Market Your Martial Arts Academy By Picking Your Low-Hanging Fruit First

By Chris Whamond on January 26, 2009 — No comments

Are you in a bind for more martial arts students?

Are you wondering where to focus your precious marketing dollars?

If so, read on. Because I’m going to reveal your three levels of “lists” and where to focus your efforts for maximum money in minimum time.

Your Three Levels of Lists

You have three levels of lists available to you: your customer list, your response (or “lead”) list and compiled lists. Let’s go through each one of these briefly.

1. Customer List – This is obvious. It’s your list of current and past students and their parents. In other words, people who have handed you money at one time or another.

2. Response List (leads) – This is your list of leads; people who have expressed an interest in martial arts classes either for themselves or their children…but have NOT yet signed up.

3. Compiled List – This is a list of people purchased from a mailing list company (or an email list purchased from an outside company – which, by the way, you should never do). It’s a “cold list”. In many cases, compiled lists are “homeowner” lists – random names in a certain neighborhood, for example.

All Marketing Starts With a Target!

Remember: all marketing starts with lists. Did you hear that? It’s so important I’ll repeat it again: your list is your target. You must first pick a target in order to market.

So, if you have very tight resources, which list do you focus on? Where do you start? The answer is simple: List #1. Your customer list.

Here’s why:

First, your customers trust you more than people on any other list. Because of this, they are pre-disposed to buy from you. Your response rates will be much higher marketing to your past customers than on your leads list or on cold lists.

Studies prove past customers are 8X more profitable. Or put another way, it’s 8X more expensive to market to a stranger (a non-customer).

Second, you need to maximize the value each customer (student or parent) represents to you. When you do this, your ads, website, referral programs, buddy days, birthday parties and other lead-generating sources become that much more profitable. As a matter of fact, if you squeeze every drop of value out of each customer you can, it can turn “loser” marketing campaigns into HUGE winners!

Your Martial Arts Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan should be as follows:

1.) Monetize your customers as much as possible – cross-sell, resell, upgrade, promote to, sell pro shop items to, get referrals from your customers – before you do anything else. All those extra sales from your customers are called “back end sales”. That’s where all your juicy profits lie.

What’s the best way to market to your customers? How do you get your message in front of them each month in a non-salesy, non-pushy way? Easy: Your monthly martial arts marketing newsletter: Through the Ranks!

This is one of the secrets of the Through the Ranks newsletter’s success. Your Through the Ranks newsletter is the engine that fuels your backend machine – your repeat sales – and helps you extract maximum value out of all your customers!

So here’s my suggestion when marketing:

Start by getting your newsletter out on an consistent, non-stop basis before you do anything else. Make your newsletter what it should be: the centerpiece of all your marketing efforts.

That way, when you DO get a new student, you’re all set to maximize the value they bring you – and YOU bring to them.

Once your back end marketing machine is humming along – and you’re getting your newsletter in your students’ hands every month without fail, then you can start working your next most valuable list: your leads list.

But don’t start outside marketing until you’ve perfected your inside marketing – by marketing to your current students and their parents! Why not? Because if you don’t have your “inside” marketing plan in place, the value you extract from any new students simply won’t be as high.

Make sense?

Fortunately for you, it’s easy to get your internal marketing going because you’re a Through the Ranks direct response newsletter member. This martial arts newsletter does most of the hard work for you. So…assuming you’re getting your newsletter out on a regular, consistent basis each month, then you can move on list #2 and list #3.