Eleven Ideas, And Not One Of Them Reached A Stranger

In August 2024 somebody posted on Reddit on behalf of his father's dojo. Hundreds of people had trained there over twenty years. Sixty-odd students before covid, only about fifteen came back after it, and it was back up to twenty-five. At that count, he wrote, the business is ok if nothing goes wrong, but things break and bills come up.

Then he listed what they were already doing. His dad thought there was a list of old student emails somewhere, from the hundreds of people who'd trained there over twenty years, and the plan was to email them an offer of one to three months free. There was a refer-a-friend deal running, a free month each way. A friend of his dad's was doing the social media, about two posts a week, "mostly recycled stuff that appeals to people who are already in the community."

And then this:

"other than that I don't really have many ideas of where to go"

The thread gave him eleven. Local SEO, local Google ads, Meta ads, community events for face-to-face exposure, a lead management system, a Google business page, open days, making black belt gradings big so people invite friends and family, shooting reels, building a lookalike audience from his existing customers, and reading Hormozi. One commenter settled the whole thing in a sentence: "Properly done local SEO should be all you need."

That's roughly the state of marketing advice for a martial arts school. Ask once and you get a list. Ask again and you get a longer one. The problem isn't that any single idea on it is bad. The part worth sorting out for yourself is which of them can carry a school and which can only ever decorate one.

The test that sorts any list of ideas in one pass

Go back and look at what the son was already doing, because that part matters more than the eleven suggestions.

Email the old students. Refer-a-friend. Posts aimed at people already in the community. Every one of those is aimed at somebody who already knows the dojo exists.

That split is the one worth marking on your own list. Some ideas reach strangers: people who have no idea your school is there, who've never driven past it, whose kids' friends don't go. The rest get more out of people who already know you. Your students, their parents, their friends, your former students, the people who followed you a while back, the family who enquired in March and never booked.

Write S or M beside every line and the list stops being a list. It becomes two piles, and they do completely different jobs.

The M pile is where the hours naturally go, because it's the work you can do yourself. And it has a hard ceiling. Every idea in the M pile works on the people who already know your school, so when that number stops growing, the M pile runs out of people to work on. A dojo with twenty-five students on the mat can email its former students once. Then it's a dojo with twenty-five students and no list.

Mark your own list before you read the rest of this. The count that matters is how many S rows are actually running this week.

How do you market a martial arts school?

Get two S channels working, then let the M pile work on what they bring in.

In practice we'd put Facebook and Instagram first and Google second. The other channels aren't bad, and we run some of them ourselves. It's that those two reach people in your town who've never heard of you, and let you find out quickly whether your offer lands. You put an offer in front of parents who don't know you exist, you see what happens, you change the words, you run it again. The cost of being wrong is small, and you learn it early.

That second half is the bit the other channels can't match. You can't rewrite a printed postcard. You can't re-aim the SEO work you've already paid for. And a birthday party only holds so many people.

Which of the two to lean on, and how they get mixed up in your own head, is its own argument. The way we'd put it: Google catches the parent who's already searching, Facebook reaches the one who wasn't.

Should I do SEO or Facebook ads first?

We'd say Facebook, then Google, then SEO in the background.

None of that is a dig at SEO. It's that we wouldn't ask search to carry the volume a growing school needs. And it's work somebody has to do by hand, rather than an ad platform doing it for you, so it takes the time it takes.

So build it like a foundation, not a campaign:

1. Rank for your own school name first. If someone hears about you in the schoolyard and types your name, you need to be the first result. That's the bare minimum.
2. Make the site work before you optimise it. Fast, easy to navigate, obvious about what you offer, no dead ends. On a small local site, that's the part that matters.
3. Then go after the buyer searches, if your area has them. Your style plus your town, or plus "near me", and only if people in your area are genuinely searching it.

Point three has a specific shape in this industry, and an owner answering another owner on Reddit put it better than any SEO guide. His advice was to rank for "name of city Jiu Jitsu" and "name of city martial arts", and both of those with "for kids" in them as well, because most parents search for the closest school available and then usually contact the one with the most and highest reviews. The city, the style a parent has heard of, and the word kids.

Which is also why reviews and your Google Business Profile sit right next to this. That's a separate job and worth doing properly.

Should my school be on TikTok?

Not to fill trial classes, and the reason is geography rather than fashion.

Think of your market as a ring around one building. We'd argue that ring should be set by population rather than miles, and whatever you set it to, you need a platform that can hold the shape.

On TikTok the tightest you can aim is a set of zip codes, there's no ZIP+4, and you can't exclude a location back out of your targeting at all, so you can only include the ones you want. Going that narrow can also shrink the audience enough to push your cost per action up. That's the opposite of what a school needs, which is a ring around one building with the far side of the highway taken back out of it.

The second problem is appetite. A TikTok account that does anything needs feeding, which is a standing job for somebody rather than a campaign you set up. If you enjoy making the content, make it, because a school with a good TikTok has something real. Just file it under brand and not under filling Tuesday's beginner class.

What about YouTube for a martial arts school?

Worth having, and we'd still put it behind the first two.

YouTube video ads are bought and run inside Google Ads, as a Video campaign, and we've found the targeting good. We'd still get Facebook and Google working properly before starting on YouTube. It's a channel to add when the first two are running well and you want more, not one to open because the first two feel hard.

There's a quieter one worth adding, too: the people who visited your website and left. They're strangers who already raised their hand, so we'd rather spend on reaching them again, by retargeting on Facebook and Instagram or following up by email, than on a fresh cold audience. It's traffic you've already paid for once, and letting it walk away is a waste.

Where do directories and your social profiles actually fit?

They're plumbing for people already pointed at you. Set them up once and stop thinking about them.

Directories: list the school, then forget about it. We wouldn't expect a class out of it, and it isn't a strategy.

Your Facebook and Instagram profiles: have them, and put a booking link in the bio. Treat them as a second shop window.

Posting more often: we'd treat this one as filler. Benchmark analysis of Facebook Pages puts average organic reach in the low single digits as a share of a Page's own followers. So the honest version of the advice is to schedule a batch of posts in one sitting so the pages don't look abandoned, automate what you can, and stop treating it as growth.

If you want the posts to earn something, there's one kind worth the trouble. A parent deciding whether to bring their child to you is trying to picture their own kid in that room, and no belt-promotion photo helps them do it. A clip of your little ones laughing in a line does. Film a warm-up. Film the bit where somebody gets it wrong and the class laughs with them. That's the one, and you can shoot it on a Tuesday.

Birthday parties, pizza nights, and the thing almost every school forgets

This is the idea we'd most like owners to take seriously, and it fails for one reason.

A birthday party puts a room full of children who don't train at your school inside your school, with a parent either in the room or at the door, on a day when everyone's in a good mood. It's hard to think of an easier way to get children who don't train with you onto your mat. Treat pizza parties and Nerf nights the same way.

And then the party ends, the cake gets handed out, and everybody goes home with nothing.

The whole mechanic is that every guest leaves with an offer to try your classes. Not a brochure. Not "we do classes here too". A specific offer, in the child's hand and in the parent's phone, with a date on it. Skip it and the party was a day's revenue. Do it and the party was recruiting.

Give the referred child an offer as well as the referring one, while you're at it. A refer-a-friend deal that rewards your own student and gives the friend nothing is asking a child to do your selling. That whole mechanic, and when to ask for it, is worth its own read.

When word of mouth dries up, it isn't a confidence problem

A school can run a long time on walk-ins and word of mouth. Good years, thin years, and no real idea why either happened. That's what the M pile on its own feels like from the inside.

When it slows down, the instinct is to do the M pile harder. Post more. Ask for more referrals. Run another open day. Email the old list again.

But a quiet month on walk-ins and word of mouth isn't a sign you need to try harder at the things you were already doing. It's a sign that the number of people who know your school exists has stopped growing, and nothing in the M pile can change that number. That's the point at which you need a channel that reaches strangers, not more hoping.

Do this Monday

Take whatever marketing list you're working from, the one in your head or the one your franchise sent or the one you saved off a Facebook group, and write S or M beside every line.

Then count the S rows that are actually running this week.

If it's fewer than two, you've found the thing holding your school at the number it's been stuck at. You've also found out that none of the ideas you were about to start will fix it.

If you want to talk through which two to run in your town, book a call and we'll go through it.

Keep reading

• "Not Yet": The Thirty-Student Line, And Why We'd Rather Tell You To Wait
• The Marketing You Pay For Before You Know If It Works
• How To Judge A Martial Arts Marketing Agency Before You Sign