Understanding your SCUBA customer is key
In case you weren’t aware, I love internet marketing. It’s inexpensive, relatively easy and allows you to reach a almost limitless amount SCUBA diving customers. Like knowing to take off your snorkel on a manta night dive, you must be aware of your surroundings to be most effective with your SCUBA marketing.
I was recently helping two different consulting customers of mine to help strategize their marketing for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and continuing into the holiday season.
One customer is a team of independent SCUBA instructors. Their clientele are mostly employees of high-tech companies. Since they don’t have SCUBA gear to sell, only SCUBA instruction, their goals are geared towards driving class sign ups. Since their clientele is a tech-savvy group, we determined an email marketing campaign targeting Cyber Monday would be a beneficial technique. We scheduled a series of emails starting several weeks ago through today showing off class package discounts.
Results so far: We’re barely half way through Cyber Monday in their time zone and they already have all of their scheduled classed through March booked with lengthy waiting lists.
My other customer is a dive center. Their clientele is not as tech savvy due to limited high-speed internet in their community. Their goal is to both drive class sign ups as well as retail sales. We determined that a Black Friday promotion would be a great opportunity. Since their clientele doesn’t have the best access to online media, we determined a direct mail and street signage campaign would be best. Again, mailers started going out several weeks ago. They did limited hours of operation on Friday. Almost every piece of gear was discounted slightly, but they included pool training with everything. This will hopefully increase their instruction business while building value instead of deeply discounting.
Friday’s results: it was the best Black Friday this SCUBA diving center had ever had. To be fair, they had never done a Black Friday promotion in the past, but it still shows that a little marketing goes a long way.
The Lesson
You need to understand your customer. Although internet marketing is faster, easier to track and more cost-effective, sometimes traditional tools such as direct mail can find your customer more effectively.
