Word-of-mouth Isn't Enough

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to episode number 29 of the Tennis Business Academy Podcast.

In today’s episode I want to talk about word-of-mouth and more specifically elaborate on why I think that word-of-mouth isn’t enough.

Why I think that we need to do more than just rely on word-of-mouth when it comes to marketing our programmes and clubs, if we truly want to get more people playing.

And the reason why I feel like this is an important topic to cover on the podcast is because I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard or read coaches or clubs say something along the lines of ‘word-of-mouth is all the marketing we need’ or ‘word-of-mouth is the only marketing we want’ or ‘in my experience all our customers come through word-of-mouth’ or some variation of any of the above.

I mean, of those 3 examples I’m not really sure which one I dislike the most.

So, let’s just break them down one by one.

The first one I said was ‘word-of-mouth is all the marketing we need’.

Ok, this might actually be true for about 1% of clubs and coaches.

The ones that are so prestigious, so well known that people just flock to it without you having to lift a finger.

How do you know if you’re one of these?

You have a waiting list of people wanting to join the club or the coaching programme and every single person on that waiting list has been referred by another customer of yours.

If this is you, then congratulations! You can truly rely on word-of-mouth alone, at least for now!

And just as by the way, I’ve seen Facebook Ads for Patrick Mouratoglou’s Tennis Academy on my feed.

Meaning that even one of the most widely recognisable, most successful coaches in the world doesn’t think that word-of-mouth is enough for his academy.

So, maybe the rest of us need to think twice before saying that word-of-mouth is enough for us.

Ok, let’s move on to the second statement which was ‘word-of-mouth is the only marketing we want’.

I mean, if you’re not that bothered about attracting new players, then yeah, perhaps word-of-mouth is enough.

For the rest of us that live in the real-world and are trying to grow our businesses, we definitely need more.

And the final statement, ‘from my experience all of our customers come through word-of-mouth’.

This is an interesting statement because it assumes that if all customers are coming in through word-of-mouth then it must mean that word-of-mouth is the best marketing strategy, full stop.

But there’s the thing, and maybe you can already see where this is going, every time I hear someone say this I ask them a simple question: “what marketing initiatives are you running throughout the year?”

And almost without exception, the people who tell me that in their experience all their customers come through word-of-mouth either stare at me blankly or say ‘not much’ when I ask what other marketing they’re doing.

So, of course all their customers are coming through word-of-mouth!

Because they’re not being proactive with any other form of marketing!

I mean, duh, right?

If I never ever come to the net then by definition I’m never going to win any points with the volley.

But that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have won some points with the volley IF I had come to the net at least a few times during the match, right?

Perhaps the analogy is a bit silly, but it brings me to a very important point, which is this:

If your business is growing, if you’re being able to find new players interested in what you are doing then marketing IS happening.

It just is.

Without marketing, in the broadest sense of the term, new customers wouldn’t be able to find you, get in touch with you and eventually sign-up.

They just wouldn’t.

Without marketing you would be pretty much invisible.

So, if you are being able to find new customers, despite the fact that you might not be doing any marketing at all, what that means is that someone else is marketing for you.

I’m going to say that again, if you’re finding new customers, or rather if new customers are finding you, and you’re not doing any marketing, what that means is that someone else is marketing for you!

And who is this someone else?

Well, the obvious one is the word-of-mouth that we’ve been talking about.

Your current customers could be referring you to their friends and family.

But there are other people and organisations that are potentially marketing on your behalf.

Hopefully your country’s tennis association does a good job of promoting the sport.

Maybe you have one or more professional tournaments that are played in your country or even in your local area.

The ATP, the WTA and the ITF promote tennis globally through all sorts of channels.

Maybe tennis is shown on TV where you are.

Etc. Etc.

All these organisations are working to promote tennis and the initiatives they run benefit us all indirectly.

Now, we could sit here and argue if they could do a better job of it or not, but that’s not the point.

The point is that they do help us market the sport and that benefits us as individual businesses.

Whether we think about it or not.

And that’s great!

I have nothing against it! On the contrary!

Free marketing for you and me - bring it on!

But we need to be aware that this is what’s happening. People are being marketed to.

It’s just that we’re not the ones doing the marketing.

And that brings me to the most important question of this episode.

Do you want to be in control of the marketing of your business, or do you want to rely solely on third parties like the ones I described earlier?

Because as much as you might do an amazing job on-court, you can’t guarantee that your customers will refer their friends and family all the time.

And even if they do, you won’t know how many they’ll refer, not to mention that you won’t be able to control exactly what message they’re conveying.

And as for what your tennis association, or the ATP, WTA, etc. do?

Forget about it!

You most definitely cannot control them. You can’t control their budgets, the frequency or the type of messaging they put out.

And you most certainly can’t control or have any impact on how much tennis gets shown on TV, which seems to be less and less every year, at least here in the UK.

The only way to really control your business’ marketing is for you to take matters into your own hands.

It’s for you to define a budget, an annual plan and then execute against it.

And this doesn’t have to be super expensive or incredibly time consuming.

I’m not talking about a massive national marketing campaign.

I’m talking about hyper focused, local marketing that is simple, but consistent, where the goal is to make sure that every single person that lives or works in the catchment area for your venue will at some point see one or various of your marketing messages.

Because if you can achieve that week after week, month after month, year after year, I can guarantee that you’ll see more consistent and predictable growth, which is really the aim here.

On the other hand, if you rely solely on external marketing channels like word-of-mouth, it’ll be much harder for you to get consistent results.

Because if you can’t control the frequency and the types of messages that get put out into the world, how could you ever expect results to be consistent?

Now, ok, I’m aware that I’ve spent the last few minutes telling you that word-of-mouth isn’t enough.

And I stand by that.

But I also think that it’s important to end this episode by stating clearly and unequivocally that I have nothing against it.

In fact, I love word-of-mouth as much as anyone else!

To have one of your players or parents, think highly enough of you and your business that they decide to refer their friends and family to come play with you is great.

It really makes you feel like you’ve achieved something, like you’ve definitely done something right!

So, the purpose of this episode is NOT to knock word-of-mouth.

The more word-of-mouth we get the better.

I’m just pointing out that for 99% of tennis businesses and clubs out there, word-of-mouth isn’t enough.

Not if you want to get new players joining consistently.

For that, you’re going to have to rely on a solid, well thought through marketing strategy that leverages a variety of marketing channels.

Marketing channels such as your Facebook business page, your Facebook group, other local Facebook groups and also Facebook Ads.

And that’s just on Facebook!

You can then also use Instagram and any other relevant social media platforms.

You should also set up a quality website that does a good job of selling what you do and you need to make sure that the website is visible on Google when people search for tennis ‘in your area’.

You should then set up a solid email marketing system and maybe consider using Google Ads.

And that’s only on the digital side of things.

In the ‘real world’, so to speak, you can print flyers, banners, posters and billboards.

You can go into schools to show tennis to the kids there, you can run open-days and other sort of community events and establish mutual beneficial partnerships with other local businesses, run an ad in the newspaper and so on.

There are so many different types of initiatives that you can use to raise awareness of what you do, and get people to consider getting involved.

But first you need to get past this mental hurdle that ‘word-of-mouth is the only marketing that you want or need’ since that’s a bad mindset.

That idea stops you from trying everything else, which is a shame.

So, that’s my challenge to you.

If you feel like you’ve been relying on word-of-mouth too much or even if you just feel like your marketing could be better, more structured, more consistent, more focused, then take some time to work on improving it.

Because I can guarantee that it’ll be one of the best investments you’ll make in a long time.

And if you ever feel like you want help with doing just that, I invite you to check out the Academy.

There are tonnes of marketing resources in there, including online courses on Facebook Ads, website building and email marketing that will help you create a solid and consistent marketing strategy for your business.

You can check it out at tennisbusinessacademy.com/academy

Alright that’s it for today’s episode. As always I’ll be back next week with another instalment of the Tennis Business Academy podcast.

Until then and thanks for tuning in.