Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

First, if you haven’t read the manual yet, then read the following article before you start implementing this marketing plan.

“Marketing Basics for Martial Arts School Owners”

What follows is a marketing plan I wrote for July, but it will give you a good idea of how to write your own 5 x 15 plans throughout the year.

Once you read it, it should be painfully obvious that you don’t need a billing or consulting company to do this for you. You can easily come up with a workable, effective marketing plan that is customized to your needs, just by setting aside 30 minutes once a month to do so.

5 x 15 Marketing Plan: July, 20__: Read the rest of this entry »

- Scroll Down to Download Ads -

Welcome to the Member’s ad section. As a paying member, you may download these ads for your own personal use in your own school. Just remember that by downloading these ads you agree to our terms of use:

1. Ads are for use by active, paying members of the Martial Art School Alliance International website only. If you cancel your subscription, you no longer have the right to use these ads.
2. All ads are copyrighted. You are authorized to insert your own contact information in the ad, but further modification of the ads or extracting text or images is prohibited. Ads must remain intact and with the copyright notice visible.
3. You may only use these ads for your advertising your own programs and business. Sharing these ads is prohibited.
4. Fliers may be photocopied and ads may be reprinted, so long as you insert your school’s contact information before reproducing the ad or flier. All reproductions must be for your own personal use.
5. Ads may be reduced or increased in size to suit your needs. Feel free to blow them up to poster size to use for display in your school.

To download an ad, simply right-click the link and choose “save as” to save it to your hard drive. Note: All download links expire after a few minutes. If you get an error downloading a file, reload Read the rest of this entry »

For many martial arts instructors, teaching children is just not something that they care to do. For whatever reason, they would prefer to spend their time teaching adults, and would rather avoid opening their classes to kids.

Well, despite what you may have been told, making a living running an “all-adult” martial arts school is very do-able; in fact, I know of one martial arts studio in a small town near me that has over 300 adult students.

Another long-time school owner I know decided that he enjoyed teaching adults more than kids, even though his main market had been children for 15 years. So, he developed a marketing approach that was geared specifically for adults, and went from less than ten adults to nearly 40 adult students in a few months time.

His style? Traditional tae kwon do. I think that proves you don’t have to teach MMA or military hand-to-hand to attract adults; you just have to know how to find the adults that want what you teach.

But how are you going to attract that type of adult into your classes? By offering them what they want!

Generally speaking, adults enter martial arts classes for two main reasons:

1. To lose weight and get in shape
2. And to learn realistic self-defense skills

The key is in attracting adults who have disposable income and the time to devote to martial arts training. The schools I mentioned have been very successful in this because their ads focus on giving adults what they want.

As you might guess, in order to attract the adult market you have to get the word out that your classes can provide those benefits.

Here’s a “mini-course” in marketing that explains exactly how to attract adult students to your classes: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the hardest things about starting a new studio is finding ways to market before you are making any profit. It’s a real catch-22; you know you need to market to attract students, but you don’t have much money to spend to do it. So what do you do?

Actually, there are a number of low-cost and moderate-cost methods you can use to attract new students. The first thing I would suggest is to Read the rest of this entry »

After operating various martial arts schools and programs for over fifteen years, one thing that I have learned is that my students are my best advertisement.

What I mean to say by that is, I get more people that call or stop by to join classes who say they heard about us from “a friend” than I generally get from paid advertisements.

That tells me that my students say positive things about the school (which really makes me happy). And, if you are offering a quality program and treating your students right, you’ll likely get quite a bit of new students from referrals as well.

In fact, referrals can end up being your number one source of new students. And once you start getting them, you don’t want them to stop!

So, in order to encourage referrals, it’s a very good idea to offer a referral incentive program in your studio. We’ve used one for years that has worked very well for us.

Here’s how it works: Read the rest of this entry »

Back when I used to get “canned” ads from various consultation companies and industry associations, before I would ever run an ad I would always modify it to maximize my response rates. After a while I decided “enough was enough” and just started creating my own ads.

By creating my own ads, I was able to focus my ad on my local market, and personalize it so that after a while people immediately knew my ads on sight. (Incidentally, it sucks when you accidentally run the same ad as your competitor – that’s why I prefer to create my own ads.)

Here are some tips to either modify your ready-made ads or to create your own ads from scratch: Read the rest of this entry »

Lead boxes are a good means of getting new students – if you work them right. Here are the pros and cons of using lead boxes, and some suggestions on how to use them effectively:

Cons – Read the rest of this entry »