Advertising wins

[Jordan Hinckley]

I was just curious how other groups handle the task of advertising. I won't lie our group is smaller than we would like, and its hard to get better when you begin to see the weakness in all of your opponents defenses and since there are only 6 or 7 of them regularly it gets to a point where you can hardly get much better. We are trying a lot of things but not sure how to reach out to our core audience. To be perfectly honest it took me a long long time to reach the right "words" I had to search for in order to find this martial art. What have you all done that has worked? I have sent letters to all of the local tv news organizations, many of the local newspapers and we are posting flyers as much as we can, but what i also see with our aduience is many of the people who genuinely wish to learn our art are hard to reach. I have even taken things as far as inviting people who are involved in LARP groups (I know, not what we do but you have to pull from somewhere). Do many of you work with SCA groups in your area, or how do you reach the people looking to join, and what is OUR demographic? I have been busting my ass for a year to figure it out and I am afraid I am no closer to the answer than I was a year ago. Has the HEMA Alliance created a press release nationally and we have just not seen it bare fruit? At this point I have moments where I hit the wall. I can only get so much better with the people in my group, but the only way to get more exposure is to, well get more exposure. Any help? I do appologize if there is another topic on this and I am missing it.

[Mark W]

We've had good success from placing an ad on kijiji. Meetup.com, while a pay site can generate some interest as well.

Flyers are good, flyers at universities are particularly good. Also local hobby stores have gotten us some good members as well.

Make up a press release and send it to the local independant papers, arts papers and whatnot. You might want to try the local "Breakfast Television" or equivalent in your area.

Best regards,

-Mark

[Jason Goldsmith]

In regards to our demographic, I think a large part of the problem is a lack of knowledge regarding the existence of what HEMA teaches. People don't seek it out because they don't know it exists. To the extent that is the problem in recruitment, demos your best bet, or a TV spotlight on a "new and interesting local sport."

For general advertising, never underestimate the power of google, and googleAd words. Having a high-ranked webpage and local listing, alongside a google ad campaign with a small budget, can get you a lot of leads. However, people don't search for you if they don't know they want your services.

[Jordan Hinckley]

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7000 ... hting.html
We made it into one of the papers in town! Its a bad article but it is a start I suppose.

[Jordan Hinckley]

http://h3b1.com/UCSA_PSA.mp3 The Public Service announcement we have out that has played for the last few weeks on the Geek Show Podcast.

[Jordan Hinckley]

Going to take this thread another place, namely, post your advertising wins here. Maybe we can use this as a pool of ideas on ways we can look at advertising differently. Or use some of the ideas other groups have done to better our own groups advertising.

[Jordan Hinckley]

Here is a stupid idea that got us 1 or 2 new people coming to check out class initially. A couple of us took our regular flyer that we post on bulletin boards and put them in the back windows of our cars. I live downtown so what I did then was to park as near the sidewalk as possible by my apartment so that anyone walking by could see it. This also worked because as we drove around, when we were stopped at a light, people would end up reading the larger parts of the flyer. This was actually the reasoning behind designing and making bumper stickers for those in class.

[Jordan Hinckley]

Last week we were featured in the Salt Lake City Weekly in their Video section. They are the Largest independant weekly in the Salt Lake Area. We did plug HEMA but he cut it out when he edited it. Though it is posted to our website, so I hope that works if they look at it.
http://bcove.me/4ih2ifbi

[Brian Dyck]

Jordan:

I find this thread very interesting. I'm new to HEMA, just a couple of months but seriously hooked. I've joined a club in Ottawa but like yours is not very big yet. One of the other members and I started havingnthis same discussion.

One point of discussion is where do you find the right people who share the interest.

One observation I've made is how similar many of the backgrounds of HEMA folks are. Here's my own example. See if this rings any bells......

1 Studied history in university
2 Higest inerest was in Medieval period
3 Always loved swords and Armour
4 Sword keenerness led to doing a few years of Kendo (that was 20 years ago so no HEMA Then)
5 As time and resources allowed, started getting into armor making
6 Still practice Karate, ju Juitsu and Kubodo

About 8 months ago I was surfing the net for info on shield making and stumbled on a few videos on U tube of guys sparring with long swords and it was all over.

Since then I've been devouring everything in all the forums I can find, the on line manuals and buying books and gear. Finally had my first short free play Saturday....... Heaven.

All of the above said, in regards to your topic, my thought is that good places to look for recruits are the universities or schools and get ads or postings in near the History guys. Then find out if there is Kendo anywhere near you. I suspect (like me) there may be a lot of people out there that look to Asian sword arts as they are not aware of the growing availability of The European ( HEMA) in a legitimate form.

Finally the other thing I see constantly is people into HEMA often have, or still are doing, other martial arts. The way I see it, it's only going to help me in my new pursuit. So perhaps get your ads up near dojo's....

That's my 2 cents,

Brian

[Jordan Hinckley]

in addition to having booths at farmers markets all this summer we just set the date for an upcoming competition we have coming up for our class and it caught the eye of a local news station who wants us to come and spar in studio on Thursday morning, as well as talk about our group, the movement, and our competition. I will post video if I can get it after it is done.