The Cheapest Channel You Own Is The One You Haven't Filled

Should your school be advertising on YouTube? Owners ask us this in the same shape every time, usually with Facebook already running. The answer is yes. The useful part is where YouTube goes in the queue.

Should a martial arts school run YouTube ads?

Yes, eventually. Here's Neil's line on it in the book, written after running the thing:

"So far, we have found Facebook and Google Ads to perform better than Youtube though and my advice is to get both of those working first before starting Youtube campaigns."

That isn't a verdict on the platform. YouTube and TikTok, along with in-school flyers and postcards, are all on his list of platforms and campaign types that can be effective, and we keep testing them. We're paid on results rather than by the month, so a platform that starts producing students is one we want to be on early.

What the sentence does say is that YouTube goes third. The reason has almost nothing to do with YouTube.

Should I add another platform or get more out of the one I have?

A channel is only cheap once the one before it is full.

When you add a platform you aren't adding a tap. You're adding a second account to learn, a second set of creative to keep fresh, a second budget to argue with yourself about, and a second place to look when the week goes quiet. All of that is real work, and none of it is the work sitting undone in the channel you already run.

That channel almost certainly has slack in it. Not because it's weak, but because there's a gap somewhere between the families who put their hand up this month and the ones who ended up on your mat. Closing a gap like that is the cheapest growth in the business: no new budget, no new account, nothing new to learn on a Tuesday night. Those families already said yes once.

How do I know my current channel is actually full?

Three numbers, and nothing else.

That order matters because of something Neil says about data generally: decisions should be data driven and not opinion driven, and the data that counts is downstream. Pay attention to which targeting and which ads are getting leads, bookings, students showing for trial classes and enrolments, rather than clicks.

An ad producing very cheap leads who never become students might be the ad to cut, not the ad to copy. If the lead cost is low and none of them enrol, it isn't speaking to the people you want. Look instead at the overall cost to get a student to show and enrol, and decide on that number. We do the same across every account we run: ads and targeting that don't produce students get switched off, and the ones that do get reproduced in more accounts. Neil calls it survival of the fittest, and the only sentiment involved is the owner's.

Which platform should a martial arts school advertise on first?

Meta. Facebook and Instagram, same ad account.

"Meta is the best place for a typical martial arts school to start paid advertising. Almost everyone of their target demographic uses it and its targeting is amazing (even after all the changes in recent years)."

The reason is reach plus targeting, in that combination. The parent of a seven-year-old in your town is on Facebook or Instagram whether or not she has ever thought about martial arts this year, and you can put a class in front of her at the moment she's scrolling. That's interruption marketing, and for this business it's the strongest thing going, because most of the families who end up loving your school were not out looking for you.

It's also where our own book is. Every school we work with runs Facebook ads. About one in ten also runs Google. If Google performed better we'd lead with Google. We run it too, and we'd rather lead with whatever fills your mat fastest, because we're not paid until somebody walks in.

If you want the Facebook half on its own, what actually works in a martial arts Facebook ad is the longer version of that argument.

Where does Google Search sit?

Second, and for a specific reason.

"Google leads are high intent, because the lead has gone out and searched for something like 'karate for kids near me'"

That's the upside and it's a genuine one. The parent typing that has already decided to look. She's problem-aware and solution-aware; you're not convincing her that martial arts is a good idea, you're convincing her it's you.

The cap is volume.

"Google is limited by the search volume in the local area around your school for keywords (what people are searching) related to martial arts classes."

In a few miles around one school that number is almost always low, and lower again if two or three other schools are bidding on the same words. So the intent is high and the pond is small. Lead cost on Google is typically higher than Facebook, and with good targeting, a good offer and good copy and creative, Facebook will generally give you a lower lead cost and more of them.

Two exceptions. If your style isn't mainstream, meaning a mass audience won't recognise it from a thumbnail, Google can suit you better, because the handful of people searching for it specifically are worth more than a wide audience that scrolls past. And once a Google campaign is working it needs far fewer changes than Facebook, where ads fatigue and have to be refreshed.

If you're setting Google up, the keyword side of it is its own job. We narrowed six or seven hundred keywords down to the thirty-two that work for our schools, which should tell you how much of that list is noise. The Facebook-or-Google decision itself has its own page too.

Why owners think Google is beating Facebook

This one decides budgets, so it gets its own section.

A lead comes in through your website form. Where did it come from? Most owners' tracking says Google, because Google Ads is the thing that has tracking set up, and every website lead gets filed under it.

"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."

Your website gets traffic from a lot of places, and Facebook is one of them. A parent sees your ad on Instagram on Monday, doesn't fill the form, searches your school's name on Thursday, clicks through and books. Your dashboard records a Google win. Your Facebook campaign did the work.

So when another owner tells you Google is outperforming Facebook for his school, or when you're about to tell yourself the same thing, the next question is what the data actually shows, and whether website leads are being separated by source at all. Track leads and conversions rather than clicks.

What are YouTube ads, actually, and where do they run?

Three things about it tend to surprise owners, and all three are better known before you budget.

It is a Google Ads product. Google's own page on video ad formats puts it plainly: in Google Ads you create video campaigns with a range of video ad formats to engage customers on YouTube and across video partner sites. The video content itself must be hosted on YouTube.

There are several formats, not one. Skippable in-stream ads, the ones with the Skip button that appears after five seconds. Non-skippable in-stream, which has no Skip button at all, so the viewer sits through the whole thing. In-feed video ads, which show in YouTube search results and the home feed. Bumper ads, which run five or six seconds with no Skip button. And YouTube Shorts ads, which run between organic Shorts. Those formats live inside particular campaign types. Google's current list of them is Demand Gen, Video view, Video reach, Performance Max, reservation buys and app campaigns. If the guide you're following names something else, check it against Google's current help pages before you build anything.

Your YouTube ad may not stay on YouTube. Depending on format and campaign settings, video ads can also serve across websites and apps in Google's video partner network. That's a setting, and it's one to look at deliberately rather than inherit.

None of which is an argument against YouTube. It's an argument for why it isn't the thing to learn while your Facebook campaign still has a gap in it.

If you do add YouTube, check these two settings first

Both are settings Google documents in its own help pages.

Set a radius, not a city. Google Ads location targeting can be a country, an area within a country such as a region, city or postal code, or a radius around a location. The radius is the one you want, and Google describes it as showing your ads to customers within a certain distance of your business rather than choosing individual cities, regions or countries. The floor is 1 km. Google won't let you set a radius smaller than that, for privacy reasons. And a very small target can mean your ads show only intermittently, or not at all, because tiny areas may not meet Google's serving thresholds. So the instinct to draw the tightest possible circle around your front door backfires. How wide the circle should be is its own decision, and it's about how far a parent will actually drive on a Tuesday, not about how far you'd like them to.

Presence or Interest. This is the one. Google's broad geo setting is called "Presence or Interest", and Google's own description of it is that it reaches people who not only exist in your targeted locations, but have shown an interest in your targeted locations. For a business selling to people who are elsewhere, that's the point of it. For a school, where every student has to physically arrive on a Tuesday evening, Google's own advice applies: consider "Presence" when you only want to target users in specific locations and not users who may be in other locations but are still interested in your product or service.

What about TikTok, flyers, postcards and SEO?

Short answers on each.

TikTok is on the test list. Neil's note on it is that you can't target as defined an area as you can on Facebook or Google, that putting the school's address in the form helps, and that it's content-heavy and needs constant refreshing. That note predates the ad tools TikTok ships today, so treat it as the question to ask before you commit rather than as a current spec sheet.

Emailed school flyers work, at a cost to acquire a student comparable with Facebook. Two catches: some school districts don't allow it, and the leads all land at once rather than spread across the month, which is a different kind of problem if you're the one answering the phone.

Postcards can be targeted and they can work, but they're expensive, harder to track, and you can't change them once they're launched. Which is the real split between offline and online, and it's bigger than the price. Offline, you pay in full before you know the result. Online, you test, you look, you change it, and you keep making changes before you've spent much at all. The full version of that argument is on its own page.

SEO is worth doing and won't do this job. Compared with how many families you reach on Facebook and Instagram, the volume you'll get through search is nothing like the same. It's also manual: rather than paying a platform to run something, somebody has to do the work by hand, so it takes time and the results take time. Build it anyway. Just don't let next month depend on it.

Birthday parties, pizza nights and Nerf nights. Contact the parent a couple of months before the birthday, run a good party, then give every child who attends a special offer to try your classes. That last step is what makes it a marketing channel instead of a Saturday. Automate the outreach and the RSVPs and it runs itself.

Business directories take an hour to set up. They bring traffic and they help your search visibility.

The point underneath the whole list: when the thing that used to fill your school stops filling it, the walk-ins dried up, word of mouth went quiet, that's the moment to try a new channel. Not while the current one still has a gap you haven't closed.

Where we sit in this

We're a pay-per-show company, so read the above as an interested party being straight with you rather than a neutral one.

We get paid when a student walks into your school. No retainer, no contract, you're not locked in, and nobody is charged for a pause. That's the whole public pricing story and the rest belongs on a call.

What we do is the half before the door: we find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them. And because we're always watching those numbers, not getting paid every month regardless, we test other platforms and strategies constantly, including this one. The day YouTube beats Facebook for a school like yours, we'll be running YouTube for you, and we'll have found out before you had to.

One boundary that comes before any of this: get to at least thirty enrolled students before you start paid advertising at all. Thirty proves there's a market in your town and that you can enrol and keep people, which is the thing no channel can prove for you.

What to do Monday

Fill in the three-column tally above. Booked, showed, enrolled.

Then read it in this order:

1. Is the booked-to-showed gap the big one? Next week's work is reminders and follow-up, not a new platform.
2. Is the showed-to-enrolled gap the big one? Next week's work is the first class and the day-one offer.
3. Are both tight, and the booked number itself is small? Now you have a volume problem, and now adding a channel is the right conversation.

In our experience most owners who ask us about YouTube find their answer in the first two lines above. That's the cheapest growth available to them, because they already paid to find those families once.

And if you want to know whether the arithmetic justifies more volume at all, what a student is actually worth to you over their time on your mat is the number that settles it.

If you'd like to go through your three numbers with us, book a time here and bring your timetable and the number of spaces you can genuinely take this month. If we don't think we can fill them, we'll say so on the call.