When I first started learning about marketing for the home business industry, one thing I discovered was that it doesn’t matter if it’s internet marketing, network marketing, affiliate marketing — “Marketing is Marketing!“

This is where my consulting career was born.

Not only was I acquiring new skills which applied to my business, but I was learning something which was of great value to other business owners.

So going back to how my partner Raymond and I were able to help Chief Master Lee market his school, we were quickly able to indentify where West Coast Hwa Rang Do’s marketing was strong and where it needed some work.

The Power of Referral Marketing

The first thing you must know about the West Coast Hwa Rang Do® Academy is that over 90% of it’s students come in through referrals — that is other students referring other students.

If you business is not winning with referrals, then you are either not serving your customers well or your product/service may need some work.

The rest of WCHRDA’s students came through a combination of the internet, yellow pages, drive-by’s, & God knows what else. The performance of the yellow page ad was so poor, Master Lee decided to remove it and save himself an extra $1000 per month in advertising.

Drawbacks of Referrals

So you may be thinking, well that’s great. If referrals are working for him, why would he want to do internet based marketing?

Well, Master Lee is the person that screens all of the students which walk through the doors of the dojang. Only on rare occasions does he allow anyone else on his staff to qualify these potential students.

As you can imagine, being that the school is in Los Angeles some of the prospective students aren’t…. well… let’s just say ‘of the highest caliber’.

Many of them are just curious or just want to throw a few kicks for a couple of days. Some got beat up in front of their girl friends and want to compensate for a deficiency. Some have even said that they want to be “like the samurai”.

The point is that it takes a lot of work to sort the serious from the curious and Master Lee has many other things he can do with his valuable time.

Traditional Methods

So let’s run through some of the reasons why Master Lee nixed his last piece of traditional advertising and why others are doing the same:

So Master Lee decided to feed $900 of those dollars back to his school & gave me and Raymond $100 to spend on marketing via Google Adwords to start with.

$100 might not seem like a lot, but when I think back on it — why would a 7th Dan Master & Eldest son of the Founder of Hwa Rang Do® trust a white belt (me) & a yellow belt (Raymond), with even a single penny to promote a Martial Art we only had a basic understanding of? (10 months ago)

First we explained the benefits in no unclear terms:

How is this possible? With this:

We presented this concept to Master Lee and the key component which got his attention was: “Earn prospect’s trust through delivery of useful content and information with incentive to act” — The Pipeline

This concept of marketing was really in sync with the overall goals of Hwa Rang Do®, which is to add value to individuals and society.

Master Lee took a leap of faith in trusting two individuals whose only previous experience was in the industry of network marketing. We had applied these methods to our business and were certain this would work for Hwa Rang Do® as well.

You know what they say, “sales is the transfer of belief”. We believed.

In the next installment of the Black Sash Edition of this Newsletter, I’ll break down the Marketing Plan for you and some more of it’s benefits we presented at the 2007 Hwa Rang Do® Black Sash Conference.

The Warrior’s Path is always in front of you,

Ferny Ceballos