One of our school owners sent this after a few weeks of running:
"I love how the ads come, lately market to kids only - that is our primary group then they eventually become our adult members but i generally am not looking for teens or adults unless they come attached to a family unit. I really appreciate that you made the ads reflect this"
A school owner, in a message to Madscope. Source: deck slide
s33. His autocorrect; he sent "ads completely" two minutes later to fix it.
Read that twice, because he is not saying what most owners think they are saying when they ask for a kids campaign. He is not saying adults are worth less. He is saying adults arrive in his school by a different route, attached to a family that came in for a child, and that pointing paid ads at them directly is not how he gets them.
That is the actual decision. Not which age group you like teaching, and not which programme has the best margin. Which group can walk through your door in volume next month, and what happens to everyone else when they do.
The bracket you advertise is the bracket that has to hold the crush
Whatever you point the ads at fills first, and it fills faster than the rest of your school adjusts. Jason Wadley runs a taekwondo school in Lake Jackson, Texas. He had been at around 225 students, lost about 60% of them to Covid, and reopened with maybe 60 or 70 people and a deliberately thin class timetable he planned to widen as students came back.
"Well, I didn't know that you're going to bring me so many people. And so I had to cut the campaign off and redo my class schedule so that I can handle the numbers."
Master Jason Wadley, Lake Jackson TX, at
[01:22]in his video testimonial.
He signed 30 memberships in under 14 days. He is careful about that number and you should be too:
"So we signed up what 30 people in less than 14 days. Now that's not 30 people, that's 30 memberships and 30% of those had a sibling that came in."
Same video,
[01:33].
Thirty memberships, about 30% of which brought a sibling onto the mat. That is his arithmetic, not ours, and it is the single most useful thing in this article for planning a kids campaign. When you advertise to children, a meaningful share of your bookings are not one child. They are two.
Now put that against a class timetable. If you are running one 4-to-6 class on a Tuesday with room for twenty, thirty memberships with siblings attached does not politely distribute itself across your week. It lands on the two or three class times parents can actually make, which are the after-school and early-evening slots everybody wants, and it lands there inside a fortnight.
Wadley's campaign ran less than three weeks before he stopped it. He also had to change how his front desk worked, because the intake was not arriving one family at a time:
"So we had to retrain our staff and, and our front desk helped to handle, you know, doing, not selling one person at a time, but actually doing, you know, selling four and five and six people all at once."
Same video,
[02:48].
None of that is a complaint. He calls it a good problem to have and he was back running inside a few weeks. But notice that every one of those adjustments (timetable, mat space, front desk process) is downstream of which age bracket he advertised to. A campaign aimed at adults would have filled a completely different set of class times and would not have brought a single sibling.
The programme you did not advertise grows anyway
Here is the part owners do not expect. Jessy Austin runs Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility in Lima, Ohio. Before Madscope he had been stuck at 60 to 70 members for years, split roughly just under 40 kids and 30 to 35 adults. He ran a kids-only campaign.
"And also, we just focused on the kids... And we've actually grown our adult class. So even though it's dialed in for the kids, just by people seeing it in the reach, we've expanded our adult class."
Jessy Austin, Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility, Lima OH, at
[06:04]and[06:19]in his video testimonial. He went from 60 to 70 members to 130 over the campaign.
Two mechanisms are doing that. Separate them, because only one is free.
The first is reach. Your ads are seen by adults in your town whether or not the offer is addressed to them, and some fraction of those adults were already thinking about training. You pay nothing extra for that and you cannot really plan around it.
The second is the enrolment conversation, and that one you control entirely. Our own method for growing an adult programme is not to advertise to adults at all. It is to make the parent an offer at the exact moment their child enrols, because that parent is standing in your reception with their card already out and will be in the building twice a week regardless. A strong offer, two free weeks or a free month, given at the point of the child's enrolment rather than left as a poster on the wall. One of our schools offers parents two free months and does very well with it. And the same rule applies as with the kids: do not hand over the free month and wait to see whether they come back at the end of it. Enrol them at the first class and roll the free period onto the front of a regular membership.
That is a front-desk script, not an ad budget. If your adult programme is half empty, try that for a month before you split your spend across two campaigns.
So when should you advertise to adults directly?
When the adult programme is the one with capacity and the kids programme is not.
That is the whole test. Read your own timetable rather than your ambitions:
- Count seats, not students. For each class time you could put a beginner into, how many more bodies fit before it stops being teachable? Add those up per age bracket. That number, not your total membership, is what a campaign is filling.
- Apply the sibling multiplier to the kids column. Wadley's experience was around 30% of memberships bringing a second child. Your number will differ, but it is not zero, and the seats have to exist on the same nights.
- Ask who teaches it. A bracket with mat space and nobody qualified free to run the extra class is not capacity. It is a hiring decision wearing capacity's clothes.
- Then point the ads at whichever column has the most real seats. Not the one with the best margin. The one that can hold people.
The margin argument tempts everybody, because adult memberships often carry a higher rate. It loses to the capacity argument for a simple reason: an enrolment you cannot physically accommodate is worth nothing, and an intake that overwhelms your staff costs you the students you already had. We have written separately about what happens when a school cannot handle its own growth, because it is the most common way a working campaign turns into a bad month.
Teens, honestly
We are not going to give you a confident answer on teens, because we do not have one that comes from evidence.
What we can tell you is what owners tell us. The owner quoted at the top of this article does not chase teens or adults directly at all and takes them when they arrive attached to a family. That is one school's strategy in one town, not a rule, and we are reporting it as his position rather than dressing it up as a finding.
If somebody hands you an industry benchmark for teen acquisition cost, ask them where the number came from and how many schools are in it. We are not going to borrow one to fill this section.
The mistake underneath all of this
Owners ask which age group converts best. The honest answer is that in the schools we run campaigns for, the variable that moves results is almost never the age bracket. It is whether anyone rings the lead back quickly, whether the booking lands at a time you actually run a class, and whether the mat has room. Age targeting is a real lever, but it is a lever on which of your rooms fills, not on whether the campaign works.
Austin makes this point about himself, and it is the most valuable sentence in his video:
"When you do do this, I was hesitant, and I'm just going to be honest with you, I was not ready. So, when you make that call, just get your calendar clear, make sure that you, your team are ready for this... So, all this was on my fault, because I should have 10 to 20 more. I just wasn't ready for it at the beginning."
Same video,
[08:42]and[09:09].
Ten to twenty students he says he lost, in a campaign that still took him from 60-odd to 130. Not to the wrong age bracket. To a timetable and a team that were not set up for the intake he asked for.
Where we sit in this
We are paid when a student walks in, so we have an obvious interest in you picking the bracket that produces the most shows. Read this page knowing that.
It happens to point the same way as your interest, though. A campaign that fills a class you cannot staff gets paused inside three weeks, exactly as Wadley's did, and a paused campaign pays us nothing either. The bracket with real capacity is the one that keeps running.
If you want to work out which of your programmes has the seats, book a 15-minute call and bring your class timetable, not your student list. And if the honest answer is that nothing has room right now, read this first — starting a campaign into a full timetable is the one scenario where we would tell you to wait.
The short version
- Advertise to the bracket with the most free seats at the times parents can actually attend. Not the bracket with the best margin.
- Add siblings to your kids maths. One owner had about 30% of memberships bring a second child. Those seats are on the same nights.
- Expect the programme you did not advertise to grow. One owner ran kids only and watched his adult class expand anyway.
- Grow adults at the enrolment desk, not in the ad account. Offer the parent something at the moment the child signs, and enrol them on the first class rather than at the end of the free period.
- Sort the timetable before you start. The owner who went from 60-odd to 130 says he left 10 to 20 students on the table by not being ready.
Client quotes on this page are reproduced as written or as spoken. The written quote is transcribed from deck slide s33, a message sent to Madscope by the owner concerned; he is not named because that source material does not name him, and his typo and his own correction of it are both his. The video quotes are from Master Jason Wadley (Lake Jackson TX) and Jessy Austin (Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility, Lima OH), both published on the Madscope YouTube channel and linked above. Every figure attributed to them was confirmed against a second, independent speech-to-text pass of the original recording and carries the timestamp it is spoken at. Nothing has been rounded, no timeframe has been invented, and neither owner's own qualification has been removed: Wadley's insistence that 30 memberships is not 30 people, and Austin's statement that he was not ready and cost himself students, are their own words and are kept. The advice about offering parents a trial at the point of a child's enrolment is Madscope's own method, published on our channel, and is not attributed to either school. No industry benchmark, average conversion rate or survey figure appears on this page, because we have not measured one and will not borrow one.