Thread: Unusual marketing for your classes?

So, there are the typical and obvious:

• flyers
• calendar listings
• newspaper/magazine advertising
• websites (your own and other peoples)

But Shira recently used the nonprofit status of the studio she's teaching at to get free poster space on city buses -- that's exciting!

Anyone else have some fresh ideas?

In addition to ideas others have tried, I'd recommend the Guerrilla Marketing book series, esp. the [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Marketing-4th-Inexpensive-SmallBusiness/dp/0618785914/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226515251&sr=1-2"]original[/ame]. I'd also say books from [ame="http://www.guykawasaki.com/"]Guy Kawasaki[/ame] (who helped market the Macintosh PC) and [ame="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/"]Seth Godin[/ame] are great resources for ideas on how to do marketing (esp. ethical marketing) in the modern age, and with limited resources.

I seem to have a lot of bad ideas today:

Create your own bling (t-shirt, hoodies, buttons, thongs?)

Temporary tattoos?

Oh, and what about those big signs sandwich shops and gyms hire 13 year old to flip around at major intersections? Those always get my attention!

Here's an update on the bus poster thing - I've gotten 2 new students so far, which is enough to break even on the printing costs for the posters.

I realistically don't expect to get any more new students than that for my Nov/Dec classes because of the holiday season and the fact that the local university is entering its final weeks of the semester, meaning that term papers are due, exams are looming, etc. Most of my dance students are either undergrad or graduate university students.

My purpose in running my "posters on the buses" initiative for November was to learn about what it takes to create a poster that's appropriate for that venue. I wanted to push myself to create something, get it out there, and then assess how I feel about the poster as I look at it for a month. I felt I needed to learn about stuff like which font sizes and typefaces are most effective, which words to use, etc. It was a great learning experience, and I'll use what I learned from it to do another bus poster campaign in February which will be the one I expect to generate results.

Its not terribly fresh, however I've had a fair amount of success by affiliating myself with various organizations in my area - by that I mean offering discounts on classes to members of a given organization in exchange for promotion to that group's customer base.

I am also, thanks to this thread, off to find out the cost of advertising on transit....and drafting my own branded thong. ..l;,