No matter how good an art or skill is, unless it is complemented with the right marketing strategy, it won’t give good monetary results (from a business perspective). This holds true for the centuries-old tradition of martial arts too which requires the right marketing strategy to get more clients/students. With so many martial arts schools out there, standing out from them requires effort and skills. We have prepared a list of actionable and result-oriented marketing ideas for martial arts schools that can give great results if you implement them.
1) Website
With people having less time, the trend of getting information directly online is constantly on rise and if you don’t have a good presence online, you will miss many potential clients. Getting a good-looking professional website for your martial arts school is the basic minimum requirement for online marketing. Your website must be mobile-friendly (easily adaptable on mobile devices), fast loading, well-organized and must convey your business/service with clear-cut contact details.
2) SEO
There are only 10 websites that show up organically on the first page of Google and if your website does not show up here when people type “martial arts school in [city name]”, then most probably your competing businesses will swallow the big chunk of clients. To get your site on the first page, you must have a proper SEO (search engine optimization) for your website. Any digital marketing agency can handle this for you or if you want to proceed with this yourself, you can learn the SEO strategy through various Youtube videos and internet marketing forums.
3) Paid Advertising
Pay-per-click ads or paid advertising for martial arts is a quick method to start getting clients soon. The two giant sources that can be utilized for this purpose are Google ads and Facebook ads. Both these sources have many targeting options to get the right set of clients that are interested in joining martial arts. With many free and paid tutorials out online, you can either learn it yourself or can get the ads through a digital marketing agency.
4) Press Release
One of the most cost-effective ways to get quick attention for your martial arts school is by utilizing a quality press release service that can send out news announcements related to your martial arts business on many news platforms. This process not only generates views but also helps in branding your martial arts school. It also indirectly boosts the performance of your martial arts website in Google as it generates 100’s of backlinks.
5) Referrals
Your present students are the best direct promotional assets for your martial arts school. If you can come up with a good incentive (fee discount, cash bonus, etc) for referring a new student, you can enhance the speed of your business. Getting referred directly by other people has a very high conversion rate because people are much more inclined to trust friends and relatives and it also generates word-of-mouth marketing.
6) Tournaments
If you hold martial arts tournaments regularly in your area on popular locations, then you are sure to get noticed which would help to grow your martial arts school. If you find it expensive to host such tournaments, you can tie up with non-competing businesses to do joint promotions to lower the costs. Let’s say you tie-up with a budding pediatric doctor/clinic who wants his/her clinic to get more patients and that clinic can promote health-related stuff, then you both can get benefits.
7) Event Sponsor
This is similar to the one above but instead of spending more on hosting a martial arts tournament, you can become a co-sponsor or sponsor of famous events in your locality/city depending upon your budget. By doing this, your martial arts school will be promoted automatically to all the visitors of events.
8) Custom Codes
In all your marketing materials (banners, clothes, ads, etc), you can use a short, memorable and easy to message code that can connect people with your business so that you can open up a new channel of getting students for martial arts.
9) Parties
Note down the birthday parties and other special events of all your students. You can host a free birthday party for your students at your location so that your present students can bring their friends and relatives to your martial arts school and this would help to open up a new marketing channel.
10) Free Classes
Free is one of the most attractive terms in marketing as many consumers are driven towards free things. You can host free weekly classes and can create the best memorable experience by having unequal martial art fights like a child and an adult to showcase the benefits of martial arts.
11) Safety Workshops
Fear is a good selling point and you can use increasing safety awareness as a strategy to get more business. Focus on safety campaigns like showcasing child safety strategy in schools, parks, etc. You can also tie-up with businesses in health and safety niches like CCTV installation companies, hospitals, clinics, etc. You can also host seminars on child safety, women’s safety, etc to grow your martial arts school.
12) Reviews
Businesses can stand and fall nowadays based on online reviews. If your martial arts school has a good number of positive reviews, you are sure to get much more students and vice versa. You can encourage or incentivize your students to leave reviews online to boost your business. Having good instructors and giving a good experience to the students is a prime requirement to stay away from negative reviews.
13) Getting Word Out Through Newspapers
As many people perceive newspapers to be a significant and trustworthy source of information, you can utilize this public perception to boost the brand image of your martial arts school along with bringing new students. First of all, you have to contact journalists and/or editors of local newspapers after which you can propose writing content for topics related to your expertise like “change in martial arts trends”, “role of martial arts in the contemporary world”, etc. By getting such columns regularly, you will start seeing more and more people knowing about your school which will help to grow your martial school admissions.
14) Videos
The entire task of experiencing a martial arts school is much better suited visually than any other means. This is why using videos to convey your martial arts school is a great way to convert traffic into admissions/clients. You can put professionally shot videos of martial arts training and contests on your website to get more people interested in your service. You can also open a new Youtube channel to consistently post such videos in order to get more people to see it and in turn reach out to you for learning martial arts.
15) Choose Main Target Locations
Locations close to schools, colleges, student hangout areas, big coaching institutes, etc are the prime areas where you can market your martial arts school with good chances of exposure to the main target audience. You can use billboards, pamphlets, booths, etc to let the target audience know more about your martial arts school in these locations.
16) Social Media
For your martial arts school to get known by your local population, social media is one of the good options. Start with creating a profile of your martial school on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. Then slowly work towards growing your number of followers on such sites by consistently sharing valuable and interesting content. After a few weeks to months, when you get a good presence on such platforms, you can start promoting martial arts school on social media. You can also make use of the dedicated local level groups on Facebook to advertise your services.
17) Influencers
Identify the core demographic of your martial arts classes and accordingly choose those influencers that would be the perfect fit for giving a shout-out on social networks. While selecting influencers, get a rough idea of the local following that they command because there is no use in marketing a martial arts school using influencers with mostly non-regional followers.
18) Offline Marketing
Most martial arts advertising ideas given here are inclined towards online marketing for the simple reason that they are easy, comparatively inexpensive and provide very detailed targeting options. Nonetheless, offline marketing still continues to drive millions of leads every month for various businesses and services around the world. So it can be a great complement to all the online marketing methods that you are currently implementing to grow your martial arts admissions.
19) Directories
Yelp, Manta, Crunchbase, Homeadvisor are a few of the names that you might have come across many times while searching for goods and services locally. Such sites are usually called authority sites as they command high ranking in search engines. You can get your martial arts school details listed on such platforms to reap a small share of the traffic that these sites receive. It hardly takes 10-15 minutes to list your business details on such platforms and in return, you will get a big exposure to your service due to the power and influence they command online.
These are a few hand-picked ideas to grow a martial arts school. The “leave a reply” section below welcomes all comments, suggestions, doubts that you may have related to this subject.
