As a local martial arts school owner, the above quote is probably quite familiar to you. The physical location of your school is critical to your success.
However, there’s another “location” that’s become equally, if not more, important.
A few years ago, purchasing a house without an in-person visit would have been unimaginable. Today, almost 50% of millennials purchase their house site unseen. Clearly, there is another “location” – besides a house’s street address – that’s become absolutely essential to the home-buying process.
What is this other location? … unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know the answer — the Internet.
Today, “Location, Location, Location” refers to both your physical location AND your Internet location, with both being critical to your school’s growth.
DON’T GET LEFT BEHIND AGAIN
At the Martial Arts Marketing Network (MAMN), we’ve been working on the Internet location since 2007 and have always been at the forefront of its ever-changing developments.
MAMN was formed by an Internet hotshot (MBA from Wharton) and a martial arts school owner with a simple mission: remove the pain and time sink of digital marketing so our clients can spend their time doing what they love while still growing their school — teaching and practicing martial arts.
We’ve seen the Internet transform from a fringe marketing tool that competed with the Yellow Pages (remember those?) to what it is today — a must-have second “location” that’s critically important to the success of any martial arts school.
In the early days of our business, we actually had to convince certain school owners that having a website was an important component of their marketing.
That’s changed quickly. Either they got online, or they went out of business.
Now that just about everyone has an online presence, competition is fierce. As a result, just having a run-of-the-mill online presence is no longer sufficient.
Instead, you must have THE premier Internet location in your geographical area.
Bottom line — if you aren’t treating the Internet as a business location that is at least as important as your physical location, you are missing out – BIG TIME.
WHAT DOES A PREMIERE INTERNET LOCATION LOOK LIKE?
For your Internet location to provide value to your business, it must be a lead generation machine.
Other promotional methods previously worked to get new students. However, today, almost all martial arts school leads come from the Internet.
So how do you do this? How do you ensure your online presence is your school’s dominant lead-generation tool and, as a result, is generating scads of prospects who are interested in becoming a student at your school?
The answer comes down to being focused on two primary goals:
• Traffic: maximizing the number of parents of four-to-twelve-year-olds who are exposed to your online presence
•Conversion: maximizing the number of prospective customers who contact you after becoming aware of your school
As a starting point for accomplishing these goals, you must ensure your online presence has these four essential elements:
1 Well-constructed and maintained professional website (e.g., mobile-first design, rock-solid security) that has:
- Design and content optimized for your target audience – parents of four to twelve-year-old children (your prospects must think your school is perfect for their child)
- More relevant, high-quality, and search-engine-optimized content than any of your competitors (this is the most critical factor for a website to be ranked high by the search engines – “content is king”)
- Relevant, high-quality, and search-engine optimized content added on a regular basis (this is the second most critical factor for a website to be ranked high by the search engines)
- Multiple ways for parents to express their interest in having a child become a student – e.g., phone, online forms, contact (it’s important to accommodate each prospect’s preferred method of contact)
2 Professionally designed Facebook page with relevant posts added regularly (your prospects are spending more than four hours per day on Facebook)
3 Effective digital advertising campaigns: Facebook and/or Google, depending on your specific competitive situation (you don’t want to rely solely on your website’s search engine ranking to get leads)
4 Lead follow-up system that is reliable in turning prospects into customers (leads are of no value unless some of them become students)
Next, beyond these four essential elements, you must ensure that:
- The above elements are tightly integrated into a “lead-generating-machine” online system (without such integration, it’s impossible to get the maximum value from each element)
- Your online presence is the ONLY one of its kind in your geographical area (again, just having a website like everyone else is no longer sufficient)
MARTIAL ARTS MARKETING NETWORK’S PREMIERE INTERNET LOCATION
The premier Internet location described above is what the Martial Arts Marketing Network provides to our martial arts school clients.
This tightly integrated online system is offered on an “area-exclusive” basis (we work with only one school in a geographical area). To learn more about the two main components of this system, click on the links below.