In this article we’ll have a look at some the most important things you might want to consider when it comes to advertising swimming lessons or a swim school in London.
Targeting and demographics
As a swimming teacher or a leader of a swimming school/program, your business is clearly going to be tied to a particular location. How you decide to target your advertising will depend on the exact location of the pool facilities you are using.
Location
Deciding on what is a reasonable radius around your facilities within which you’ll focus most of your advertising is going to be important. You want to look at how easy it is to drive to your location from different parts of town. Are there good public transport link?
If you are looking to advertise children swimming classes you probably don’t want to advertise in areas which will have more than a 20-30minute commute for your potential clients.
Whether you’re advertising online or using offline methods, there is going to be very little value advertising in South London, if your pool facilities are in North London.
This might seem like a trivial point, but you want to keep this in mind especially on social media. The temptation might be to chase numbers wherever they come from, however what really counts for your business are people close to your location that can realistically come to your classes.
Keep your advertising local and that way get the most out of the time and resources your put into your marketing.
Tailor your advertising
If you offer a wide variety of classes you want to ideally tailor each piece of advertising material to reflect who you are targeting with a particular campaign.
Whether you are creating a leaflet or a social media ad, try to focus that piece of advertising on a single demographic.
If you offer beginner swimming classes for children and advanced swimming classes for adults, it is a good idea to completely separate your advertising for these different services. (Unless you run these parallel to each other at the same time, and you are looking to get parents and their children to come together.)
Your social media ads or flyers targeting parents, advertising your children swimming classes, should look completely different to ads aimed at 30-50 year-olds looking to get fit through advanced swimming.
Timing
When it comes to your advertising efforts, consider which time of year is best for you to push harder and when you are less likely to get new clients coming in.
This might seem like common sense, but many business owners prefer just automating their advertising both online and offline and let things run the same way 12-months out of the year.
To get the most from your advertising budget, you don’t want to be doing that.
Advertising children swimming classes in London in the middle of March is probably not a great idea. Focusing your advertising budget more towards early September when people’s schedules for the year are being formed might be a better choice.
Maybe you have good experience running classes through the summer or half-term breaks. If this is the case, running your campaigns for the two weeks leading up to these might be a good idea.
Leaflets and Flyers
Leaflets are one of the most reliable forms of advertising for local businesses in London.
They are excellent especially when it comes to geographically targeting the households near your business or specific areas with favourable demographics.
As London leaflet distribution is what we do at The Private Postman, we can help you understand how to get the most out of your campaigns.
Keep it simple
Keep your leaflet to a basic A5 single page format. Devoting one side of the flyer to an excellent photo or an image is a good idea. The other side of your flyer can contain more text and detailed information about your services.
Try to avoid advertising too many different services on one leaflet. It’s better to run multiple campaigns, than create and unfocused flyer design that confuses the recipient.
Keep your targeting also reasonably simple. Ask your distribution company which areas would be the most appropriate for you and see if you agree with what they tell you.
You can read more about leaflet design in this blog.
Repeat your drops
Modern leaflet distribution systems will allow you to deliver your leaflets to each area more than once with a good buffer period between deliveries.
Repeat exposure in advertising works. To read up more on this technique, have a look at our blog discussing repeat drops.
Talk to your distributor about how much time you should keep between drops and give repeat drops a go.
Have your leaflet point to your website
If you have a good website, you can include a URL or a QR code on your leaflet to direct your potential customers to it.
The amount of information you can include on a good website is incomparable to any marketing tool.
Testimonials
Include testimonials from happy clients on your flyers whenever possible. Testimonials simply work and can make your flyers much more effective.
Online advertising
Advertising online can be very effective when done right.
Social Media
Social media ads are excellent as they can be targeted very carefully and each ad can be tailored to very specific demographics.
You can play with creating different ads to target parents, grand parents, adult looking to swim themselves. If you learn to do this well, you will be able to get a lot for your advertising spend.
Search Engines
You can pay to have your site come up in Google and other search engines when people search for particular search terms. This can be effective, however it can be quite a bit more expensive per click compared to social media advertising.
You can also try to optimise your website and include helpful written content on it to maximise your chances of rising to the top of the search terms organically. This is called ‘SEO’ or Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a large field and you might want to do some research on this yourself.
Website
Having a quality website with testimonials, good videos, images, FAQs, a booking calendar etc… is something that can’t be easily replaced.
You can include a huge amount of information on your website while keeping it easy to navigate. Potential clients will often look at your website before calling and the better your site is, the more likely you should be to convert them into paying customers.
Combining online and offline marketing
Running your online ads and your leaflet distribution drops at the same time in the same areas can help the effectiveness of both.
As people see your advertising in different domains, even if they don’t act on it immediately, they develop a familiarity with your branding and message.
If you do this sensitively, you can over time, develop brand recognition, that converts potential customers over the long term very well.
