Why most martial arts school owners are struggling with Facebook ads, the influence of AI, and how to take back control of your results.

• What’s really changed with Facebook ads for martial arts schools
  
• The downside and power of AI
  
• The agency trap that keeps school owners stuck and returning to zero
  
• A 5-step framework to improve your ads from offer to follow-up
  
• The pitfall of not aligning your martial arts marketing strategy
  
• And more

 *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

Do Facebook ads still work for martial arts schools?

Or has that ship now sailed?

Maybe, maybe not.

Well, I want to dive into what I see is working, what's not, and the challenges that are coming up in the market space right now.

It's not necessarily just ads; it's market sophistication and a whole lot more.

So, let's jump in.

First up, do Facebook ads still work?

100% yes.

Where's the problem there?

Why are costs going through the roof?

Why are results tapering down?

Why is it harder to get hold of people when you get leads?

And then when you get leads, why is it even harder for them to show up?

The truth of the matter is, market sophistication has evolved.

And as times change, we have to level up.

So, there are a few things that I see are making a big impact in the market space right now.

First up, let's talk about the big one: AI.

AI is magic.

I love AI, but there's a big danger with AI.

What I see with AI is it's made a lot of marketers mediocre, mediocre to average.

And average people have sort of risen up, but most people are just trying to take their own knowledge to ChatGPT or whatever tool they are using and see how they can refine that better.

And what has happened is we've just all spread this level of sameness all around.

I mean, you look at ads right now: you see the long little em dashes, you see the same emojis, everything's starting to look the same with no emotion.

So, ads still work, but there are too many people (school owners and agencies that do things for school owners) who are just taking shortcuts and getting lazy, truth be told.

And the more you just hand over the offer creation, the copy, and everything to AI without actually understanding what makes ads work, it's not going to give you good results.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Truth be told, you are going to get confirmation bias for what you put inside AI tools.

And what it's going to give you is not always going to be accurate.

Now, that could be the complete opposite if you do have an understanding of marketing and you know how to use the system to generate copy and get the right results from it.

And you also know that the ultimate test is going to be taking that to the market and spending some money.

There are a few layers I want to unpack with us.

First up, for those completely new to advertising, you're going to have to make peace with the fact that you're going to have to spend some money and test a lot of stuff.

And if you've been doing this for a while and you've been getting great results, awesome, but now you're seeing results start to taper, then you have got to invest a little in understanding how marketing works.

Now, here's something that I'm just going to go out and say.

Most marketing agencies suck.

The level of expertise that they deliver is just below par.

And I feel like martial arts school owners have been sold this little picture that ads are so impossible and so hard and that it's going to take all this time.

I'll tell you what, for the amount of time that you spend talking to an agency, going back and forth, trying to correct them, trying to speak to someone who actually understands a little bit about your school and about marketing, you could rather take that same amount of time, click a couple of buttons (it's not even many), have that finger on the pulse, and know exactly what's working.

And you know when to turn things off and when to turn things on.

It's actually not that hard.

And a big benefit of AI is that it is making a lot of things easier.

These platforms are just getting easier and easier and easier.

And here's the big problem that I see: I've been doing this for quite a while, working with martial arts school owners exclusively for going on 13 years, and I sometimes see the same school owners pop up in my inbox still facing the same problem.

And here's where the problem started: five years ago, they wanted nothing to do with marketing.

“I just want to teach and let somebody else do that for me.”

Great.

This is typically how that cycle goes: find someone, they don't deliver, blame them.

Find another agency, work with them, they get a bit of results, then blame them.

It's never taking responsibility for the marketing; it's always their fault.

Now, sometimes it just is their fault, and they should not be providing a service if they can't deliver the results.

But there's a bigger danger here, and that's not understanding marketing, because marketing is not the flick of a switch.

You can't just turn it on, hope it works, pray it works, and think it's just going to deliver results.

It just doesn't work that way.

The ad platforms, typically in a month, could deliver one awesome week, two okay weeks, and one disastrous week.

It's always going to be up and down.

Now, if you don't know how to navigate those ups and downs, which ads are working, and which ads to turn off, you're always going to be struggling.

Because here's what happens, back to the five-year cycle, it could be five years, it could be two years, a school owner looks for an agency to do the work, hands it off, and finally finds the guy that does the job.

Great.

This guy's awesome.

This is it.

You know, this person is the one they've always been looking for.

And it goes well, it goes great, for one short while.

Because what typically happens is that the guy who can run good ads can run good ads, but he can't scale the team.

And so now he has to hand off all the ad creation to someone with less experience who's probably getting paid a fraction or is typically offshore.

I love working with teams offshore, but the problem sometimes is the context of understanding what is working in the Western world.

Now, the guy that you hired and paid good money for slowly hands that off down the line, and the results just start to trickle down because that experience is not going in at the top.
And what do the agencies typically do?

They work with the new clients to get them, maybe even lock them into a contract, and now you're working with the sometimes subpar team.

I'm not hating on agencies or the people that run them.

I think they're all good people with good intentions, but the issue I'm seeing right now is this model is fundamentally broken.

And with the likes of AI increasing and helping with the delivery, it's getting less and less important to actually have an agency.

And there are software tools, like what we use with our internal CRM, where you can manage ads with three to six clicks and have a bird's-eye view of what is working and what is not.
So, times are changing, and they're changing fast.

And so, if you had that unicorn ad company that was working well and now the results start to decline, here's the issue.

You go back to zero.

You go back to zero every time because you still haven't learned marketing.

You still don't know how it works, and so now you again go chase the next unicorn.

This is just this whole feast-and-famine cycle of trying to find the person who's the unicorn.

They get some results, and sometimes they're actually getting okay results.

It's just that your lack of understanding of what makes ads work and how the ad system works makes you feel that it is not working.

Your expectations are completely different from what they're supposed to be.

And it's always good to look at that guy getting results, and that guy getting results.

The truth is every location is going to be different.

Now, big danger here, because sometimes I hear people say, “Well, my people are different. Our town is different.”

I've got to be careful that I'm not feeding that perspective, because that's likely also not true, but the results that you're getting for your location are going to be different.

With the clients that we work with, I know that when ads work off the bat, it's great.

When they don't, it's actually when the real work starts.

That's when the real work starts: when the ads don't work as expected.

We've got hundreds of ad variations and hundreds of tests running, so we can see what works in different areas and what doesn't.

Fortunately for us, we do have a big library of ads which we can pull from if they don't work as expected.

So, what is not working?

Next, let's just dive further into AI.

I probably wanted to make this video about the three things that aren't working, and I don't know which number I'm on, but I'm going to keep going.

Now, AI.

I love it.

It takes a lot of things off our hands.

It does help optimize a lot of stuff.

What it doesn't do yet is actually improve the delivery of ads.

So, I've got a good friend of mine here on the Sunshine Coast who works with attorneys, and we had this debate where he reckons the AI settings are amazing, but we sit every week live with our clients and look at all the tests, what AI delivers and what it doesn't.

And the biggest mistake I'm seeing martial arts school owners make right now with their ads is leaving the AI Advantage Plus setting on (I think it's called Advantage Plus), which basically gives Facebook permission to go outside the scope that you gave them and expand that audience.

Now, maybe that's going to be the cool thing.

And like I said, my buddy that works with attorneys, they get great, amazing results with this.

I've also heard of some global brands that get great results.

For martial arts, I have not seen one use case from all our split tests where this is actually working.

What it does is show ads out of your area, out of your location's area, and it doesn't stay within the parameters of the radius of people who can actually attend your martial arts school.

Every martial arts school, depending on if you're very remote and in a small town, is probably working with maybe a five-mile radius, maybe 10 miles.

I know some schools here in Australia that are in very small towns, and they target about 40 kilometers.

What's that?

About 20-25 miles.

But that's about as far as you're ever going to go.

The problem with the AI, especially if you're working with a narrow frame, is that it just searches way out of the realm.

So, will it get better?

Yeah.

Is it working right now?

Definitely not.

The next thing I'm seeing is AI images.

AI images are very interesting because the ones that we create outrank any native image that we can create.

The ones that Facebook creates, they just don't work.

I have tried so many variations of the Facebook images, and they just don't work.

So, Zuck's big plan to let everybody just run ads through Meta and have it just do it for you. I just haven't seen it work.

So, let's see where that goes.

I want to bring this video home.

What can you do to improve your ads?

Invest in understanding how it works.

That's probably the biggest thing that you can do.

Now, does this mean you need to press all the buttons?

No.

Something we do in our Partners program that I think is quite unique is that we help you run the ads, but we also show you what we are doing.

So, I like to keep a non-codependent type of relationship, meaning you can see exactly what we do and why, and you could pretty much just take our stuff and go do it yourself.

Now, most of our school-owner clients don't because we provide a lot of value on top of that, and we're forever testing new stuff.

And so, we're always bringing new concepts to the table, but ultimately, that's it: know what is working.

Number two, you're going to need a good offer.

What is that offer?

Free or paid, it doesn't really matter.

Does it actually bring in the leads?

And number three is an automated follow-up system.

When a lead comes in, what actually happens with that lead?

Right now, I'll give AI praise.

AI-automated follow-up is working amazingly for some of our clients.

What that means is we have leads coming in through Messenger, leads coming in through a lead form, and the AI starts to have a conversation with the prospect, books them straight into the calendar, and then all the other automations trigger.

So, that speed-to-lead is super important.

That is working super well for our clients right now.

Is there a number four?

Yeah, there are four and a five.

Number four, test a lot of creatives.

You can't just throw up one picture and think it's going to be the bee's knees.

It's not.

You've got to remove bias.

If it's kids that you like and you've taken photos of them, they might just not work.

You're going to have this emotional bias; maybe it's your own child, and you really want it to work, but it just doesn't.

You're going to have to test multiple creatives all the time and have zero emotional attachment to them.

Our clients reach a point in a couple of months where they have a complete grasp of how the concept works, and they start to press the buttons themselves because it just becomes a lot simpler and their understanding is a lot clearer.

And number five, get some help.

Get some help in understanding how the platform works.

It doesn't take much to become at least average at your marketing.

And if that means investing in a program, in coaching, or in a place where you can actually learn, then do that and make sure you bring all your marketing strategies in-house.

The thing that most people are missing when it comes to marketing is expecting ads to do one thing, email to do another, social media to do another, and flyers to do another.

And so, you're investing in, like, five different strategies that are completely disjointed, and none of them complement each other.

So when you start looking at things from the top down, your marketing becomes better because you now have the bird's-eye overview of what is working.

You know which offers are working.

You know which graphics are working.

If that works in an ad, it's going to work on a flyer, in an email, in organic outreach, and in social media.

Make sure you bring all the resources home so that your marketing strategy is one marketing strategy, not five disjointed strategies with five mediocre marketers who do five different things in five different directions that don't complement your business.

That's it.

If you need some help with all this, shoot me a message, find me on Instagram, or email me at george@martialartsmedia.com.

Happy to chat.

See you in the next one.

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