It is now almost a month since a I took a break from my work at ThoughtWorks, and started purple art school.
The first 2-3 weeks were quite hectic. Mostly running around to setup the place, sign the lease, get some marketing to spread the word around ...whew !
Quite a bit of learning there ! What I have discovered so far - posters (which I intended to put up in apartment complexes around my school) - are a very costly , and ineffective means of marketing !
This, in spite of the fact that quite a few of my friends have helped me by putting up posters in their apartments without me having to run around (thank you, people !!) ! It is costly because each apartment charges at least 500 bucks to put up posters for a week. I also found out that some apartments allow posters only of A4 size ...(in all my enthusiasm, I made A3 size posters ...awesome yes, but completely useless :) )And even when I put up posters, the response has been lukewarm. In the apartments where I directly approached the managing committee or the estate manager, the whole process reeked of inefficiency, and I could not help but think that these people were probably making money (unaccounted) from this whole poster business !!! So that shelved the poster process.
The next one was the flyer (the pamphlets sent through newspapers) - cost wise more effective than posters, and reach is good ...more households get the flyers, and no running around...I only had to call my newspaper wallah and he would come home and get the flyers, and his rates are reasonable too. Although the flyers are less costly than posters, the come with a big enough price tag too ! :) But at least they offer the flexibility of deciding the price based on the size, quality of paper, ...and also I found out that if you use more than color in the content of the flyer, then it costs more , and of course, if you print in bulk , the cost (per flyer) comes down ...!
The next thing to try was to see if supermarkets would allow posters to be put up (for a charge , of course) - and nopes, they don't !! one or two of them do allow, but they're just sloppy about it, seems like it's not worth the try. (or may be I am just too picky :p )
Ok, so in today's day and age ...should I not be using the internet to market ??? :)
Not really...at least so far I have not discovered evidence that internet marketing will be useful in my case... and here are my reasons , first, this is a local community dependent venture. The most important thing then is for people in and around the school to know that such a place exists and to know what the school has to offer. Second, most mothers of children, are not computer savvy ... (again, not that they don't know how to use the computer, but that they actually have much less access to it , since it is hogged by either the fathers or the children themselves) and it is the mothers (if not the grand parents) who usually end up having to drop/ pick up their children, and they would rather find a place that is close by, and not rely on the internet to give them that information ...(unless if they search for schools in the neighborhood, and then of course they know such a place exists, but beyond that, they would rather be informed of events / classes by other means).
So I settled on flyers . But then I need a channel to communicate ad hoc / short term events / workshops etc. To prepare flyers for each of this, needs much upfront planning, and also to commence work on that a week or so in advance. Then again for people to respond and register takes about a week or so. So a 2 weeks lead is a fair amout of time, and that means I need to plan activities that much ahead. Not that this is an issue !
Still, SMS seems to be a good alternative, more immediate. Yes, contentwise the flyers are more accomodating ...but at least with bulk SMS it seems like I can send out information of events / workshops at a much shorter notice. This is now the route I am trying to take....combine flyers with SMS + update the website :)
It will be a while before I begin to see the impact of this strategy, but for now it appears to be headed in the right direction. Fingers crossed !!
So much for spreading the word. The biggest challenge still is how many of these convert :) let's wait n watch :)
