Why should a student choose to attend classes at your school?

By Pat Nihill, MBA
Marketing - ChampionsWay Inc.


Why should a student choose to attend classes at your school rather than the school down the street? It doesn’t matter if your closest competitor is on the other side of the city or in a totally different town, understanding what differentiates your school from the others is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself. The answer, if worded in a clear and concise manner, is your key to long-term success. The following article provides an overview of the importance of differentiation and includes an easy to use exercise to help you clearly define what your distinctive competence is and tips on how to best deliver this message to the market to attract new students and grow your business.

In any competitive industry, the most important factor for ensuring long-term success is a company’s ability to differentiate itself from its competitors in a way that is valued by its customers. If you are not adding value to your customers’ lives why would they want to continue doing business with you? What makes your school special? Like most martial arts schools you probably face a multitude of competitive threats, such as the other schools in your town, fitness clubs that offer free sessions to their members, people who practice at home with videos and competition from alternative activities like little league soccer, baseball, football, and scouts to name a few. In today’s day and age consumers have countless alternatives to choose from when they are considering ways to spend their time and money. Your school’s offerings are only one of many choices that your potential students face on a daily basis and to be successful you need to be able to tell them exactly why they should be enrolling in classes at your school.

The following exercise is based on a proven framework used by some of the largest and most successful organizations today. The purpose of this exercise is to help you define what is truly special about your school from your customers’ perspective. The exercise should take approximately 30 minutes and when completed will provide you with a powerful marketing tool that you can use immediately to help bring in new students.

1. Defining Your Strengths.

Start by making a list of your school’s top 10 strengths. This could be anything from the size of your school or variety of classes you offer to the number of parking spaces you have on your property. In making this list try to be as specific as possible, rather than saying ‘great customer service’ you should focus in on what it is about your customer service that stands out.

2. Understanding What Your Customers Value.

Now try to make a list of the things your customers value most about your services. You may want to make multiple lists if you find that you have a few different types of students coming to your school, for instance: new students, adult students, kids & parents, competitive athletes, etc. Again, try to be as specific as possible. The more specific you are the easier it will be to define what makes your school special. If you have the time, you should also ask this same question to some of your students – you may be surprised in the answers you receive!

3. Discovering Your Greatest Strength.

Now compare your list of strengths with the list(s) of things your customers value. Can you find any connections between the things your customers value most and areas where you feel you have a strength? Can you narrow it down to two or three, focusing on the connections your customers would perceive to be the most important? When we went through this exercise at ChampionsWay one of the unique strengths we came across was that while we are a rapidly growing software company most of our staff members are actively practicing martial arts students and instructors and our main software product was developed in a martial arts school. As such, we determined that one of our greatest strengths is that we know how our customers feel and strive to alleviate the problems martial arts schools face on a daily basis.

4. Articulating your distinctive competence.

Something to think about is that for most businesses it is important to be competent in all of the areas your customers value but to really stand out from your competitors you only need to be great at one. If you made multiple lists in step two you may want to try to create a separate distinctive competence statement for each of your customer segments. To create a distinctive competence statement, look at the key connections you identified in step three and try to create a single sentence that clearly articulates both your school’s strength and how it provides value to your students. Using the example from step three, ChampionsWay’s distinctive competence could be as simple as – Software built by martial arts professionals to help other martial arts professionals succeed.

5. The Key to growth – telling people about your distinctive competence.

Once you have created a statement for each segment you are now ready to start spreading the word to attract new students. Effective marketing campaigns should always include a reference to your distinctive competence – this after all is what makes your school special! There are a number of ways that you can include this distinctive competence statement in your marketing messages.

At a minimum you should incorporate your distinctive competence clearly and consistently on all of the pages of your website. People often use the Internet as their primary source of information and having a professional looking website coupled with the branding of your distinctive competence will add a considerable amount of credibility to your school. If you are already contemplating a new website I would encourage you to contact ChampionsWay to discuss how we can work together to build your school a strong online presence.

If you are using Mr. Marketer to manage your email, voice broadcast, direct mail, SMS, and fax campaigns you can easily create new user groups for each of the segments defined in step two. Once the groups have been created you can start developing targeted messages that focus on the value you provide to your students in that particular segment . An effective way to get your message across to your customers so that they remember it is to create a slogan based on your distinctive competence – using our example from the earlier steps ChampionsWay could go with “Built by Martial Arts Professionals for Martial Arts Professionals”. You should use your slogan consistently and as often as possible to ensure your message reaches its target and is remembered for future reference.

So, why should a student choose to attend classes at your school rather than the school down the street? Hopefully using this exercise you have been able to come up with an excellent answer that clearly states the value you provide and is easy to remember. Remember, marketing is not rocket science - it’s simply a creative way of communicating your ability to deliver value to potential customers.

I hope you found this article useful.
All the best,

Pat Nihill, MBA
Marketing - ChampionsWay Inc.