How To Share Your Martial Arts Gym Message
This is where it gets fun! You have put in the work defining your market and message, and now it’s time to deploy your martial arts gym message to your prospects via the medium of your choice.
Most people do this backward and spend all their time working on the media, but end up sharing a weak and poorly-targeted message – and then complain that advertising doesn’t work!
Where to place your advertisements and content
There are so many options, paid and free – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, flyers, Google AdWords, your local paper, your blog, posters on notice boards and more…
Start by testing out one or two places and then keep adding media outlets as you grow your gym. Don’t try to do them all at once and then burn out or run out of cash setting them up.
Some are better for some markets than others and that is fine. There will also be overlap, and that works to your advantage.
By using multiple media platforms your prospects will see you everywhere. This is called “top of mind awareness”, which is great because when they do think of joining somewhere, they instantly think of you.
Some of the media platforms are free, while others cost money. You can use free, paid or both – it all works.
If you have an advertising budget, you can use online and offline techniques to reach your audience. Let’s have a look at the options.
Paid offline techniques
I know “offline” is old school, but you can put a new twist on it.
TIP: It goes without saying you don’t want to be spending money on expensive offline marketing materials if you’re not sure your message is appealing to your ideal customers. Do some online testing first because that is much quicker, easier and cheaper to test and fine tune.
Facility signage
You need modern signage that looks good. This can be a sign above your facility and you can add window graphics.
Don’t just put the name of your gym on your signage, include your core message, your signature offer and always have a call to action to get them to contact you or call in, just like an ad.
Flyers
These are great to put up at local businesses that you support, or businesses that also help your ideal customer. For example, at the sports massage therapist. Offer to put some of their flyers on display in your gym as they will be way more likely to help you if you help them rather than expect a favor.
Your flyers need to act like a silent salesman, winning over hearts and minds 24/7 and not just include a bunch of factual information you threw together. If you’re creating flyers, have a look at my template in the resources section. (Resource name: Flyer)
Banners
A nice way to get your martial arts gym message out is putting big banners out on the weekends or at local events. Make sure to check with your city to see what they allow. Again, the places where you might want to put your flyers may consider taking your banner too – space permitting.
Paid online techniques
This is my favorite type of marketing because you can scale it and keep improving it.
Social media advertising
This is where the biggest return on investment is right now. It won’t necessarily always be that way but you have to take advantage of where the attention is.
Social media platforms are always changing, so you want to be on as many as you can for your gym. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat are just a few of the many platforms you can use.
Have you noticed how changeable it all is? Social media companies seem to come out with new features all the time. New platforms emerge from nowhere – many fizzles out but a few become household names. It’s a never-ending game.
You want to make sure you spend the most time on the dominant platform. Right now that is Facebook, but that could change and it probably will one day.
As well as platform popularity, you need to think about where your market hangs out online? You need to nail this in your market research so that you have a primary platform to target, but still hit the other ones to get the overlap. Right now the younger crowd is on Instagram and the slightly older on Facebook.
You want to make sure the images you use on social media advertisements and updates match your message to your market. This can be huge when you have women only classes or MMA classes, for example.
As well as the imagery, the text in your social media posts needs to be in their language. It’s all about being congruent with your message. Make sure to use their language by reviewing your avatar sheet and checking it matches the right tone of voice, and also mentions the right “whys”.
Search engines
Make sure your website is listed and ranking on all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. (We will get more into SEO in a bit). Make sure you have claimed your business listing on the search engines and that all of your information is correct and up to date.
Advertisements on search engines
As a minimum, you should start off with Google AdWords Express and then start up Facebook Ads. Go to where your target customer is searching for what you offer. Many people skip AdWords because it’s not as sexy as Facebook, but this is a huge mistake.
If you’re not sure what to do, get some help to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
Optimization
Make sure your website is search engine optimized so it shows up at the top of the results when someone does a local search for martial arts gyms and disciplines.
If you do not know how to make sure to hire someone to help you. You want to dominate organic results (the ones that appear on the left-hand side of the page in Google) because a good amount of people will skip the ads altogether and go to the top one or two search engine results. Make sure that is your gym.
There are some SEO tools and reports that can help you work out what the popular search terms are.
If you’re using a WordPress site, make sure to get the free Yoast SEO plugin. This makes SEO super easy by evaluating how well you’ve optimized your pages. The plugin automates doing a series of detailed tests on your information and checking you’ve got the balance just right with your optimization.
You don’t want to overdo adding things like keywords because search engines penalize website owners who go over the top with their tweaks. It will also point out where you’re missing a trick with your site. If you’re lacking optimization or have over-done it, Yoast will tell you exactly where you stand.
Majestic is a great site for seeing the links to your site and the links your competitor is getting. This is of vital importance if you’re in a competitive city with lots of gyms. You can see their key links and get them for your gym.
Blogging
Despite what you have been told, or how you might feel, blogging is not dead. Google wants newly updated content on your site and a blog is the best way to do that fast. Make sure to check out the SEO blogging resource in the downloads I give you and use it. (Resource name: Blogging SEO guide.pdf.)
Struggling to get ideas for good blog posts?
www.answerthepublic.com is a great place to come up with content suggestions for your blog. Type in the martial art you offer and you will get a list of questions people are asking about that exact subject – and it tells you which are the most popular questions! This is important because you want to make sure you’re writing blog posts about things that lots of people are searching for.
You need to answer these burning questions to get the best results. Writing about dull and dusty topics no one cares about is a waste of time and it won’t attract new customers.
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Do the free things even if you have a big budget
Even if you have the money to spend on promoting your gym, you still need to do the following free things.
This will create a compound effect and you will get way better results than from just your paid ads alone.
Also if your paid ads accounts get suspended for some reason, you’ve still got other ways to keep sharing your martial arts gym message. It doesn’t often happen, but it can.
The organic content approach is slower than the instant paid approach, but this is a marathon and not a sprint. Organic traffic provides a steady stream of free leads.
Focus on the long game while you are doing the quickly paid campaigns too. This is where you will see massive growth in your gym. What’s more, a blog jam-packed with good quality, helpful information is a brilliant way to build your authority and boost your credibility.
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Free marketing techniques
We have all been there, lots of ideas and no money. This is where you get creative and put in the sweat equity.
I once used a credit card to get street signs I couldn’t afford and put them out every weekend. Sunday nights were spent bringing them all back in so they wouldn’t get stolen because I couldn’t afford another set! Back then, I had way more time than money.
TIP: Not all the paid methods are super-expensive. You can start for 10 bucks. If you skipped that bit, go back and give it a read, especially SEO and blogging.
Check out Part 3 of the series Here
If you’re wanting to grow your academy, I’d recommend starting with a review and plan for your business. Click Here To Apply To Work With