An owner told us on a call that he'd been turning over the same question for a while:
"maybe the same ad, but having it English and Spanish"
His school sits in a mixed area. A lot of the families within walking distance speak Spanish at home, and the families he'd been getting came from further out. He wanted to know whether reaching both meant two ads, two campaigns and two of everything, and whether he'd have to pick one if he couldn't run both.
The honest answer took about thirty seconds, and it surprised him, because almost none of it is about the ad.
Should my martial arts school run ads in Spanish?
Usually you run one campaign in the language most of your area reads, and you put the Spanish somewhere else.
Here's the thing the owner was missing, and it's an easy one to miss, because he was looking at his neighbourhood instead of at his booking form. A seven-year-old doesn't see your ad. A seven-year-old doesn't fill in a form at nine at night and choose Tuesday at five. The person doing that is a parent on a phone, and a bilingual parent who's shopping around for a kids' class can read four lines of English ad copy without breaking a sweat.
What they'd rather not do in English is the part after that. Texting back and forth about their own child with a stranger. Asking whether he'll be the only one who's never done it. Asking what you wear, what it costs, what happens if he hates it. That's a conversation, and people have conversations in the language they think in.
So the language question isn't really an advertising question. It's a follow-up question that gets filed in the wrong drawer.
And the follow-up drawer is already the leakiest one in this business. A parent shopping for a dojang wrote on Reddit that out of nine places they contacted, "only two answered my emails". Another, writing to owners about what it's like from the other side, put it as a flat instruction: "Don't make me schedule a call. Don't say you'll reach out to me. Make it easy or I'm probably going somewhere else." Nothing in either of those is about language. Both are about the reply.
Now add a language gap to that reply and you've made the only part that was already fragile harder. That's the whole argument. The families you're worried about losing aren't losing you at the ad. They're losing you in the fifteen minutes afterwards, the same as everybody else, except with one more reason not to type.
Do I need a separate Facebook campaign for Spanish speakers?
No, and if you build one by setting a language, you should know what you've just done.
When you set a language on an ad set, you're not giving Meta a hint. Meta's own description of Advantage+ audience lists language alongside location, minimum age and your exclusions as the "strict criteria where AI should not expand beyond". Those are the walls. Everything else you fill in is a suggestion it's allowed to walk past if it finds somebody better. So a Spanish-only ad set isn't a Spanish-flavoured version of your campaign. It's a smaller campaign, narrowed on purpose, running on a fraction of the signal.
And if you genuinely do want two language versions in front of two sets of people, that already exists without a second campaign. Meta's own ad documentation covers carrying several language versions of the same creative in one ad and serving "the right language version to the right people". The multi-language thing isn't what a second campaign buys you.
What a single campaign buys you is that every booking, show and enrolment lands in one place. That's the part worth protecting. The longer one campaign runs with everything pointed at it, the better it gets at finding the next family, and that's how the cost of getting a student through your door comes down rather than up. Splitting it in half gives you two campaigns, each learning half as fast, for a problem that was never in the ad.
Language is still a real signal, and it's one of the things that can be aimed at when there's a reason to. Neil's own list of what to target includes languages spoken. It's just very rarely the thing that's broken.
Isn't a Spanish-speaking neighbourhood a lower-income neighbourhood?
These are two separate questions, and the owner on that call had them welded together. Worth prising apart, because the fix for each one is different and doing the wrong one costs you students.
Income is a real factor and we don't pretend otherwise. Neil's book says it plainly: if people can't afford classes, they simply can't enrol. When the leads coming in genuinely can't pay your tuition, the lever is who the ads are aimed at and where, and he describes that as usually an easy fix. It's a conversation with whoever runs your ads, not a change to your offer. The thing you don't do is make the trial paid to filter people out, which is covered in what to charge for a trial.
A language isn't an income bracket, though. Spanish is spoken at every income level in the US, by people who own businesses and people who clean them, in the expensive part of town and the cheap part. "The families near me speak Spanish" and "the families near me can't afford my tuition" are two different sentences that happen to be true in the same zip code, and if you treat them as one sentence you'll end up cutting out half your own neighbourhood to solve a pricing problem.
There's a third thing underneath both, and it's the one Neil pushes hardest. "I can't afford it" is often the polite exit, not the reason. Owners with a good enrolment conversation sign families across every income level. And if people are showing up and not enrolling, the offer usually isn't what's wrong. More on which of those you're actually looking at in the students you actually want more of.
How do you follow up with Spanish-speaking leads?
Exactly the way you follow up with everyone, plus one sentence.
The rules don't change: text, don't just ring. Inside fifteen minutes while the phone is still in their hand. From the number the booking confirmation came from, because a new number reads as spam and the reply rate drops. One or two lines, like you'd text a friend, ending in a question so there's something to answer. All of that is in why trial students don't show up, and it's the same page whichever language the reply comes back in.
The one sentence is the whole intervention.
Has [child's name] tried martial arts before?
Two details in there do most of the work. It names the child, which is how they know a person typed it and not a system. And it ends in a question, which is the difference between a confirmation and a conversation. The six questions worth asking once they're talking are in the questions to ask a parent after they book, and they work the same in either language.
One line for your booking confirmation, if you'd rather make the offer before anyone texts:
¿Prefiere que le escribamos en español?
That's it. One sentence. Not a translated website, not a second ad account, not a Spanish version of your timetable. One sentence, in a message the family already gets.
What if nobody at your school speaks Spanish?
Then don't send the line. This is the part that matters more than the wording.
Offering a language you can't answer in is worse than not offering it. A parent who takes you up on it and gets nothing back has learned something specific about your school, and it's not that your Spanish is rusty. It's that you don't reply. A reply pasted out of a translator three days later teaches the same lesson. You've turned a neutral into a negative using a sentence you were quite pleased with.
So the rule is one line long: nobody offers a language unless a named person who speaks it will answer inside the hour.
That person doesn't have to be staff. A parent of a current student might take ten texts a week in exchange for their own tuition, and they can tell a nervous parent what their kid was like in week one, which nobody you hire will be able to do. An assistant instructor who grew up speaking it counts. One of your teenage leadership kids counts, with supervision. What doesn't count is "we'll figure it out if someone replies".
Before you send the line: the three-column sheet
- Write the name of the person who answers in Spanish. One name. Not a rota, not "whoever's in". If you can't write a name, stop here and the rest of this page doesn't apply to you yet.
- Write the hour they're reachable. Bookings land in the evening. Someone who only reads texts at nine in the morning isn't cover.
- Rule three columns on one sheet: booked, offered Spanish, replied in Spanish. Add a line per booking for one month.
- Read the sheet at the end of the month. Column three is your answer. If a quarter of your bookings switch, you've found something real and it's worth a permanent arrangement. If it's one family in thirty, you've spent one sentence finding out, and that family still got a better welcome than they'd have got anywhere else.
Count the shows against column three too, if you can be bothered. That's the number that tells you whether the switch changed anything, rather than whether people noticed it.
Where we sit in this
We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them.
In a bilingual area that means the ad and the booking stay with us, and the choice of language in the conversation stays with you, because you're the one having it. We've set this up this way for another school already: one campaign in the main language, the offer to switch made in the follow-up, nothing split in two. We're paid when a student walks into your school, so a campaign that's been narrowed down to half an audience for no reason is our problem as much as yours.
If you're sitting in a neighbourhood you feel you're not reaching, bring that to a call along with your timetable and the number of spaces you can genuinely take this month. Some of what you're describing will be a language thing. Most of it usually isn't, and it's quicker to find out which than to guess. Neil's book, The Martial Arts Student Attraction Blueprint, covers the targeting and follow-up side of this in more detail.
Do this Monday
Add one line to your booking confirmation: ¿Prefiere que le escribamos en español? Then rule the three columns and count the replies for a month.
Do it in that order, and only after you've written down the name of the person who answers.
The short version
- The parent clicks and books, not the child, and a bilingual parent can read your ad in English.
- Language matters in the conversation after the booking, not in the ad.
- Setting a language on an ad set is a hard limit, not a hint, so a Spanish-only ad set is a smaller campaign on purpose.
- Two language versions of a creative already fit inside one ad, so a second campaign isn't what buys you that.
- Language and income are different questions with different fixes. Don't solve one with the other.
- One sentence in the first text does the whole job, and only if someone's going to answer it.
Questions owners ask
Should my martial arts school run ads in Spanish?
Usually you run one campaign in the language most of your area reads, and put the Spanish into the follow-up instead. A bilingual parent who's shopping for classes can read a short ad in English. What they'd rather not do in English is a back-and-forth about their child with someone they've never met. So the ad stays as it is and the first text after the booking offers to switch.
Do I need a separate Facebook campaign for Spanish speakers?
No. Setting a language on an ad set is a hard control, not a hint: Meta's own description of Advantage+ audience calls these strict criteria its AI should not expand beyond. So a Spanish-only ad set is a deliberately smaller audience. And if you did want two language versions, Meta's ad tools carry them inside one ad and serve the matching version, so a second campaign isn't what buys you that.
How do you follow up with Spanish-speaking leads?
The same way you follow up with everyone, plus one line. Text inside fifteen minutes, from the number the booking confirmation came from, short and ending in a question. Add one sentence saying you also speak Spanish and they're welcome to reply in it. If they answer in Spanish, carry on in Spanish. If they answer in English, never raise it again.
Is marketing in Spanish still relevant?
For a local school the useful version of that question is narrower: does it change anything for the family deciding whether to walk through your door. On the ad, usually not much, because they clicked it in English. In the conversation after the booking, yes, because that's where a parent asks what to bring, whether their child will be the only beginner, and what it costs.