Question

Topic: Strategy

Sales Strategy For A New Language School In Hong K

Posted by jorge.adiego on 2/22/2015 at 3:28 AM ET 250 Points
Hi :)

My partner and I are opening a Spanish Language School in Hong Kong.

Our target is the population in general though we have three main groups of clients: children (playgroups 3-6 and kids 7-12), business (with customized courses for corporations) and general courses for adults and teenagers.

We have 4 main competitors specialized in teaching Spanish, 2 in Hong Kong island (where we will be) and 2 in Kowloon district:
1. The main one, with 10 years in the market. Although they appear the first in a Google research they still pay their SEM announcements. And use other kinds of marketing such as ads in bus stops.
2. The second one is not investing in marketing and it's much smaller, though they have been in the market a similar number of years.
There are also universities and general languages centers that offer Spanish.

Our main differences with the competitors are:
We are the only school founded by teachers. We are the only teachers with special qualifications for Business and for Spanish teaching. We have small groups of students and we follow their progress with special reports and feedbacks.

Our main concern is our commercial policy and how to get students. We are considering several tools:
1. Our website: it's the main tool. We need to have a good positioning and we are thinking about an intense SEM campaign. We also have a blog in our website and a Facebook account (as well as Twitter and Instagram) and we wonder what kind of contents should we post in each one. Should they be the same? What differences should they have?
Our goal is double:
a. To enroll students.
b. To have a fluent relation with our students.
2. Flyers. We are thinking in our three main groups of clients, so it would be one flyer for children to give to parents at the schools, one for corporates to be given in some companies working with spanish speaking countries and a general one for the general courses for adults and teenagers.

We wonder in what other ways we should advertise our school and get new clients.

Thanks so much
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 2/22/2015 at 11:10 AM Accepted
    For me, the first red flag is this "Our target is the population in general".

    You might want to tell that dream in a little. According to statistics from the World Bank and the United States Census Bureau for 2013, the population of Hong Kong is 7.188 million people. With the best will in the world it's unlikely that the general population of Hong kong all want to learn Spanish.

    For the search term "learn Spanish" on Google, geo-located for Hong Kong and the surrounding area there are 140 searches per month. Is there enough volume here to meet your needs?

    You may be seeing different results. You may be seeing different ads. You're there, in Hong kong. I'm not.

    However, spending money on pay per click ads to test the market is a cost effective way to check interest levels. Be sure to create clusters of ads that speak to the specific need you're addressing. Split test your ads, refine and hone them, kill the losers early and keep the winners until you have ads that do the heavy lifting of converting.

    You might want to run PPC ads before spending money on three kinds of flyers. If you then decide the market is strong enough to support flyer production, BEFORE you rush out to a printer, decide on WHAT your flyers will say, WHO they'll be aimed at, WHO they'll exclude, WHAT you want flyer readers to do once they've read your flyer, and HOW you will distribute your flyers.

    Given your fees and the time line involved, do you know how many new students you need to attract each month to break even? Do you know the drop out rate? How will drop offs impact revenues and refunds? All these figures need to factory into your overall marketing budget.
  • Posted by mgoodman on 2/22/2015 at 4:38 PM Accepted
    The temptation is to do lots of things quickly and hope that something in the mix produces results. The other extreme is to research and analyze the situation carefully and at least get the strategy right before you do anything. Fortunately there is now a middle ground, just as Gary suggests. You can begin with relatively low-risk search advertising ... to see what words seem to work best, to try a few different approaches to landing pages, and to reach different target audiences.

    That's precisely what I'd recommend. But the requirement is that you plan your test campaign very carefully. Don't lose sight of the fact that the main goal is to learn what works best, not to generate tons of new business as quickly as possible. That could happen, but don't go into this expecting it. Most likely it will take several months before you can even begin to identify a winning approach, and meanwhile you could be spending your full budget with less-than-great payout results.

    If you want to hedge your bet a little bit, there's no reason you can't conduct some information interviews with people in your target audience(s). Find out how they view language schools, why they would want to learn Spanish, what criteria they use to make a decision on language classes, etc. Listen carefully to the words they use and the objections they offer. That will lead you to more persuasive copy in your testing, and perhaps shave a few months off the testing time.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 2/22/2015 at 8:58 PM Accepted
    In your mind, your major differentiators ("We are the only school founded by teachers. We are the only teachers with special qualifications for Business and for Spanish teaching. We have small groups of students and we follow their progress with special reports and feedbacks.") may not be what matters to your prospective students. It may be cost. It may be convenience (location/hours). It may be speed of learning. It may be a guarantee. It may be "field trips". But without talking to your target audience first, it's hard to know how to position yourself as "better".
  • Posted on 2/23/2015 at 5:00 PM Accepted
    Hi, I don't think SEM is necessarily the best way to approach this. I am an HK'er, and have previously worked in PR and marketing in Hong Kong before. The media landscape in HK is vastly different from North America or similar European countries.

    HK may be a very advanced society,but people still make many purchase decisions offline.

    Here's how I would do it.
    1. You mentioned already, but FLYERS. HK is such a cluttered place the only way you can get attention is by giving out flyers. People who take it will look back at it and if it interests them you will get business.

    2. Online through Facebook and Linkedin. I would say these are the two most highly used social networks for your target audience. Run Facebook ads targeting parents in HK. Find Facebook communities in HK that are part of your target audience and pick that particular Facebook page to be your ad targeting. There is an option to set the ad to be served to people of a specific Facebook page. Run ads on linkedin for expats and professionals in HK.

    3. Online forums. Ask the locals to point you to local forums where there are parents and expats who potentially can use your Spanish teaching services. One English-speaking forum that comes to mind is Geoexpat. They have plenty of advertising options.

    Hope this helps, and good luck navigating the very competitive landscape of HK. :)
  • Posted by jorge.adiego on 2/24/2015 at 5:09 AM Author
    Thank you all very much for your advices. We do appreciate especially now that we are starting ;)

    Gary, your red flag helped us so much. Of course that we don’t expect everybody to be our target. When we said “population in general” we mean that among all the people who want to learn Spanish we don’t focus in anyone in particular because we have programs for all of them. The 140 people that search “learn Spanish” in Google also helped us. We did more search and realized that French has a not much higher search and there are double French centers here. We found, as RChan will say later, that a lot of people use Facebook and Yahoo in Hong Kong. This will make us to re-think our on-line strategy.

    Mgoodman, one of the things that we enjoy so much is about talking to locals and find out why and how they want to learn Spanish. Yes, we do listen to them carefully. In fact, we changed some aspects of our website after following their advices and opinions about Hong Kongers.

    Jay, we also appreciate your advices. You gave us two very interesting new points: speed of learning and guarantee. Our prices are competitive, the school is very convenience in the middle of Hong Kong and close to a subway station and yes, we are those kind of teachers who use “fiels trips” ;) We’ll think about how to establish a guarantee method and use the speed as a variable too.

    And finally RChan. As a Hong Konger your advices are especially welcome. Yes, we see that Facebook is very used here in Hong Kong. And also the flyers. Some people in Europe is surprised when we talk about the importance of flyers in Hong Kong.

    Now our big concern is if we should hire an agency to manage our on-line strategy or to do it on our own. The price of an agency is high but internet is a key element in our plan. On the other hand we think that we could have fun trying and learning doing it by ourselves. What do you think?

    And thank you all very much again :)
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