Leveling up your martial arts school doesn’t really have to be hard, you just need to optimize and make sure that every aspect of your business accommodates the leads and the customers. 

Here’s the first part of how you can level up your school: 

1. Aesthetics

The number one thing you noticed when you walk into a martial arts school is the smell. Always make sure to make your school a nice place to be. Make sure that when someone comes into your school, their subconscious minds say that your school is clean, it smells good and the ambiance is bright.

Imagine a person walking into your school and what they first notice is the smell of foot, or sweat it will automatically register in the subconscious mind negatively. 

Even though you are really accommodating to their needs but they’ll still not feel right about their experience because of the ambiance of your school.

💡 This is our tip for you, invite a friend that has never been to your school then ask them to your site’s smell and sound.

2. Digital Marketing

The marketing games have been extremely challenging. In this era, it’s important to connect with potential customers on the world wide web.

3. Automated Marketing

To make your school successful, you need to do the following: Generate leads, make them an offer, set them an appointment, and have them show up, enroll, attend classes, then upgrade or renew the membership then we’ll get referrals — all of these can be automated. 

This is a necessity especially when people opt-in to your website you would never want the relationship to end. 

Are you struggling with how to market and grow your martial arts school? 

Download this FREE martial arts marketing guide to help you fully book with students. 

Let’s talk about the upgrade program, which is very crucial in your school. 

Having an upgrade program is vital to your success. An upgrade is where your school gets a tremendous amount of revenue, but in order for you to have an upgrade program, you have to have a culture. 

There are so many definitions of culture, it is such a subjective word.

Culture is having a purpose-driven martial arts academy. The philosophy of martial arts is clearly understandable, it is part of the academy’s belief system and you as martial artists understand the core values of what you’re teaching 

Having a purpose-driven culture allows you to have a destination-oriented course in your school – not 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. 

Then, you can start laying out the system of upgrading your students towards blackbelt one day in your academy that reinforces values, instills confidence, increases focus, and promotes family morals. 

Another most important thing you have to set up in your culture is also how this upgrade program depreciates from the current program.

Keep in mind that when we talk about upgrade it means a better experience for your students and more money for you as a school owner, so don’t discount your upgrade program. 

Retention is important. 

The most important we can do like martial arts school owners is to keep our students long-term. 

Ask yourself three things:

• Why do students quit?
• Why students are still in school and what keeps them going?
• And the most important question, how do you cause more people to fall in love with martial arts?

Here’s the thing, if you want people to stick long-term and it’s crucial that you get to nail the foundation at the very beginning. 

What can you do in the first to six months of your program to make your students fall in love with your program? 

First, you can do, is your program should be fun – that they would smile because it’s a good time.

Second, on their first trial don’t mix them in a group class with regular students but instead do it one-on-one, it will make them feel comfortable and give them an assurance that it’s going to get tough but you’ll help them. 

Third, look at your student attendance and see who consistently attended class and who is not consistent in attending classes, then reach out and communicate to the students when they missed classes. 

Paint a vision of what a long term looks like for your school and set the foundation right to keep the student in the long-term. 

As business owners, in order to achieve success, we need to be constantly evolving and also use a third party to help us maximize our service.

For instance, creating your website and a common mistake as a business owner we don’t do extra diligence.  We have to be responsible for making a decision and understand that there are responsibilities as a business owner must do.

You must work with them, the more you help the third party companies to help your business, the better results you are going to get. 

Make it a habit that whenever you hire a third-party vendor to provide your business or service you work closely with them and explain to them – your culture, SOPs, and funnels so they can fully understand your service. 

The last thing that you don’t want to happen is them imagining how is it working in your company. That’s why need to understand and need your guidance.

As business owners, we need to take responsibility for our own business even when working with another vendor who is going to provide the service that you’re looking for. 

As school owners, our mindset is very simple and in this frame of mind, it can be a challenge. Our mind is not automatically on that customer experience mode.

For example in digital marketing, we use experts to set everything up and we tell them how we want things done and what our offer would be and what we want to happen afterward.

Whatever your set-up internally in your business make sure you flip it and test it out from a customer point of view. For example: when somebody visits your website and if the funnels run smoothly for the leads. The user experience must be taking on the step of the objective of the website. 

Always see how the customer rides the experience because if it is not smooth can make you lose a potential customer. So as a business owner, it is very crucial to test the customer experience. 

Make sure that your digital marketing does not only set up proper content but there are things that happen afterward – and it should be a streamlined order.

As a school owner, try to create a perfect balance like a ying-yang where the creative side as a business owner is also matched with the customer experience. 

All of us got into the martial arts business because we enjoy doing martial arts. Not just that there are also tons of benefits to training martial arts 

How can we get more people to experience the same joy, benefits, and the same values that we feel and learned during the martial arts training? We have to be the ambassador that goes out and let people into our school that will show them the differences the martial arts school can make in their lives. 

One of the huge proponents is building relationships with the community, this is still the best way to grow our school. Try to help kids in your community by getting into the school system going to the classroom and talking to them about how they can become focused, confident, how they can stand up to bullying without fighting through this you can become an expert in helping kids become better kids and in return they’ll come into your school. 

The long goal is how to build a long-term relationship with the school by thinking about how we can help them. The goal is to help and change lives and everything good will come back to you. If you plant the seeds, you will reap the harvest later on. 

You also need to have a printout letter that presents the things you will talk about and give an overview of your school and how long have you been doing it, also gather testimonials from the teachers and schools you gave talked to and send them to the teachers. 

You have 3 goals when you call schools: 

1. Make your student a hero in front of the kids it will make them feel great.
   
2. You want the teacher to impress how professional you are, the message that you deliver, and how you interact with the kids. 
   
3. Invite the kids to your school for a free event – doing a community event. 

By the end of the presentation, you ask the teacher how they like your message, and do they think the kids got anything from it. If you get a positive response from the teacher, you’ll then ask if there’s a teacher who is interested to have you do the same presentation. 

I hope this guide is beneficial for your school.