Posts Tagged ‘Enrollments’

How To Use Trade Shows and Fairs To Get Students

Trade shows, festivals, and local fairs are a great way to get in front of your target audience.

With warm weather arriving and spring in full swing, chances are good that the local community events calendar in your city is filling up with trade shows and festivals.

In fact, you may have even been invited to do a demonstration or have a table at one of these events.

And that’s a good thing. Even though you may dread doing these events (I know I do), lead generation from trade shows, local community events, health fairs, and school festivals remains one of the best ways to increase your community profile and to generate lots of leads quickly.

However, if you fail to do this lead generation method properly, you’ll just be wasting your time and missing out on a ton of great leads. So, follow my tips for successfully leveraging trade show and fair appearances to the greatest result in marketing your martial art school. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Time To Go Back To School With Some Old School Marketing

In this day and age of the internet, texting, and social networking, it’s easy to overlook some of the old school marketing and retention methods.

However, in some cases those old school methods of reaching out and contacting people are just as effective, if not more effective, than those that use modern technology.

And, since many of your competitors are flocking to technology with the hopes of finding “push-button” marketing success (it doesn’t exist), you can step in and fill the void left by using some tried and true old-school marketing methods…

All of which will definitely serve to set you apart from your competition.

Old School Marketing That Still Makes The Grade

So, here are three old-school marketing and retention tactics that still work well for generating leads, enrollments, and renewals: Read the rest of this entry »

Using Testimonials in Your Martial Arts Marketing

Using testimonials correctly in your martial arts marketing can greatly increase your enrollments and income.

There are many ways to market your school, and providing potential clients and customers with testimonials is one of the best ways to super-charge your martial arts marketing.

The power of testimonials should never be underestimated. In this day and age, consumers will only purchase products or pay for services they trust; typically, this means that product or service has been referred to them by people they know.

Since this is something that the small business owner has no control over, he has to do the next best thing… which is to get testimonials from his past clients.

Benefits of Using Testimonials

There are many benefits to collecting and using testimonials in your marketing:
Read the rest of this entry »

Simple Honesty And Convenience Can Really Make A Difference In Your Bottom Line

Think you have some powerful sales kung fu? Put away those slick tricks. Honesty and convenience are better than tricks, any day of the week.

So, think you have some powerful “sales kung fu”?

If so, you likely are aware that your customers see the enrollment process as a buying process. They are shopping you along with your competitors, and will likely make their buying decision based on how good you are at convincing them to join your school.

Now, having said that, you should know that I am not a fan AT ALL of sneaky tricks and hard sell tactics.

So, before we go on let me present you with the number one rule I want you to live and die by in your sales process:

Massie-ism #674:

“When you have the truth, you don’t need tricks. Always tell the truth to your customers.”

No matter what you’ve been told, and no matter who told you – slick tricks work against you and not for you when you are building your enrollment.

Growing a school over the long-term is about building trust and a reputation for honesty in your community. Being known as the local used car salesman of martial arts instructors is not the best way to achieve that goal.

With that in mind, let’s look at a few key areas where you can use honesty and common sense courtesy to your best advantage to increase your sales and conversions.
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Knowing and Doing the Basics is the Key to Martial Arts Business Success

Do you have your basics down? Not your martial arts basics, but your business basics. Find out by reading this article.

Do you have your martial arts business basics down?

You know – those top priority concepts, skills, and tasks that are essential to running a successful martial art school?

Maybe you haven’t given much thought to what those are… but if you’ve read Small Dojo Big Profits, you know about the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s Principle).

Pareto believed that eighty percent of your results come from just twenty percent of your efforts, and I’ve found this to be true in my own businesses.

That’s why it’s so important to know what those “20% activities” are. Once you do, you can focus in on those activities, and cut out most of the extraneous stuff. By doing so, not only will you become more productive, but you’ll also have more time away from your school.

So, let’s examine the “basic foundation” of running a successful martial arts school, and then we can look at which daily tasks and goals we need to focus on to leverage our workday and maximize our effectiveness.
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Not Following The Monthly Marketing System To The “T”? Reading The Following May Change Your Mind…

Recently I coached one of our members on setting up a marketing system. Check out this video to see the results of him implementing the system:

Just the other day, Tony posted his final results for the MASAI 30-Day Challenge in the forums:

Well, I hit it and a few over. I’m sitting on 34 this month. This is the crazys month ever. I have got around 36 infos this month. I have had some busy months before but I don’t think any like this. Thanks for your help!

Hmmm… from 3 or 4 enrollments a month to 34 in one month. There must be some amazing secret, right? I bet you’re wondering, what was this mysterious system we implemented?
Read the rest of this entry »

How To Build Your Email List And Use It To Grow Your Martial Art School…

This is what most people see when they open their inbox. Follow the tips in this article to make sure your emails get opened.

The fact is, even though email has been around virtually since the beginning of the internet, most business owners overlook it as a powerful and nearly free marketing tool.

And today with all the “shinier objects” online (like social media marketing for instance) many business owners discount or overlook the power of having a solid email list for their business.

This is a HUGE mistake! Email marketing remains one of the best, if not the best, marketing weapons to have in your marketing quiver. Think about it – except for the cost of your email newsletter and lead capture software, it is absolutely 100% free to send a promotional email out to your list.

And, you can do it as often as you like, typically in just a few minutes for a single promotional email (as long as it takes to type a few paragraphs and hit “send”).

But, there’s email marketing and then there’s really good email marketing… and knowing a few simple tricks and secrets can make all the difference in the world in how effective your email marketing is for your school.

So, let’s go over a few tips and tricks that will improve your optins (leads) and response rate (how many people respond to your emails).

Read the rest of this entry »

After Marketing Comes Selling – Where The Real Fun Begins…

While the phone may seem initimidating to you at first, the sooner you start seeing it as your friend, the faster you will be able to grow your school.

Many would-be school owners and aspiring full-time instructors have convinced themselves that they don’t need to know how to sell to be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Accept this now – you have to be a good salesman (or “sales person” if you prefer) in order to run a successful school. However, this doesn’t mean you have to use sneaky tactics or adopt a hard sell approach to enrollments.

On the contrary, these tactics will work against you as you grow your school. Tricking or manipulating potential students into signing up often creates problems down the road, especially if your programs and customer service are substandard.

Instead, learning to be a good salesman as a martial art school owner requires learning how to treat people right, and selling by demonstrating the value of your programs. Remember – telling informs, but showing convinces. And, only the truly convinced will invest both their money and their time into becoming a long-term member of your school.

Treat ‘Em Right, And They’ll Stay – But First, You Have to Get Them To Try It Out

The thing is, demonstrating value requires that you actually get the prospective student (hereafter referred to as a “prospect”) to try your school out. The introductory course is where the real convincing occurs (this is sometimes called a “trial course” – language you should avoid, since it suggest a lack of commitment on the student’s part). But in most cases, a bit of selling is required to convince a complete stranger to try your school.

So, how do you do it? It’s simple really, if you follow a few basic principles. And while I can’t really go over the complete sales process in a short article, I will go over the basic principles here to get you started. Read the rest of this entry »

Your Members Want More – Just Make Sure You Give It To Them With Integrity

Having a BBC is a must, but "selling black belts" is NOT the way to go. If you do it, set it up so your BBC has integrity.

Having some sort of elite membership in your school is a must in this day and age.

You have to do this… I’ve tried having a school without an elite membership level, and it just doesn’t work.

As you probably already realize, those folks become your “core” and help keep the school together. Plus, it gives the really serious people something more.

Not to mention that it allows you to increase retention in your martial arts business. That’s a big one. We all want to keep our best students around longer, and a good BBC program can help you do exactly that.

How To Have A Successful BBC

Three things you must do: Read the rest of this entry »

“Building It” Fast Is Simply A Matter Of Following What Works In The Majority Of Successful Martial Art Schools…

Want to grow your school? Follow a proven plan.

Starting a martial art school is tough – and growing a martial art school is even tougher.

That’s why I spent a lot of time in my first school analyzing my operations and comparing them to what successful school owners did. I traveled and spent time with them, observing first-hand what they were doing to grow their schools.

From those observations, I compared what successful instructors were doing, and settled on the activities that were most common among the schools I observed…

It’s not like I kept a bunch of data tables and graphs; it was nothing so complicated as all that. Basically, if I saw a lot of successful instructors doing something, I figured it was important and made note of it.

Then, I made sure I was doing those exact same tasks and activities in my own school on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Now after 15 years of doing this, I’m able to boil down the key elements to martial arts business success into a very simple formula and very thorough checklists, ensuring that I’m hitting on all eight cylinders in my martial art school operations.

This month, I’ve decided to share that formula and most of those checklist items with you in the remainder of this article. Want to hit 100 martial arts students fast, and then continue that growth? Read the rest of this entry »

A Confused Mind Never Buys…

Handing out unnecessary information just for the sake of doing it can actually hinder the enrollment process by creating confusion in the mind of the prospective student.

Recently, a MASAI member asked me how many sheets of information he should hand out to his new students and prospects.

Apparently he’d been told by an “expert” that he needed to hand out a ton of information to new students, ostensibly to increase the likelihood that his prospects would enroll…

Well, if you’ve been reading my materials for any length of time, you know that I hold a strong dislike for unnecessary complexity in any shape or form in any process – be it in business systems, martial arts technique, or teaching methods.

And, the above situation is no exception. Let me explain why I think overloading new prospects with information is a mistake, and allow me to show you how to make your enrollment process much, much simpler.

Read the rest of this entry »

The only thing that’s worse than having ineffective signage, is not having any signage for your business at all… but only by a narrow margin. At least if you don’t have any signage, you didn’t have to pay for it, right? But, in all seriousness, it just makes no sense to pay for a poorly designed sign for your business. Recently, I’ve had several of our Platinum site members send me banner sign designs for review. In each case the banners were laid out in such a way that they wouldn’t be effective for the intended use. However, it only took a few quick fixes to get the signs laid out properly, Read the rest of this entry »

Last month I wrote to you about planning your classes out for the new year ahead of time. This will ensure your classes are exciting, that you have less work and stress next year, and that you have more time to focus on enjoying teaching. In short, planning out your entire year’s worth of lesson plans ahead of time will make you more effective as a teacher. Planning for your marketing in the new year is no different, and in fact I’d say it takes an even higher priority than planning your classes. Why? It’s putting the horse before the cart… no students – no classes! So, let’s look at how you can plan your marketing cycle out for the year, based around the marketing approach that I teach all my coaching clients to use to build their enrollments rapidly.

Planning The Cycle…

Remember last month when I explained how to break your curriculum up by year, quarter, and month? We’re going to do roughly the same thing with our marketing plan, but we need to take other factors into consideration – namely:

• Seasonal swings in inquiries and enrollments -
• Seasonal “windows of opportunity” for certain markets and age groups -
• Seasonal and holiday promotions -

Now, let’s just take the first quarter of the year… we obviously have the New Year holiday to kick things off… the opportunity here is to attract adults who are looking to lose weight and get in Read the rest of this entry »

Start Preparing Early For The Holiday Lull…

Everyone who has operated a school for any length of time knows that things slow down from the week of Thanksgiving until after New Year’s Day. But, just because you may not be receiving the same amount of direct inquiries, it doesn’t mean your numbers need to go down during this period. Let me explain… While it’s true that people have their minds on other things during the holiday season than enrolling in martial arts classes (Note: if you think about it, that’s really true all year long), by focusing your Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Massie

Quantitative Retention Strategies

Quantitative retention strategies consist of concrete actions that can provide a directly measurable increase in your enrollments. In other words, you do retention strategy “A”, and you a measurable increase in your enrollments numbers for the following period that you can directly attribute to that strategy.

I suggest that you don’t experiment with these one at a time, but instead that you implement them all at once. The reason is that singly they may not make that much of an impact, but cumulatively they will make a huge difference in your retention.

Without further ado, here are three tried-and-true quantitative retention strategies you can implement in your school. Read the rest of this entry »