The success of your martial arts school relies on a number of factors but one of the most important ways to gain exposure is through proper promotion of your business. Traditional methods like flyers, word-of-mouth, or attending martial arts tournaments can work for your school but social media has quickly become one of the most important platforms for marketing. While tweeting, posting to Facebook, and uploading to Instagram can be beneficial for your school, the most important thing is to keep organized by creating a promotion schedule.
Here’s what you need to create an effective one.Before you unleash your plan of attack, it’s important to ensure that your social platforms are in order and organized so that you know when, what, and how to post. Understanding posting frequency is important, as this differs for each platform, and over-posting on certain platforms can actually minimize your school’s reach. Once you’ve gotten to know your social media platforms a little better, you can then start naming each promotion or event, making it clear for both you and your staff to see what is coming up next and when. Seeing the year ahead can help you better prepare for any otherwise unexpected important events.
A great way to ensure that your martial arts school stays in the loop is to be engaged in the conversation. This includes using appropriate and relevant hashtags during special days, such as holidays or events like local martial arts tournaments. The changing seasons should also be included, especially important moments during the year like back-to-school. Scheduling content and campaigns in advance with these dates and events in mind can help you increase your reach, while simultaneously demonstrating that your school is involved with the on-goings of the community.
This isn’t to say that you should be doing exactly what other martial arts schools are doing. Instead, take a look at what other schools do in terms of promotions and marketing and assess what seems to work for them and what doesn’t. Incorporating and modifying their successes and failures into your promotion schedule can help making an effective one much easier. As well, you can see if you may be missing any important martial arts events that should be added to your schedule.
Track Your Results
As important as creating a promotion schedule can be for your martial arts school, your efforts should always be tracked so you have quantifiable data that can justify any expenditures. Because a marketing tactic or plan may not always work as well as you had predicted, tracking your results could also help you prevent any further effort or money spent into something that has proven to be ineffective.
Xplor Recreation’s martial arts software can help you easily track your marketing efforts through the software’s integrated marketing and built-in reporting. The automation component allows users to create, track, and measure all marketing campaigns in one place. Learn more about the management software here.