The Myth of the Magic Bullet in Marketing Your Martial Arts School

Posted by Mike Massie on June 4, 2009

In this business, every kid (er... school owner) should have one

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

There are no “magic bullets” when it comes to marketing your school. The ‘one single best marketing method” is a marketing myth – it doesn’t exist.

People routinely ask me what the best method is for marketing a martial arts school.

My answer?

“All of them!”

Or, I might be inclined to say, “The ones that work!”

The thing is, you can’t just rely on a single method of marketing your school. Consumers these days are absolutely bombarded with marketing messages, and your hopes of catching their attention with a single method of marketing are slim to none.

How to Get Noticed By Potential Clients In Your Target Market

Instead, you need to make sure your potential new student sees your marketing message multiple times, over and over again so the chances that they’ll respond increase significantly.

There are dozens of methods of marketing your school (I list 37 ideas in my marketing manual, and every month the members of my dirt-cheap martial arts business coaching club receive a marketing plan with 10-12 actionable marketing ideas to implement the following month). Some ways work better than others, depending on the market, the quality of the execution, frequency, etc.

The only way to find out what works is to test multiple marketing methods, and stick with the ones that get results. And, don’t just try one method once then decide it doesn’t work – you should try multiple ways to use each marketing medium (print ads, web, direct mail, door-to-door, etc.) before discarding a method as useless. Often, poor ad performance can be chalked up to poor execution, not the method or channel.

Don’t Worry About Finding A Magic Bullet – Instead, Buy A Machine Gun

On a final note, stop looking for a single killer marketing method that you can use to the exclusion of all others. In most cases and with most markets, a single marketing approach may only bring in a few leads a week. That may not sound like much, and you may be tempted to discount a method that only results in one or two leads a week.

However, I’ll gladly use 10 or 12 different marketing ideas that “only” generate 1 or 2 leads a week… because if I use them all at once, they soon add up.

And, when all those different marketing and promotional methods are used simultaneously, it often results in marketing synergy, where the combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

So, stop searching for that single “magic marketing bullet”. Instead, resolve yourself to the fact that to get the desired result, you just need to use lots of bullets.

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Mike Massie is the author of Small Dojo Big Profits and runs a martial arts business coaching website for new instructors and small school owners, StartingAMartialArtSchool.com. Click here to purchase Mike’s business manuals and materials.