You Are Planning To Fail
Like the saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” So how does your SCUBA marketing plan stand up? Don’t have one? Why am I not surprised.
At least as a PADI Master Instructor, I know that there isn’t a point before the Course Director application where you have to create any form of business or marketing plan. Before I can present the components of our SCUBA marketing plan, we first need to understand how any component can work with another to help build our business.
Why You Need a SCUBA Marketing Plan
Without a marketing plan and an understanding of how its components will work together, you are wasting your time. You may still pick up the private lesson here or there, the occasional trip booking – you may even fill your current schedule, but you could be doing better. Every large corporation has a marketing plan and any small business that attempts to get any type of business loan must have a business plan, so why shouldn’t you?
Niche and Hyperlocal Marketing
According to Wikipedia, a niche is defined as:
The subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.
Hyperlocal is defined as:
Refers to entities and events that are located within a well defined, community scale area and is intended primarily for consumption by residents of that area.
It would be great to dominate for the simple demographic of “people” (all people could potentially SCUBA dive or visit your dive center or resort, so why not?) but it isn’t too realistic. Even picking something like “people in Seattle” may be too broad of a niche. What do you like to do and who do you want to work with? If you like technology and live near an Intel campus, go start a program for Intel employees. If you like kids, get a youth program started.
Marketing Options
Now that you have a well-defined niche that we can target hyperlocally, you are on your way to world domination. There are many options for marketing and I will be covering everything I can think of here, plus I’ll be showing you how you can tie them all together. We want to market in the most effective manner possible so we don’t waste time, yet maximize our results.
