Posts Tagged ‘Martial Art Schools’

…And It’s When You’re On Top Of Your Martial Arts School Marketing!

It’s a fact: in martial arts business, competition doesn’t matter if you’re marketing-savvy.

I have clients who have schools right across the street from them, or down the block, etc. Many times these styles and schools are very similar in what they teach.

However, if style mattered, then it would also follow that all the businesses in other industries that sell exactly the same thing would be putting each other out of business.

Think about it – when you have a McDonald’s on one corner, a Burger King on another, and a Jack in the Box on the third, why don’t they all fail?

It’s because competition can actually be a good thing. When the big chain school down the street advertises all over town, they are raising the awareness of your product in the community. And if you can ride on that wave, it can help you tremendously. Read the rest of this entry »

Easy Online Martial Arts Marketing Methods You May Have Overlooked

There has never been a better time for martial arts marketing, because it’s never been easier to get the word out about your school. Online marketing and modern technology can take the grunt work out of promoting your programs.

Still, I know that many of you may not be leveraging the internet as well as you might to market your school. With all the different ways you can market your school online, it’s easy to get caught up with the more obvious marketing methods, and overlook the subtler and simpler ways to promote your school that are sitting right under your nose.

So, with that in mind here are several relatively quick and easy ways to boost your online marketing while barely lifting a finger (well, except to hit a few keys).
Read the rest of this entry »

Three Trends School Owners Need to Be Aware of When Marketing Online in 2010-2011

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should be aware that online marketing is of the utmost importance to your business in the coming decade.

As I’ve mentioned and discussed many times in recent years, the landscape of marketing small businesses locally has changed drastically since 2005.

Print is dead. Yellow pages are useless. Newspapers are the dinosaurs of our media. Better than 90% of the population turns to online media to research buying decisions. We’ve been through all this before on this site and my martial arts business blog.

But the marketing landscape changes at a breakneck pace in the new information age, and it seems to change ever faster as technology progresses. I spend a considerable amount of my time studying these trends and analyzing what they mean to small business owners, so I can advise my clients on how to best leverage new marketing technologies and opportunities.

If you follow the trends and know how to take advantage, there has never been a better time to market your business. But, you have to know the trends to take advantage of them. Here are three trends that you need to know about for marketing your business online in 2010 and 2011.

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…

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 »

Join the forum discussion on this post

Skip The Middle-Man And Go Directly To Your Local Consumers

Direct marketing is an area of marketing that can be very successfully used by savvy martial art school owners. But just what exactly is “direct marketing”?

There are two qualifying characteristics that distinguish direct marketing from other forms of marketing:

1. It is delivered directly to the consumer via mail, email, telemarketing, or other direct means -
2. It is focused on “call-to-action” marketing; in other words, the marketing piece focuses on getting the consumer to take a specific action immediately -

Direct Marketing For Martial Art Schools

For our purposes, we typically focus on three forms of direct marketing:

• fliering and door hanger distribution,
• email,
• and direct mail marketing.

Fliering houses, distributing door hangers, and direct mail all are pretty much in the same category as far as direct marketing goes.

However, I believe door hangers are the superior method. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

Chances Are It’s What You’re Not Doing That’s Hurting Your Business…

Let me start this article by stating up front – the following may sound like one big long pitch for my stuff, but hear me out. I’ve advised hundreds of martial arts instructors over the last seven years, and indirectly helped thousands more via my newsletter, websites, blogs, and instructional materials. In that time, I’ve come to identify certain traits successful martial art school owners seem to all share, as well as traits that unsuccessful instructors share (or lack) as well. Read the rest of this entry »