The marketing calendar, one year at a time

Most marketing in this business is reactive. October arrives, somebody remembers Halloween is a good opportunity, and there are eleven days to organise something. It works, sort of, and it works far less well than it would have with eight weeks.

The fix is not more marketing. It is knowing which six moments actually produce members, and when each one has to start.

The six that earn their place

January — the enrolment month. The strongest new-member window of the year and the one most businesses under-prepare for, because December is exhausting. Whatever you are running in January needs to be built in November.

Spring break and Easter — a camp, not a campaign. Working parents need childcare for a week they did not plan for. A short holiday programme sells on that alone, and it puts children who have never trained in your building for five consecutive days. Start promoting six weeks out.

Summer camp — the biggest revenue event of the year. It is also the one with the longest lead. Industry guidance is to begin marketing three to four months ahead, which means a July camp is a March conversation. Miss the window and you are discounting in June.

Back to term — the second enrolment window. Smaller than January but easier, because families are already rebuilding a routine and looking for the slot that martial arts fits. Six weeks out.

Halloween — community reach, not enrolment. The single best event for getting families into the building who would never respond to an advert. It converts differently from the others: nobody signs up on the night, they sign up in the fortnight after. We wrote this one up in detail, because the event is rarely the problem and the follow-up almost always is.

December — hold, do not push. The one to skip. Families are overcommitted, budgets are spent, and a hard enrolment push lands badly. Use it for retention instead: belt gradings, a demonstration, a party for existing members. The people you keep in December are the January revenue you do not have to go and find.

The rule underneath all of them

Every one of these has the same shape. An event brings people in; a list keeps them.

That is the part almost everyone gets wrong, and it is not a marketing failure. The event runs well, the building is full, everyone has a good time, and nobody writes down who came. Six weeks later there is no way to tell whether it produced a single enrolment, so the same argument happens next year about whether it was worth doing.

Three things make the difference, and none of them is about the event itself:

Capture contact details at the door, digitally. A clipboard becomes a pile that gets typed up on Wednesday, or does not. Name, one contact method, child’s age. Nothing more — every extra field costs completions in exactly the moment when attention is shortest. An embeddable lead form on a tablet is the whole of the fix.

Record consent as you collect it. If you are going to message these families, the permission has to exist at the point they gave it, with a timestamp. Retrofitting consent onto a list you already built is not really possible, so record it where the messages are sent from.

Tag the source. When you look in January at where the year’s members actually came from, “the summer camp” needs to be an answer the system can give you, not a guess. Ours tracks the source on the lead, so January is a report rather than an argument.

Where to start

Whichever of the six is nearest is the one to start with. Early September, for instance, is eight weeks from Halloween — comfortable if you start then, tight if you start in October — and about nine weeks from when January’s campaign needs to be designed.

Pick two. Not six. A business that runs Halloween and January properly will beat one that runs all six badly, because the difference between a good event and a wasted one is entirely in the preparation and the follow-up, and both take time you only have if you are not doing something else.

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Six campaigns a year need one place to capture the enquiries, record the consent and report what each one produced. That is leads and trials and retention analytics, on every tier including the $39 one. If you want to know what a member is worth before deciding what a campaign can cost, the churn calculator does that arithmetic in about thirty seconds.