Getting martial arts leads but they keep disappearing? You're not alone. Most martial arts school owners blame “tyre kicker” leads, but the real problem is your follow-ups. Here’s the exact automation system that fixes it.

• Why calling leads “tyre kickers” kills your martial arts business growth
• The 60-second automation system that stops lead ghosting
• How Amanda turned 11 martial arts leads into 7 premium signups ($83 cost per student)
• The martial arts marketing follow-up sequence that works across email, SMS, and voicemail
• Why Facebook's Andromeda algorithm changes affect your martial arts school ads
• The content strategy that creates higher-quality martial arts leads

 *FREE: Bring 50 Enrollments Into Your Martial Arts School Every 90 Days Need help growing your martial arts school? Watch Training + Take The Assessment

TRANSCRIPTION

The world of martial arts marketing, marketing your martial arts school.

So let's say you're running ads at the moment; it could be through Facebook, through Google.

They typically take a different pathway or a different strategy.

So maybe we'll lean into Facebook for now.

But regarding leads in general, let's say you are running a campaign and you've got lead enquiries coming in and they just ghost you.

So you're all excited, you get a lead notification, see the phone number, and perhaps you pick up the phone and call them.

No answer.

You try to message them.

No answer.

So what's the deal?

Are all these leads just notoriously bad?

Is it just a distraction?

Is it too hard to get hold of people?

I'm recording this close to December right now.

Are people just more distracted than ever, and it's hard to get hold of them?

Or are they just all the leads, martial arts leads, just tyre kickers?

There are a few things that we can consider here.

And if you are in the scenario where you're getting leads and they are ghosting you, there are a few things that could be wrong.

Number one, I think I want to address the mindset around leads.

And a lot of times I hear school owners talk about how leads are tyre kickers, and it's not typically their fault.

Because let's say you're running a campaign and you've got one lead notification, two, three, four, and you can't get hold of anybody.

And four leads in, all of a sudden your entire mindset is shifted.

You feel here's another time waster.

And so where your follow-up sequence might have been multiple times, multiple touch points, calls, messages, emails, you kind of lose motivation.

And the danger is we collectively call our leads tyre kickers.

Like all these leads came together, 10, 20, 30, however many, came together and collectively decided that they are just tyre kickers.

Probably not true, right?

So I think the first thing we have to guard is just our own mindset.

Because if we're running a campaign and a few leads are not great, it's going to happen.

It's marketing.

They aren't just all standing there waving their credit cards saying, please sign me up.

So we have got to consider that, right?

There are going to be some bad leads, but it doesn't make all of them bad.

I come from a sales industry where there was no such thing as a bad lead ever.

It's your job to sell the lead, especially if they put their hand up, right?

If they put their hand up, it's not like we're door knocking and interrupting people.

I mean, other than the odd Facebook lead that comes in and they said they clicked the form by accident.

I might talk about that a bit later.

They click the form by accident and don't know how they became a lead.

Yep, we do get those and I've done it before.

I always thought it was impossible, but I actually have done it before as well.

So that can happen.

I'm not talking about that.

I am talking about the people that actually put their hand up, saw your ad, had some interest and thought, well, I'm interested in this.

And they opted in and they handed over their name, their number, and their email.

They are probably interested, fair to say, right?

But then there are a few things that could be playing against the whole situation; is, are they ready now or are they not ready now?

If we were to break it up, the majority of your prospects will opt in and they might think they're ready, but then they also aren't ready now.

Or they are ready at the moment of seeing your ad and they give you the details.

And then something happens in life.

Like the child says, well, I don't want to do martial arts anymore.

I want to do football.

I want to do soccer or something else, basketball.

So the timing is off.

But three months from now, maybe one quarter on where something has changed and they decide, oh, hang on.

Actually, I might give this a go.

Again, they could be ready then.

So that goes back into your follow-up sequence, right?

Because if a lead opts in, they are interested at a certain point in time.

It's important that we have offers to scoop up that low-hanging fruit as people have entered into your lead generation system.

So that is one thing to consider right there.

Now, that doesn't answer it for all, right?

Because if we're getting like five, ten leads in a row and we can't get hold of them, then what is up?

Well, targeting.

Could it be targeting?

Well, here's the whole thing with targeting right now.

At the time of recording this, just before December 2025, Facebook has made this whole algorithm change to Andromeda.

And Andromeda basically, in short, means, I've got an episode on this, I'll probably do more as we go along.

Andromeda basically means that targeting as we know it is going out the window and now our creativity becomes the targeting.

And so the way we frame our creative together with a hook and an angle, that's going to determine who our ads get shown to.

That's a very short explanation.

It's a whole other minefield.

But targeting as we know it is kind of disappearing, which isn't that, I think, such a big deal for martial arts schools for the most part, because you are only targeting a three, five, or ten-mile radius for most.

And within that, if you put your ad in front of all those people, a good offer, good targeting with a good offer in front of the right people with the right media is going to filter out.

And it's going to get people to obviously resonate with your ad and then opt in.

If you are in the scenario where all your leads are just, you're not getting a hold of them.

Then the first thing we can do is add some friction, add some friction so that they can express their intent.

So if we, for example, if we're running a lead form and somebody can just click and all the details are pre-filled and they can just opt in and now they become a lead.

Perhaps we need a bit of friction.

We like to schedule a position and intent question.

We got a couple.

A basic intent question could just be: are you interested in training after the trial if it's a good fit?

Yes, I'm interested in a programme.

This is our multi-select option.

Yes, I'm interested in a programme.

Maybe, depending on me, my child likes it.

No, just want the trial.

So that gives us a level of intent and it also gets the prospect to think, right?

They opt in, maybe it's a free class.

This is what I'm referring to at this moment.

And they see it and now they get to self-reflect on their own intent of what they are doing and they can click and they can become a lead.

So that's step one, friction.

Now, here's the real thing that I want to be talking about: once a lead becomes a lead, lead becomes a prospect interested in booking a trial, we need communication automations to trigger like in the first 60 seconds, right?

Best would probably be a phone call, but most of you are probably not going to be that quick on it unless you got somebody that does that for you permanently and sits and watches the phone.

I know that you can probably hire a team to do that.

Honestly, I feel if you've got a team doing that, you could be overcompensating just for not a great strategy in automation.

What we do right now with our Automated Student Conversion System is a lead will come in.

They'll get an email immediately.

They'll get a text message immediately.

They'll also get a voicemail drop.

So a voicemail will get dropped into their phone; like a voicemail, the phone won't ring, but they'll get a voicemail.

That'll be a message from you, the school owner.

And then we've got our text message that triggers a conversation where our AI bot starts to have a conversation to book them in.

But within the first 10 minutes, there are three, call them normal static messages that go out, but then also the automations trigger right there and then.

And we've got a bot that says it's a bot.

It's not saying, you know, it's not pretending to be you or pretending to be human.

It tells people it's a bot.

We actually find that that takes away a lot of the objections because they know what's the point in arguing with the bot, right?

But that takes away a lot of the objections.

And then the bot is programmed to have a conversation.

That is just some intent.

How serious are they in martial arts?

Why did they choose martial arts?

And the bot actually books them into the calendar automatically.

This sequence all happens in 10 minutes.

Obviously, this is still not the perfect world, right?

They could get the email, the SMS, the voicemail drop, chat to the bot and still ignore it.

So we've got the sequence carrying on for another good two weeks and warms them up, engaging.

It's touch points in multiple mediums.

So we're talking between voicemail drops, video messages, SMSs, and emails.

And so it doesn't feel like they are just being bombarded or spammed.

You know, I don't know how you feel, but if you opt into something and you get like four emails at the same time or four text messages, it just feels chill.

But if you strategically position them across multiple channels and it's behaviour-based, meaning based on what they do when they receive those messages will dictate what the next messages are.

Now, that is smart automation.

And there are not a lot of systems that do that effectively.

We do that with our system called MAM.Pro, M-A-M-P-R-O.

So we build out all those automations.

Going into 2026, or could be 2026 when you're listening to this, you need automation that triggers the minute somebody becomes a lead and follows up on multiple levels because you just can't afford not to have that.

The more people are using social media.

I saw a clip today about brain rot.

If you think of people sitting on Facebook reels or Instagram reels and attention spans are just getting shorter and shorter and shorter because we're just watching shorter and shorter and shorter information.

And because of that, somebody might opt into your ad now and completely forget about it like two minutes later because they just got their brain taken into a new direction.

So the quicker you have automation, the quicker you catch people in the moment, speed to lead.

It is the thing.

It is essential.

Now, again, you can have an entire team do this, but why?

If you can have great automation that triggers and does it for you and does it for you intelligently.

So by the time you do pick up the phone, it's a completely different story, right?

Because they kind of already know who you are.

The know, like, and trust factor happened automatically.

And so the phone is just a little bonus.

Like we got one of our members, Dave, who's just a school owner and they only use the messenger bot.

They use via messenger to book in all their appointments.

So every time they run an ad, the bot picks up the conversation, books them into the calendar, and then his wife just gives them a courtesy call once they booked into the calendar, once they have already booked the trial.

So really, really smooths out a lot of the kinks with leads, the quality, the filtering and all that.

And it's hands-free.

I hope that's helpful in a sense.

If you don't have that type of system in play, reach out to us.

If you need help with that, we can definitely help you install that type of system.

The next is looking at how you are approaching ads.

Now, I've been all over this Facebook Andromeda thing for the last six months, and I'm always after the 80-20.

What is the 20% that we're going to do that's going to deliver 80% of the results and let you, the school owner, do the least?

Now, there are paths that you can log into our system and launch an ad in literally three to six clicks.

There we've got AI images generated.

It works, right?

It works.

The thing that I would question, though, is if lead quality is not as great, then how do we get a better quality lead?

So let's go down the narrative of the lead is not great.

We are getting poor quality leads.

So they were so mesmerised by the ad and they clicked, but they know nothing about it.

So how do we get a better quality lead?

Well, for that, we need an effective content strategy that's both a social media strategy and both an ad strategy.

And for that, we use The Martial Arts Social To Ads Creative System.

It's a way that you could take basic photos, have them angled at specific motivational drivers.

And on top of that, a strategy of how to film videos, credibility videos, a founder story video, and a way to record many little case studies that we can place inside ads.

So we've nailed down a strategy that does this.

And so the last couple of weeks, we tested this with one of our clients, Amanda, and the first week of ads, it was a very slow campaign.

But here's what we saw yesterday.

We logged in and we saw that there's only been 11 leads, but seven of them have already signed up.

So seven have signed up for the premium programme.

And they all resonated towards the ad because of a certain case study in a certain video that we did.

And this was quite revealing because this is not just a person that they just opted in because it was a fancy little AI image.

They paid attention to a video, a person that they could relate to, understand, and felt a connection that, oh, well, this is the club for me because I can relate to these people.

I want to be like this.

I want to be part of this.

And when we calculated the cost, I think in Australian dollars, it was $83 a sign-up, which in my books, anything below $100 for a sign-up for a student, that's going to be worth, in her case, $2,700 if they stay for the year.

It's a pretty good return.

So there are a few things for you to think about.

Are you thinking, should we just be more persistent?

Do we have some good automations in play, good follow-up sequences?

And should we uplift the level of our content and our media?

And that will create, generate better leads and have better quality.

And sad to say, there's no agency that can do this for you.

It's got to come from the ground up.

It's got to, you got to capture the moments during the day and it doesn't take much.

It takes like five minutes, 10 minutes a day.

If you've got the strategy and you do that, and when you do that, nobody can compete with you being you, your graphics, your media winning formula.

Anyway, hope that helps.

If you need any help with this, there should be a message wherever you watch this video.

I'll catch you in the next one.

Cheers.

*FREE: Bring 50 Enrollments Into Your Martial Arts School Every 90 Days Need help growing your martial arts school? Watch Training + Take The Assessment

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