Posts Tagged ‘teaching children’

Selling The Intangible Benefits of Martial Arts Training

This month's martial arts marketing materials can be downloaded from the member's download area.

When marketing martial arts classes for children, you should be aware of what motivates parents to spend money on extracurricular activities for their children.

If you believe parents are motivated by the same motivating factors that get children interested in martial arts, you’re way off base.

In fact, parents motivations for enrolling their children in martial arts are often the exact opposite of that of their children.

Let’s examine these motivations in brief to help you better understand how to market your children’s programs to the greatest effect. 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 »

The other day, I was clicking around on some martial arts websites and came across an interesting article on the Bullshido website, the topic of which was “The difference between a commercial martial arts school and a McDojo.”

Now, normally I’d expect to hear the standard diatribe – including a lot of senseless yammering about how “real” martial arts schools don’t teach kids. As you might imagine, I was shocked when I read the following:

“Lets take a walk into a school shall we?

If the above description was a McDojo then EVERY professionally run martial arts academy would be considered a “McDojo”. The Gracie Jiu Jitsu academy, Gokor’s, Renzo’s, the Beverly Hills Jiu Jitsu Club, the ADCC training center….ALL of them. Meanwhile, we all know that every school I mentioned has produced people that would kick your a$$ six ways from Sunday.”

Seriously, I have to hand it to the author of the post (and I think he’s a moderator on one of the forum topics) – he really hit the nail on the head about the fact that teaching martial arts to children doesn’t necessarily equal selling-out.

Which of course brings me to the topic of this article; namely, how to avoid the stigma that goes with teaching children’s programs in your school… Read the rest of this entry »