Almost all martial arts school owners are disappointed with their agencies or have a horror story to share. Here’s how I see both sides of the story.
- The flawed martial arts agency model of overpromising
- The unrealistic “microwave expectations” about martial arts marketing
- The power of the marketing-to-mats feedback loop
- The strategic mindset shift from focusing on cost to focusing on return
- The advantage of an “open book” martial arts marketing approach
- And more.
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TRANSCRIPTION
I want to talk about everything that, in my opinion, is wrong with martial arts marketing.
This is coming from two sides, from both sides: the agency model, the delivery, the expectations that get promised in the market space, and then on the flip side, how it's perceived and the expectations from martial arts school owners of what it is and what it's not.
And then there's the inevitable hamster wheel of disappointment that it just never seems to escape.
So, who has not had a bad experience with an agency?
Everybody talks about how their agency sucks and they're terrible.
Is this true?
Yes and no.
I feel it's on both sides.
Now, in my last videos and a few things that I've distributed, I've mentioned my dislike for the traditional agency model.
And I'll tell you a little story.
Here's where this started.
This is now going back. Oh, it's got to be at least five or six years ago.
I always feel like I get timelines wrong.
But I had a fan of my podcast reach out.
And I think he was a fan, or it was a good way to start a conversation.
But the message was something like, “Hey, George, I really like listening to your podcast. I just have a question.”
“What's the best channel to advertise for martial arts school owners?”
“Is it Facebook or Google?”
And I gave my opinion of what I thought was good in which circumstance, because it's not a straight-line answer, right?
Sometimes it's Google; sometimes it's Facebook.
Favour leans more towards one than the other most of the time.
But anyway, that was my objective answer.
I gave an objective answer.
And I said, “Just curious, why the question?”
And the answer was, “Because I'm opening up a martial arts marketing agency, and I just want to know what the right channels are to advertise on.”
Now, things like that get me a little aggro.
I just don't like when I hear stuff like that.
And here's why: it just reeks of deception.
Somebody's going to pay for this person's lack of experience that he's going to deliver.
Whereas if you're learning how to market, then by all means, go do it, but then do it for free and let people know that they're part of this big old experiment.
And so my response was, “But hang on, shouldn't this be something that you know, seeing as you're going to open up a marketing agency?”
And his response, which got me more fired up, was, “I'm just going to outsource it overseas and get somebody else to do it for me.”
Now, if you've worked with VAs overseas, that's great, but sometimes the context is missing.
And it's naive to think that you can have zero experience in something and find some unicorn VA that's going to magically know the context of your market, how it works, the offers, the copy, and the graphics.
There are just too many layers of context that if you don't have the expertise yourself, you sure as hell should not be offering it as a service.
That's the first thing.
And this is a story I'm familiar with, but I've seen this countless times because I hang out in the agency groups and I see the questions and the things that people take on.
They take on clients and they've got no experience and don't know what they're doing.
And who pays for it?
The client does, right?
So I'm not a fan of that.
Now, does that mean all agencies don't have knowledge and experience?
No, there are wonderful agencies and people with a lot of knowledge, but here's the truth of the matter.
If you're running a martial arts school and your ad budget doesn't even exceed $2,000, and if your ad budget doesn't exceed $2,000 or $3,000, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, if you're not spending more than $5,000 on ads, you really should not have somebody outside of your business run that for you.
Because the cost of obviously paying for someone to do it is number one.
Number two is the disconnect in what's happening on the floor, what's happening on the mats that you need to communicate over to an agency.
The way this whole done-for-you model is presented is that it's just done for you and it's magical and it's just going to deliver.
It's just not true.
It is just not true.
There are just way more nuances to it.
Now, that probably leans into the whole other discussion.
I don't want to make this like a super negative post, but I feel it just needs to be said, right?
Marketers tend to just ruin everything.
And so here's what I'm not a fan of.
I'm not a fan of this big old, big promise, “we'll sign up X amount of students for you or you don't pay.”
And so here's where this is twofold, right?
It's a bad promise.
And then it gives a certain expectation for the school owner.
I saw somebody posting about how they were promised this thing from an agency, and they were promised something like 40 appointments or trial signups and they got 30.
And then they asked for the refund.
Shame on the agency for making a promise and then not wanting to refund, right?
That's just lame.
If you make a promise, stick to your promise and give the refund.
But then for the school owner, who got 30 trial appointments and probably got 10X their return on their investment, the agency fell short.
And so now the school owner wants his money back.
Now I see there are two things wrong with this, right?
The model is flawed because the only reason an agency would give a guarantee like that is to increase conversions, right?
It's to boost the conversions, which is cool, which is what you should do.
I don't know, it's great if that's what you're trying to do is increase conversions, but then you sure as hell better be able to back it up.
Now, the problem I have with that promise is you can't guarantee that promise, which means you have to give room to give money back.
And the reason I say that is you do not know the circumstances to be able to deliver that outcome a hundred percent of the time.
It's just not possible.
I've been doing ads for 13 years.
I've seen our clients sign up for more than 25,000 paid trials.
I've worked with more than 400 schools.
There is just a time when you don't know if it's going to work.
Sometimes an ad campaign goes through the roof instantly, and it's all great.
Do the same campaign in a different location, and it floors, it drops or doesn't succeed, or it just takes more time.
And I'm going to go back to “time” in just a minute, as it just takes a bit more time.
The problem here is twofold, right?
The industry thrives on making promises that it can't keep.
But think about the business that just asked for money.
They invested all their staff and resources to deliver on this promise.
They can't deliver on the promise.
They spent the money for the workforce, and now they have to give it back, and they can't.
So they can't deliver on the promise.
And here we have this whole fleet of disappointed martial arts school owners hating on agencies because they aren't delivering on their promise.
That's the agency side.
I feel it is flawed.
It is flawed to promise things that are just impossible to deliver, and it sets an expectation that is just not realistic.
Now let's talk about unrealistic expectations.
As a martial artist, and for you as a martial arts school owner, you should know things take time.
Think of the persistence, the perseverance, the knockbacks, the failures, probably way more failures than success all around.
And if you just think of whichever style, for me, jiu-jitsu. I suck at it 99% of the time.
There's so much setback before there is success.
But somehow when it comes to marketing, we think that we can just flick on the switch and it works.
And our persistence and patience and expectations are just completely unrealistic of what it should deliver.
And here I speak to school owners, and they'll tell me that they've been through all the agencies and none of them work.
Okay, there's a common denominator.
I'm not saying it's the school owner's fault, but the school owner has fallen for every promise or entered into the relationship.
There was a hiccup, and the hiccup happened.
And now it's, “These guys don't work.”
Let's go find the next magical unicorn that can do this all in unrealistic terms.
If marketing was that simple, then everybody would be billionaires, right?
But it is just not.
And if you're seasoned at marketing, then you know that it can take time.
And I don't like that it “can take time,” because that feels like something the guy that sells SEO wants to tell you.
“It takes time.”
“Here's a two-year contract. We might get results.”
I'm not talking about that.
What I'm referring to is sometimes an ad campaign just flies, and it goes, and there are other dynamics at play.
It's a great location.
Maybe the bidding is better just due to the market circumstances.
Maybe the school is just super strong in its brand and organic in its location, and there's a different touchpoint where they were seen and noticed.
So there are other factors at play that make the campaigns just way easier.
So for me, I always know when a campaign doesn't work, that's when the real work starts.
But the problem is when we take on clients that have been conditioned to the microwave expectations of, “We can just turn it on, and we're going to get hot leads in a couple of days.”
And the minute there's one little glitch, they throw their toys in the air, and they just want to quit.
Now, imagine you did that with martial arts.
Every time there was an obstacle, you'd throw things out.
Now, again, it's a fine line, right?
Because if an agency, whether it was me or whoever, is not delivering on the promise, by all means.
But if we're agency-hopping 10, 15, 20, 30 agencies, and we're still pointing the finger that all the agencies suck and nobody delivers results, then maybe the thinking around marketing has to change.
And there's got to be some responsibility on the school owner as to what results are happening.
Because I know for my best clients that get the best results from ads, it's a feedback loop.
It's knowing what objections are coming up, what is happening on the mats, what is the quality of the people that are coming through, and understanding how we can shape the marketing to improve that.
Not just, “Oh, bad leads, let's just throw it all out, and let's go try the next magical unicorn.”
No, we work through it.
And that is where the real work starts.
Knowing which offers to use, knowing which objectives to advertise in, knowing the follow-up systems, knowing if we're going direct to websites, if we're going to lead ads, if we're going through Messenger, there are layers of things to work through.
And so here's the point I really want to make from this video: there's got to be a happy middle ground, right?
I'm not saying every school owner should click all the buttons.
We make it super simple.
In our software, MAM.Pro, it takes three to six clicks to launch an ad and have it up and running in 24 hours flat.
And then we help with understanding the numbers.
So we've taken a lot of the learning curve out of the way so that it is a lot simpler and so that all the other things are digestible.
But I feel where things have got to change is being open to that, being open to, “Can we look at the numbers?”
“Can we actually see what's working and what's not, and why it is and why it's not?”
And that way we start looking at the real outcome.
Instead of making it cost-focused, like “our leads are this,” we make it, “Well, what's the return?”
“What are we getting in return for these leads?”
Throwing money at an account or ads that aren't converting is not a good way to go because definitely that is the wrong way to go.
But understanding where the dollars work best allows us to amplify ads and allows us to get better results in the end.
I don't know if this was a bit of a rant or if it's something that's been brewing in my mind for a while, but I speak to a lot of school owners and I see the same problem happen all around.
The expectation of what the results should be and how fast is sometimes just an unreasonable expectation.
And then obviously because you've got a lot on your plate and you've got classes to run, you've got a team to manage, team training, and you still have a family, there's a lot that you've got to do on a day-to-day basis.
So yeah, you need the help.
But I feel that the sacrifice of just a little bit of understanding of how the numbers work, why they work, what works online, and what works in the form of ads, will give you a clear ripple effect all the way through to what happens on the mats and to the results you can get when you have a conversation with people.
This includes understanding what their needs are, where the objections are coming from, and what the driving factors are of why they want to train.
That is the ripple effect that goes all the way through.
So if not me, find someone that can help you with that so that you have that level of understanding.
For me, I like to keep a completely open book on how and why we run ads and do marketing.
So for us, we do both.
We run the ads, we launch the ads, but every week we have a 90-minute to 2-hour call where we do rapid 5-minute rounds and we optimize the ads.
And everybody can get an idea of how their ads were optimized and why.
And some need a lot of help and they get that from us, and others start to see how it works.
And it becomes fun because they see what works and how it works and how it can work in all aspects of the business.
They start tampering with the ads themselves, adding value to them, and also knowing which photos and videos and creatives to be focusing on when they're on the mats.
Anyway, I hope that was useful in some way.
If you want a crash course on how to manage ads in 5 minutes a day, I released this cool little product.
It's called the 5-Minute Martial Arts Facebook Ad Manager.
And it's basically the process we go through on our live call, how we manage ads in 5 minutes per day.
The 5 minutes is not obviously always creating the ads, but it's knowing which numbers to look at, which ones to duplicate, which ads to turn off, and what numbers to look at.
It's super useful.
It's taken us a long time to get to that 5 minutes.
So if you want some insight, that is a great little resource.
I'll leave the link below this episode.
And you can find it in the show notes: martialartsmedia.com/160.
Thanks for watching.
See you in the next one.
*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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