyers work or not. Get some real data, so you know one way or another!
5) Posters/Banners/Billboards
Or anything else that you have printed and leave at the one place, hoping that people will read it.
I don’t think I need to explain how these work.
But I’ll add a bonus option to this channel: branded apparel.
If you think about it, branded t-shirts, jumpers, hoodies, caps, etc. all work as a form of printed advertising just like posters, banners and billboards.
Except that they’re not static, they move with the people who wear them, which if you think about it is even better.
The fact that someone has chosen to wear your brand means that they’re giving their consent, their approval to what you and your brand represent, which is a great form of social proof.
So, if you’ve got the budget, creating your own line of branded clothing is probably not a bad idea.
Especially because you might even be able to sell them to your players, which would make branded apparel a double win!
6) Media
By media I mean newspapers, radio and TV, if you happen to have those local to you.
You can engage with these media outlets in one of two ways.
They either run a news story on you and your coaching programme or club.
That’s perhaps the best form of advertising, since it isn’t advertising at all.
Or you pay to run ads on their media.
I know of a club that attracted more than 50 players through running a single ad on their local newspaper, which I’d say is a pretty good result!
Just consider who your target audience is, and whether they’ll be likely to engage with the media you’re thinking of using.
7) SEO
Or search engine optimization.
Which is really just a fancy way of saying that you need to make sure that people are able to find you online when they search on google or any other search engine.
And they’re only going to find you if you appear towards the top of the list of search results.
So, start by testing it yourself.
Go on Google and search “tennis club” or “tennis coach” “in your area”. Obviously replace “in your area” with wherever you’re located.
Or you could also try “tennis club near me”, for example.
Try a few different variations and see where your website is showing up on the results list.
Ideally you want to be showing right at the top, but if you’re in the first 3 or 4 results then I’d say that should be ok.
If you’re not, then you have a problem. There’s no 2 ways about this.
If you’re not towards the top, then someone else is. Which means that the people searching for tennis in your area will click on someone else’s website instead of yours!
So, yes, if you’re not at the top, you do have a problem. A problem that you should work to fix.
Now, I’m by no means an expert on SEO, but I do know 1 thing you must do if you want to show at the top on the Google search results list, which is to create a profile on Google My Business.
This is an easy process and Google provides step by step instructions on how to do it, so you should do it now, if you haven’t done it yet.
The other thing you need to do is to create a website that is pleasant for people and that they can easily navigate, but we’ll go into that another time.
8) Social Media
Whether that’s a good thing or not, we’re spending more time glued to our phones and most of that time is spent on social media.
And if that’s the place where our customers and potential customers hang out, then we should work to build a strong social media presence.
I’ve already spoken about the important role that Facebook Ads could have on your business or club in previous episodes.
But beyond that you should also post consistently onto your social media feeds, as there will always be someone new who will see, engage and potentially share your content, which will help further build your brand.
There’s no way that we can ignore social media this day and age.
9) Email Marketing
From what I can tell, email marketing is probably one of the most underrated and under-utilised channels in our industry.
The basic premise of this channel is that you should keep a clean and organised email list of all the people that are either active players in your programmes right now, were active players in the past, or people who have shown an interest in what you do, but have never committed to signing up in the past, and then use an email marketing tool to keep in touch with them and every so often try to sell something to them via email.
For the lapsed players and the people who never signed-up in the first place, then you can keep encouraging them to sign-up again or sign-up for the first time to your club memberships and/or coaching courses and programmes.
Just because they weren’t ready in the past, doesn’t mean that they won’t be ready in the future. And by keeping in touch with them via email, and literally putting a sign-up link in front of them every so often, you’re drastically increasing the chances that they’ll take action in the future.
But sign-ups to your club membership and coaching programmes isn’t the only thing that you can sell through email.
You can also market tennis equipment if you sell it, your own branded clothing and even other services like individual lessons, holiday camps and virtually anything else.
Once someone has given you their email address, it’s because they’re interested in you and what you and your business or club do.
So, why wouldn’t you use that opportunity to market what you do?
It’s a no-brainer, as far as I’m concerned.
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Ok, so those are the 9 different channels you can use to market your coaching business or club.
Like I said at the beginning, there’s definitely other avenues that you could, and maybe even should explore to attract new players to your programme.
But if you run marketing initiatives around the 9 we just discussed, I’m certain that you’ll be able to consistently attract new players to your club or coaching programme.
In fact, I encourage you to spend some time creating a marketing calendar that lists all the initiatives you want to run throughout the year, across the different channels you think are important to focus on.
This calendar doesn’t need to be anything fancy. A simple spreadsheet that lists out all initiatives, along with the dates in which you plan to run them will do the trick.
By planning ahead and writing them down, you’ll be more likely to actually take action when the time comes.
And at the end of the day that’s what really matters - taking action.
The more you’re willing to try new channels and initiatives, the quicker you’ll be able to find what works for you and then double down on that.
Alright, that is it from me today.
Hopefully this episode helped you structure your thinking about all the different ways that exist to attract new players to your programme.
If you have any questions or comments you can reach me on david@tennisbusinessacademy.com I read and reply to every email, so don’t be shy!
And I’ll be back soon with another instalment of the Tennis Business Academy podcast.
Until then and thanks for tuning in.