Site Spotlight - eastcountytennis.com

http://www.eastcountytennis.com/

Can you provide a description of your business?

The site is for my wife’s Tennis Camp and Instruction business.

How did you get started in this business?

Patty, my wife, has been in the tennis business for 30+ years. She worked at a nice golf and tennis resort here in the San Diego area for more than two decades. However about ten years ago, the tennis aspect of the resort was closed. My wife loves the business and decided to strike out on her own. Thus, East County Tennis was born.

How do you market your business?

We send out newsletters (via Constant Contact) regularly. In addition, we produce a camp brochure (hard copy) that we mail out between one and two times a year. In addition, we pay for Google Advertising that we run starting in April, ahead of tennis camp season each year.

How has technology, such as computers and the internet, impacted on how you conduct business?

Though so much of my wife’s business has come from word of mouth from her past 30 years in the industry, many tennis camp participants don’t play year round. So being able to reach out to them via technology is the wind in her companies sails.

And, though there are other tennis camps in the area, none have websites that provide the professional appearance that ours does. That’s especially important for those prospective campers (or parents of campers) who get a good first impression simply by the design of the site and we hopefully cement that impression with great content on the site. Another big technology change we made two years ago was integrating a shopping cart through PayPal. Adding the HTML code (provided by PayPal) was quick and easy. It’s made the first day sign-in process so much less stressful and much quicker and easier. Paying online through a trusted partner like PayPal gives peace of mind to the parents of our campers knowing their payment has been processed securely.

How important is social media to your business?

This is an area that we’ve not fully harnessed as of yet. It’s on the “to-do” list for sure. My wife has a Facebook page and we post occasional content to it. But we’ve not spent any advertising dollars there in the form of Facebook Lead Ads yet. Hopefully this or next year we’ll find the time to add this to our repertoire.