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"
Read that twice, because he isn't saying what most owners think they're saying when they ask for a kids campaign. He isn't saying adults are worth less. He's 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 isn't how he gets them.
It's also what we tell schools that teach both: put the paid ads into the kids programme. Neil's reasoning is short. "We mainly focus on kids because they are brought in the door by adults. The show rate is almost always higher. And when the adult comes in the door you can make an offer to them too." In his book Martial Arts Students On Tap he puts the money side the same way: "the show rate and profit are almost always higher for children than adults".
So the real decision isn't which age group to advertise to. It's whether your kids timetable can hold what walks in, and what happens to everyone else when it does.
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, 1:22 into his video testimonial.
He signed 30 memberships in under 14 days. He's 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, at 1:33.
Thirty memberships, about 30% of which brought a sibling onto the mat. That's his arithmetic, not ours, and it's the single most useful thing in this article for planning a kids campaign. When you advertise to children, a meaningful share of your bookings aren't one child. They're two.
Now put that against a class timetable. If you're running one 4-to-6 class on a Tuesday with room for twenty, thirty memberships with siblings attached doesn't 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 wasn't 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, at 2:48.
None of that's 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 wouldn't have brought a single sibling.
The programme you didn't advertise grows anyway
Here is the part owners don't 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, 6:04 and 6:19 into 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 can't really plan around it.
The second is the enrolment conversation, and that one you control entirely. Our own method for growing an adult programme isn't to advertise to adults at all. It's 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: don't 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. The whole parent offer, with the words to say at the desk, is in what your adult intro-class no-shows are actually afraid of.
That's work for the front desk, not the 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?
If you teach both, not as your main campaign. The parent offer fills adult seats from people who are already in your building, and adults who book off an ad on their own are, in Neil's words, "more likely to change their mind and not show up for class".
If your school only teaches adults, there's no kids programme to point at, and nothing here says you need one. We work with adults-only schools too. Bolting on a kids programme isn't the fix for an adult gym's marketing. The rest of the method (a fast reply, a strong offer, a timetable that can take the intake) applies to you unchanged.
Before you switch on a kids campaign, count the seats
Kids first doesn't mean kids whatever the timetable says. Read your own timetable rather than your ambitions:
- Count seats, not students. For each kids class time you could put a beginner into, how many more bodies fit before it stops being teachable? That number, not your total membership, is what a campaign is filling.
- Apply the sibling multiplier. Wadley's experience was around 30% of memberships bringing a second child. Your number will differ, but it's not zero, and the seats have to exist on the same nights.
- Ask who teaches it. A class with mat space and nobody qualified free to run it isn't capacity. It's a hiring decision wearing capacity's clothes.
- If the kids classes can't hold it, sort that before you spend. Add the class, or staff it, first.
The margin argument tempts everybody, because adult memberships often carry a higher rate. Neil's book says the opposite about the numbers that count: show rate and profit are almost always higher for children. And whichever bracket you pick, an enrolment you can't 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 can't handle its own growth, because it's the most common way a working campaign turns into a bad month.
What about teens?
The owner quoted at the top of this article doesn't chase teens or adults directly at all and takes them when they arrive attached to a family. That's one school's strategy in one town, not a rule, and we're 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're not going to borrow one to fill this section.
The mistake underneath all of this
Owners ask which age group converts best. For shows, kids, almost always. But the bracket still isn't what decides whether a campaign works. In the schools we run campaigns for, that comes down to 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's a lever on which of your rooms fills, not on whether the campaign works.
Austin makes this point about himself, and it's 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."
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 weren't set up for the intake he asked for.
Where we sit in this
We're 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 can't staff gets paused inside three weeks, exactly as Wadley's did, and a paused campaign pays us nothing either. A kids campaign into a timetable with real room is the one that keeps running.
If you want to check whether your kids timetable can take a campaign, book fifteen minutes 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'd tell you to wait.
The short version
- If you teach both, advertise to kids. Adults bring them in, the show rate is almost always higher, and the parent can be made an offer too.
- 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 didn't 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. The full parent offer is here.
- Count the kids seats 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.