The Fastest Martial Arts Marketing Strategy To Get New Students Without Running Ads

When martial arts school owners ask us for advice about tactics currently working for the industry, List Attacking is one of the first strategies we cover. In this article, you will learn how to use one of our favorite (and cheapest) marketing ideas for local businesses and school owners to get more appointments and new members quickly.

By sending a very strategic text message to old leads, you can remind your market about your brand or program and encourage them to return. The main goal is obviously to get new martial arts students but this strategy starts up many conversations for future prospective customers.

Why the List Attacking strategy should be a part of every martial arts school owners marketing efforts?

Have you spent time, money, and resources to market your martial arts school to your community?

Maybe you had an instructor talk to kids at local schools or set up a booth for parents and children at a local business event?

Many martial arts school owners find success with online marketing campaigns on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and video ads on Youtube.

Your martial arts website probably has a form that people have filled out to learn about your classes.

There are many right strategies for a martial arts school to drive traffic and get people on a contact list!

If you have done any of these, then congratulations! You've probably built a list of local area contacts.

One of the most powerful assets you have for your martial arts business is your contact list.

Why?

Because it's filled with contact information of people who:

1. Fit your target audience.

2. Live in your local community.

3. Have shown interest in your brand.

4. Want training in a martial art.

5. Are parents with children in the age groups of your program.

With the right message, timing, and little effort, you can start a lot of valuable conversations. Those conversations can result in a significant increase in new memberships and revenue for your business.

You can see below the success martial arts schools have had in a very short amount of time.

4 Steps To Run A Successful List Attacking Campaign

Setting up the List Attacking system is simple. Because of this, martial artists often overlook how powerful the system is.

All you need is software to send text messages to your contacts list and the ability to respond back and forth.

There are many software options available to accomplish this. Two of our favorite martial arts software that can do this are Spark Membership or Martial Arts Marketing Agency

To set up List Attacking for your business, follow these simple steps:

1. Upload a list of leads into your software.

If you have contacts in multiple places, it's worth the time getting them into one list.

Have contacts in written format? No worries! One of the tactics school owners have had success with in this situation is a program called Fiverr. You can scan your written contacts, go to their website and find someone to convert the written documents to a .csv for quite cheap.

Having someone do this for you will be worth it for any of your future marketing efforts.

2. Send a text message to 50-100 contacts at a time, asking if they're interested in your programs.

If you send too many messages at a time, you can get overloaded quickly and could also have too many appointments. Most people may like having this problem, but it's still a problem that can be avoided by limiting how many contacts you message at a time.

Here's an example text message you can send:

"Hey Johnny, this is Logan @ Legendary Martial Arts here in Winchester 👋. I have a few 10-day free passes sitting on my desk, would you like one?"

3. Follow up quickly with anyone who says yes or asks questions.

If they don't respond, that's okay! Leave them alone for now.

When someone says "no" we leave them alone. Timing is everything. Their timing isn't right for them, right now.

For positive responses, speed is everything. You'll maximize the effectiveness of List Attacking when you respond quickly. We think of these people as "future martial artists."

4. When prospects are ready, give them an appointment link or book them manually.

It's highly recommended, with any marketing, to send links that look trustworthy.

A common marketing no-no and an easy way to lose trust are to send links that look like this:

www.yourschool.com/242=tp_cz?goblygook72489-6xkg

Most of our martial art industry friends out there immediately find links like that suspicious. So let's not do that in our own marketing if we can avoid it.

Rule of thumb: keep your links "clean" looking.

Now, let's dive into a few tips we've learned after doing marketing like this for hundreds of martial arts schools and getting on the phones to book over 30,000 martial arts appointments for our clients.

Tips To Help Martial Arts Schools Get The Most Out of Your List Attacking Campaign

Let's talk about the text message you'll be sending. Then we'll give you some tips we've learned to help maximize the effectiveness of your List Attacking campaign:

Here's an example from above in this article that you can use or modify to use your own marketing ideas:

"Hey Johnny, this is Logan @ Legendary Martial Arts here in Winchester 👋. I have a few 10-day free passes sitting on my desk, would you like one?"

Tip #1: Treat and use every platform the way that it is normally used.

Text messages are meant to be conversational, not spammy promotions. Those kinds of messages are acceptable in a place like an email because that's how email is commonly used. If you treat text like email, you're missing out on opportunities. To get the most out of your List Attacking campaign, text people like you would friends and family.

This doesn't mean that your martial arts marketing idea's can't have promotional text messages in them. Just realize you could be more effective if you turned that promotional text message into a conversational message.

Tip #2: Make it personal.

They're many ways to do this. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using the prospect's first name.

Also, emojis are great to add in. Emojis help make the text message not feel like a business texting you.

Tip #3: Remind people who your brand is and where you're located.

Many contacts in your list are probably old and may not remember who or where you're located. When they see a text that's kind of random, telling them what area or city you're located in is a great way to refresh their memory.

Tip #4: Use scarcity or urgency.

Scarcity (number of passes remaining) or urgency (time-related) are powerful ways to get people to take action now.

Doing this also gives you a reason to follow up with people who said yes but haven't scheduled yet.

Tip #5: Speed is everything.

Have an instructor or team member ready to respond quickly. Not only does this look better for your brand but there is a limited amount of time before that person mentally moves on with the rest of their day.

We've learned that having the mentality of "if they're interested then they're always interested" is a good way to miss out on a lot of opportunities. People have a lot of things going on in their lives and if you're sending them this message, then martial arts probably isn't a priority... yet!

Follow up quickly so you have a chance to help make it a priority in their lives.

Tip #6: End the text message with a closed-ended question.

With this text, you're asking people to make a decision. A closed-ended question asks them to make a simple decision. "Yes or no?"

An open-ended question is asking for a much more thought-provoking answer.

An example of that would be, "what benefits would you like to see your child get out of martial arts?"

This is a fantastic question, but not at this stage. We're checking interest here and getting the conversation going.

Tip #7: Play the long game.

Our immediate goal is to find people who are ready to come in now.

The long-term goal is to get a conversation started.

You'll find lots of conversations with people who say they are interested but don't end up scheduling right away. That doesn't mean they aren't interested. This just means they have lives and other priorities. Those are potential martial artists you're talking with.

Stay in touch with these people and continue building a relationship with these people. These people are your target audience. Learn more about them so you can send them relevant advice and success all the students in your school are having over the next few days, weeks, months, and years

List Attacking Marketing Math

Time for some fun math!

Let's say you have a list of 1000 contacts that you send a message to.

100 people respond that they are interested.

50 actually book an appointment.

25 show up.

12 sign up as new members.

12 students are worth well over $14,400 for the average martial arts business.

What about the remaining 50 that said they are interested but didn't book? Should we just never talk to them again? Of course not! They said they were interested!

Those are an extra 50 conversations that could turn into something more eventually.

This is the power of List Attacking!

Out of all of our martial arts marketing ideas, List Attacking is one of the best for quick results with little effort.

Conclusion

If you're not already using List Attacking as part of your marketing strategy, now is the time to start. It's a simple martial arts marketing method to attract new students without breaking the bank. So what are you waiting for? Try it today!

Want experts to do this for you?

Let us take the stress out of managing your List Attacking and other martial arts marketing strategies. You can sit back and relax while we do all the work for you.

Want to implement this system or one of our other proven martial arts marketing strategies? Click here to schedule your free strategy call!