Ask a school owner which of last year's marketing brought in students and you'll usually get a confident answer about one channel and a shrug about the rest. Flyers in the spring. A directory listing that renews every month. A banner at the local football club. An email to old enquiries. Posts on the Google Business Profile.
Every one of those cost money or time. At the end of the year, most owners can't say which of them produced a single student, which one quietly worked, or which one deserved more of the budget. Not because they weren't paying attention. Because none of those channels was set up to be counted.
That's the actual problem. It isn't flyers.
Why the offline stuff feels like the safe spend
Ask an owner why he'd rather print a thousand postcards than put the same money into ads, and the answer is usually some version of: at least I know what it costs.
That's fair. A print run has a number on it. You hand over the money, you get a box of cards, and the cost never surprises you again.
But knowing the cost isn't the same as knowing the result, and those two things get quietly swapped. Neil puts the difference simply:
"you pay for the postcards … before you really know the results"
Whereas online, in his words, "you test it … and keep making iterations and changes to optimize it before … spending a lot of money."
There are two separate things in that.
The money goes out before anything comes back. With a thousand postcards, you've spent the whole budget on day one. Every result comes in after the decision is final. With ads you can spend a small amount, look at what happened, and decide whether the rest of the money goes out at all.
You can't change it halfway through. This is the one that costs owners the most and gets talked about least. If the headline on your postcard is wrong, or the offer is weaker than the school down the road's, you find out from the response rate, and by then the cards are in ten thousand hallways. Nothing about that run can be fixed. A live campaign that isn't working can have its offer, its wording, its audience and its budget changed this afternoon.
So the difference isn't that one channel works and the other doesn't. It's that one of them lets you be wrong cheaply.
In fairness: these channels do work, and some work well
We're not going to tell you flyers don't work, because we run them.
School flyers. We've partnered with a company that emails digital flyers to parents through elementary, middle and high schools. In Neil's words, "this works very well and the cost to acquire a student is comparable with Facebook." Two honest limits, in the same breath: "it's not allowed in some school districts", and "the majority of the leads all come in at once when the flyers are emailed to parents, so they are not as consistent as Facebook and you cannot continually optimize the same active campaign."
That second limit is an operations problem wearing a marketing costume. If forty families ring on a Tuesday and you're teaching until nine, most of them never get called back, and the channel gets written off as a dud when what actually happened is that you couldn't answer the phone.
Postcards. They "can be targeted based on area, demographics, income levels, family size etc. and can be very effective." Also, in the same paragraph: "They are expensive though and it's harder to track the results of the campaign", and "you cannot make changes to the postcards once they are launched."
Both are capable channels, then. Bought blind, impossible to steer once they're moving, and hard to attribute afterwards.
You can't improve what you can't tell apart
Here's what usually happens when a school runs several channels at once. Enquiries arrive through the website. The owner is currently paying for one particular channel. So the enquiries get mentally filed under that channel.
Neil flags this as one of the most common mistakes he sees, and it isn't limited to print:
"Something I see all the time is school owners not having their Google tracking setup properly and they don't differentiate where their website's leads are coming from. For example they are getting leads from their website and so they think these leads are from Google Ads … So people often think their Google ads are performing very well but they're not."
And the rule that follows from it:
"Do not just blindly attribute all of your website's performance to your Google Ad campaigns, because traffic typically goes to your website from multiple different sources."
Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it in your own numbers. Think about the parent who joined last week. Did she come off the flyer in her delivery box, the postcard from March, your Google Business Profile, a friend at the school gates, or the ad? She looked you up before she rang, so she arrived through your website either way. Whatever you're paying for this month gets the credit.
That's how an owner spends a year on six channels and ends up unable to name the one that worked. Nothing they bought was distinguishable from anything else they bought.
The twelve-month tally
Before you spend on any channel again, spend twenty minutes on this instead. One page, twelve months back, one row per channel.
Three columns. What it cost you. How many new students you know came from it, meaning students who joined and paid, not enquiries. And how you know.
That last column is the one that does the work. Copy this and fill it in:
| Channel | What it cost you | New students you know came from it | How you know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Facebook / Instagram ads | |||
| Google Business Profile | |||
| Flyers | |||
| Postcards | |||
| Directory listings | |||
| Sponsorships | |||
| Email / text to past enquiries | |||
| Referrals |
If you can't fill in the last column for a row, write "couldn't say". Those rows are the finding.
Do yours honestly. Write couldn't say where that's the truth; the blanks are the finding. And count enrolments rather than leads, because a channel that produces twenty enquiries and no students is worse than one that produces three enquiries and two students, and the lead count hides that completely.
If you don't know what an enrolment is worth to you, that arithmetic is its own short job and worth doing first. Without it, a tally tells you which channels produced students but not which ones paid for themselves.
What to do with a blank row
Every blank row gets one of two decisions, and there's no third option.
Give it a marker, then run it again. A channel becomes traceable the moment it's the only thing pointing at something. Three ways, cheapest first:
- A unique offer code. Not a generic "two weeks free", which is the same words every channel uses. Put a different code on each one and have whoever answers the phone ask for it. "Two free weeks plus a uniform, mention BOX24" on the delivery flyers.
- A separate phone number. One extra line, printed only on the postcards, forwarded to the same phone. Every call to it came from that card, and you don't have to ask anyone anything.
- A page only that channel points to. A short URL on the flyer that goes to a page nothing else links to. Every visit came off the print run.
Or cut it. If a channel isn't worth the effort of making it measurable, it isn't worth buying again. That's not a hard rule to soften. An owner who won't spend ten minutes making a channel countable is going to be in exactly the same position twelve months from now, with the same blank row and another year of spend behind it.
One more thing to write down while you're at it: which of these you can stop mid-run. Put a tick beside the ones you can change on a Wednesday afternoon and a cross beside the ones that are final the moment you pay. That column tells you where to test small before you commit, and it's the one nobody fills in before buying.
Sponsorships belong in this tally too, by the way, and they're the hardest row on it. Sponsoring a school team, a PTA, a community centre: the money goes out in one piece, the term is fixed, and there's rarely anything on the banner that a parent could mention at your front desk. If you're going to do it because you want to do it, do it. Just don't file it under marketing and then wonder why the marketing didn't produce anybody.
Where we sit in this
We don't get paid until a student walks into your school, so the whole argument of this article is the argument for how we work. We carry the risk of an ad that doesn't land, not you. And because the campaign is live, when it isn't working we change it that week rather than explaining the print run away.
We'd say the same about our own channel that we've said about the flyers: keep your own count. Ours is the easiest row on your tally to fill in, because nothing else points at those booking confirmations. Every student it produces is countable from your side, without anybody telling you.
If you want to go through your tally with someone, book fifteen minutes. Bring the page. If what it shows is that your problem is the front desk rather than the number of families walking in, we'll tell you that on the call, and that's a cheaper answer than another channel.
Two related reads if you're weighing up a supplier rather than a channel: what a marketing contract actually locks in, and how to judge an agency before you sign. If the question is how much to put behind the channel that survives your tally, that's here.
Do this Monday
Open a blank page. Write down every marketing channel you paid for in the last twelve months, including the ones that only cost you time. Beside each one, what it cost and how many new students you know came from it.
Then look at the blanks. Pick the single channel you most believe in, and give it a marker before you spend on it again: an offer code, a separate number, or a page nothing else links to. One channel, one marker. Not all seven.
And that one you've been meaning to do again because it felt like it worked? If it's on the blank list, you don't know that. That's the whole point.
The short version
- Knowing the cost up front isn't knowing the result. Flyers, postcards, directories and sponsorships are paid in full before anything comes back.
- You can't steer them mid-run. A wrong headline on ten thousand postcards stays wrong. A live campaign can be changed this afternoon.
- They're capable channels, not bad ones. School flyers can acquire a student at a cost comparable with Facebook. The enquiries just all arrive at once, and you can't optimise the run.
- Attribution is the real failure. Most enquiries arrive through your website whatever prompted them, so whatever you're currently paying for gets the credit.
- Count enrolments per channel over twelve months. Blank rows are the finding, not an admin gap.
- Every blank row gets a marker or gets cut. An offer code, its own phone line, or a page only it points to.
Questions owners ask
Do flyers work for martial arts schools?
Sometimes, and school flyers in particular can work well. In our experience the cost to acquire a student through digital flyers sent to parents through a school can be comparable with Facebook. Two things limit them: the enquiries all arrive at once rather than steadily, and you can't change the flyer once it's gone out. So judge a flyer run on the students you know came from it, not on how many you handed out.
Is direct mail worth it for a martial arts school?
Postcards can be targeted tightly by area, demographics, income and family size, and they can be effective. They're expensive, they're harder to track than online campaigns, and you can't make changes once they're launched. If you run them, put a unique offer or a separate phone number on the card so you can tell which enrolments came from it.
How do I know which of my marketing is actually working?
Give every channel its own traceable marker before you spend on it: a unique offer code, a dedicated phone line, or a landing page only that channel points to. Then count enrolments per channel over twelve months, not leads or impressions. Without a marker you end up attributing everything that arrives through your website to whichever channel you're currently paying for.
What should a martial arts school marketing plan include?
Start it with a backwards-looking tally rather than a list of ideas: every channel you paid for in the last 12 months, what it cost, and how many new students you know came from it. That one page tells you what to stop, what to repeat, and where you're guessing. Then decide what each surviving channel needs to be measurable next time.