You have a dream of running a successful martial arts school. You have put in time and effort to hone your skills and you want to share your knowledge with others. However, you cannot merely open a school and believe that the presence of the facility alone will be enough to attract students. This means you need a martial arts marketing plan and USP…your unique selling proposition.
How to Make a Martial Arts Marketing Plan
When you start to develop your marketing plan, be sure to keep an open mind and be willing to embrace different 
types of advertising that you might not have thought of before.
1. Who is your Target Audience?
You have to think about your target audience. In martial arts, you may have several target audiences for your school.
2. What Type of Clients Do You Want?
You might want to have children attend the classes for self-defense and confidence building. You might want to have adults attend for physical fitness and self-defense.
3.What Skills or Services Do You Have to Offer?
Depending on the type of martial arts your teaching, you might be focusing on finding students who are interested in MMA. Think about the audiences you want to capture and then create markings plans specifically for them.
What Is a USP?
The acronym USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. Naturally, any business that offers a service or product wants to stand out from their competitors. They need to make themselves appear unique in front of their potential customers. Therefore, a huge part of the marketing plan needs to be developing that USP.
Many different things could be considered a unique selling proposition. It could be the story of how you started the school, for example. It might be you or the other teachers at the school. Perhaps some of you have won awards or tournaments. Take the time to think about what it is that makes your school different from the others in the area, and then utilize that in your martial arts marketing plan.
Martial Arts Marketing Plan Ideas You Can Start Using Right Now
Now, let’s look at some of the various martial arts marketing ideas that you can implement into your current campaign.
1. Print advertising
First of all, let’s think about some of the traditional marketing options that are available to you. Even though we live in the digital age and there are many different avenues available for online advertising, it is still important to think about the “old school” options that can still work.
For example, newspaper advertising can be a good option. Look for community newspapers that take advertisements. These are often delivered through the mail, and the cost of advertising through the
m is relatively cheap.
Many people will still read through these advertisements. It is worth trying for one or two campaigns, at least, to determine the success rate. If you find later that it is not working for you, do not continue using.
2. Flyers
Fliers are another form of traditional advertising that still has the potential to work. Make sure you find a printer
that is able to offer good deals on the cost of your flyers and then print up a batch to have delivered through the mail or placed on vehicles.
3. Network with Local Businesses
You can also connect with some of the other local businesses. For example, you could advertise in a nutrition supplement store, the smoothie shop, or similar locations, and you could have their advertisements up in your school.
4. Digital Markerting
Of course, you also need to think about all of the online advertising opportunities that are available.
4.1 Facebook and Twitter
Set up a page for Facebook and Twitter and advertise through the sites. Pay per click marketing can work as well. However, you may want to try some of the other free and low-cost options before getting into this sort of advertising.
4.2 Business Website
One of the top low-cost options for online advertising is to have a high quality website and a blog. In today’s world, you really can’t get away without having website. A blog is important as well. You can add information about your school, as well as health and fitness information, motivational posts, highlight some of your students or employees in posts, and more.
4.3 YouTube Markerteing
Along the same lines, you might want to engage in video marketing. This is another type of content marketing that can work quite well. Make videos and place them on YouTube. You can not only monetize the videos, but they can act as pseudo-commercials for your company as well.
Simply place links back to your company’s website in the video description. Make sure the videos are entertaining and tag them properly, and your business could become quite famous. Naturally, this can help you increase the number of students that you have.
Where are Your New Customers
Please keep in mind that these are just some of the different options available for your marketing. Think about the traditional routes, as well as the out-of-the-box thinking for your school. Think about who your customers are and where are they likely to be found, and you will surely come up with other ideas that you can add to your marketing plan.
Evaluating the Good and the Bad of the Marketing Campaign and Starting over
Once you have completed your marketing campaign, the advertising and the work is certainly not over. You need to evaluate how the campaign went over all.
- How many new students were you able to sign up?
- Were you able to get new students to sign on for a different type of lesson?
- Whatever the goals of your campaign, how successful were you?
- Look at the good and the bad and think about what you’ve learned from the experience.
- Then, you have to start thinking up your next marketing campaign and you need to start on it right away.
Use the things you’ve learned to make this next one better and more successful. There is no real rest when it comes to martial arts marketing if you want to be a true success. Keep finding ways to improve.
Martial Arts Marketing
If you want your martial arts school to do well, you need to market properly. Utilize the techniques found here to begin to formulate your martial arts marketing plan. Martial arts marketing is an ongoing process to find new customers to build your martial arts school business.
