When to Start?

When do you start promoting continuing education, equipment sales and travel? Is it once your students receive their entry-level certification? Is it before they even complete their classroom and pool training. The answer: None of the above.

Promotion of “The Big Three” needs to begin in earnest before customers ever talk to you in person. It needs to be built into your website, Yellow Pages ad, handouts, flyers and anything else you use to promote learning to dive.

In a past issue of Dive Center Business magazine, Mike Hill reminded readers that people don’t sign up for scuba classes because they want to get certified. They do so because they want to be a scuba diver and have fun. That has to be at the heart of our message (if anything, certification is a barrier to customer acquisition more than it is a means of doing so).

So that’s the message: Be a Scuba Diver. Have Fun. The trick is to craft it in such a way that consumers understand you need to do a lot more than just get certified to meet these goals. For example:

• You can’t be a real diver if all you have is your entry-level c-card. You need the advanced and specialty training that makes you comfortable and confident in the water, and allows you to participate in the really fun activities such as wall dives, wreck dives and underwater photography and video.

• You can have fun diving right here at home — but you’ll have even more fun if you travel. Divers have the most fun when they travel in groups with people they know and trust. They get better deals and better treatment than they can on their own, and the social interaction can continue long after the trip is over.
• The right equipment makes the difference. There is no substitute for equipment that: fits you personally; that you know, from experience, how to operate without thinking; and in which you can have confidence, because you — and only you — have been the one to use and maintain it.

What you say. How you say it. »

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