Marketing Ideas for Mobile Swim Schools

If you’re looking for marketing ideas for your mobile swim school, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 7 ways to market your business and the tips and tricks to streamlining your marketing process that will save time, money, and resources for your swim school. 

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7 ways to market your mobile swim school 

1. Optimize your Google Business Profile 

Google Business Profiles are an often overlooked marketing channel. Most businesses have one, but few have optimized profiles that are helping to boost local SEO. 

For mobile swim schools, an optimized Google Business Profile is an effective way to attract potential customers without paying for Google Ads. They’re a hotbed of keywords that help put your business in front of potential customers, and unlike website SEO, optimizing your Business Profile takes just a few minutes and has near-instant results. 

Steps to take include

• Filling out every section in detail (you’d be surprised how many businesses skip this step)
• Adding high-quality, descriptive photos and videos 
• Increasing the number of customer reviews
• Creating a Q&A list 

For more ways to boost the power of your Google Business Profile, check out this article on 10 ways to optimize your profile to rank higher in SERPs.  

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2. Encourage word-of-mouth marketing

Your current customers are one of your most powerful marketing tools. A recent study found that 93% of participants said friends and family were their most trusted source of service recommendations and reviews. 

There are many ways to encourage word-of-mouth marketing that will help increase sales for your mobile swim school. These include:

• Encouraging user-generated content — Create a hashtag and encourage students and your instructors to photograph swim lessons (with consent from all participants) and share these images on social media and your website. 
• Display customer testimonials and reviews on your website — Send review requests in your lesson follow-up emails. If you already have many Google or Facebook reviews, consider using a review aggregator like embedsocial to pull these reviews onto your website. 

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Start a referral program 

Launching a referral program is one of the best ways to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for your mobile swim school. 83% of customers are willing to refer after a positive experience, yet only 29% actually do — unless they’re prompted. 

There are multiple incentives you could consider, and depending on your aim, several events that would trigger the reward. For example

• Both parties get a free swim lesson when the referee books a package of lessons for the first time
• Both parties get a dollar amount credited to their account (or a discount code) when the referee books for the first time
• The customer gets a custom discount code to share with friends and family (which could also reward them every time it gets used) 

If you have a strong email marketing process, you might even consider rewards for each new email subscriber your customer brings in. 

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3. Overhaul your website 

Another effective marketing idea for your mobile swim school is to optimize (and overhaul, if necessary) your website. Or, if you fall under the 1 in 4 small businesses that don’t have a website, create and then optimize your website!

We go over ways to increase organic website traffic in more detail in this article. But some initial steps to take include

• Make sure your website is easy to navigate — This includes adding a navigation bar that makes it easy to find pages, naming your pages with clear titles, and making sure buttons are easy to access.
• Display swim lesson pricing — If your pricing is location dependent, consider adding “starts at…” with an easy way to get in touch to find out specifics.
• Add online booking options — 97% of customers want to book and manage appointments online, so offering online booking is an easy way to upgrade your website.  (Don’t worry, integrating online booking is easy. Talk to the MarketBox team to find out more.)
• Ensure contact details are easy to find 
• Optimize for relevant keywords

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4. Boost your email marketing efforts 

According to a report by Hubspot, email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses. If you’re looking for marketing ideas for your mobile swim school, don’t overlook the humble email.

Here are 3 ways to boost your email marketing efforts 

1. Only send high-quality, relevant content — If you want to keep people engaged (and away from the unsubscribe button), only send emails that add value. For mobile swim schools, this could mean tips on getting more from your swim lessons, the benefits of learning to swim at home, pool maintenance advice, and news on promotions or discounts you’re offering. 
2. Personalize your emails — Using the person’s name in the subject line increases email open rates by 26%. When you’re collecting people’s contact information, include a field for their first and last names and add personalization tokens to the email where appropriate. 
3. Make sure customers have opted-in — Unless you want to fall foul of anti-spam regulation (which, trust me, you don’t!), never send a marketing email to someone who hasn’t opted-in to receiving them. If you have forms on your website that automatically enroll them in emails, make sure to include a consent disclaimer letting them know. 

To learn more about the advantages of email marketing, check out this article. 

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5. Consider running paid ad campaigns 

If you have the budget, running a paid ad campaign on either Google or social media can be an effective way to market your mobile swim school. Just be wary of relying on them too much to drive traffic to your website — organic traffic is always best. 

When running a paid ad campaign, it’s important to set parameters and target specific demographics, areas, etc., to ensure you’re not paying to display ads to people who aren’t the right fit for your business (or in the right location!).

Both Google and Facebook make setting up and managing ad campaigns easy. But if you want more information on creating targeted local Facebook Ads, we’ve got a step-by-step guide here. 

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6. Launch an introductory offer 

Another effective marketing idea for mobile swim schools is to create introductory offers. This marketing strategy works best with other tips on this list to convert leads into customers once you’ve got them on your website or signed up for your mailing list. 

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7. Don’t ignore physical marketing channels 

Lastly, for mobile swim schools, it’s important not to ignore physical marketing channels such as

• Signwrite company vehicles (or adding logos to swim instructor vehicles) 
• Local bulletin boards (real or virtual)
• Local newspaper ads

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Tips for effective marketing 

Effective marketing can be time-consuming, but there are plenty of ways you can automate the process to make things easier on your team. Consider the following

1. Batch-create social media content and use a scheduling tool to post it throughout the month. 
2. Set up automated lesson follow-ups that ask for reviews from customers. (Just make sure to set a trigger that cancels this once a customer has left a review, so you’re not asking for a new one every week!)
3. Use email workflows to automate your lead nurture emails.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might like this one on the benefits of Swim School Software for mobile swim schools. 

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