Leverage the flywheel effect to grow your martial arts school

In a world where you are bombarded with Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and gurus promising 100 new students within 3 months, it's not very appealing for me to tell you that you need to grow your school slowly and steadily to win.

But if you're reading this, I'm hoping you are one of the few martial arts school owners who are looking for steady long-term growth and not just a gimmick to get you 30 students in 30 days.

With AI and everything changing at light speed, martial arts school owners are confused and overwhelmed. Everyone seems to have a shortcut to sell you on how to grow your school, and every day you can see ads that promise you 100 students in 90 days or you don’t have to pay.

And the crazy part is that sometimes these do work, they just don’t last. For those schools that these gimmicks do work for, it is usually short-lived. This is why most martial arts school owners will often bounce from agency to agency and go through feast and famine cycles without really experiencing long-lasting success.

They’re expecting someone else to have the secret to make all their problems go away, but these are usually bandage solutions that won’t last in the long run.

The truth is, long lasting success is seldom found in someone else. Long-lasting growth and success come from a combination of hard work and implementing the right strategy.

It is time to take control of your school’s marketing and take responsibility for growing your school. It is only then that you can truly experience long-lasting success, where you can step away from your business for weeks or even months without ever worrying about getting new students.

And the best way to accomplish this that I know of is to leverage the flywheel effect. Be warned, this is not going to be easy, requires hard work, and takes time for the results to manifest.

What Exactly is the Flywheel Effect

In an engine, a flywheel serves as a crucial component for storing and regulating energy to ensure smooth acceleration. It is designed to store rotational energy and stabilize the engine by smoothing out variations in engine torque caused by the intermittent firing of the pistons.

I know you're not here to learn about how car engines work, but the concept of storing and stabilizing motion energy is also applicable to growing your martial arts school.

How?

In the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, he illustrates how small businesses can leverage the flywheel to accumulate momentum over time, leading to exponential growth.

And without asking you to read the entire book, it boils down to these three principles:

Attract: Draw potential customers to your business by providing easily discoverable, helpful content through SEO, social media, targeted ads, and events.

Engage: Once prospects express interest in learning about your martial arts school, offer trial classes to allow them to experience firsthand what your school has to offer. Provide clear information about your programs on your website, making it easy for them to enroll and become part of your community.

Delight: Design your martial arts programs to deliver a seamless and enjoyable experience for your students. Offer structured classes led by knowledgeable instructors who create a supportive and motivating environment.

Now, I understand these three principles may seem simple, but the challenge lies in how to precisely apply and implement them to grow your martial arts school.

Before diving into how to apply the flywheel strategy to expand your martial arts school, I assume you already have a school and some experience in operating it. If you're brand new to this, I recommend reading this article instead.

Of course, there are various ways to grow a successful martial arts school, but the approach I'm about to discuss is one that we know will work in the long run, providing stability along the way.

Step 1: Invest in a High-Converting Website

There's often debate about the necessity and cost of having a website for martial arts schools. I would argue that if you're just starting and don't have any students yet, a website may not be essential.

However, in today's digital age, the default behavior for most people is to search online for solutions. Likely, the majority of your prospects will first look at your website, even if they come through a referral. This makes your school’s website the initial impression most potential students have of your martial arts school, rendering it a critical factor in enrolling new students.

An outdated, unengaging, or ineffective website can cause prospective students to seek alternatives even before you have the chance to interact with them.

So, what constitutes a great martial arts school website?

Well, several elements contribute to creating a website that effectively attracts and converts students, which I've detailed in another article [provide link]. Here, however, are the most crucial points.

A functional and operational website (You'd be surprised how crucial this is).
Responsive design ensures your website displays correctly on both desktop and mobile devices.
Effective lead-capturing capabilities to attract prospective students.
SEO optimization to enhance visibility on search engines like Google.
Fast loading times (Slow websites drive visitors to your competitors).
A website that effectively portrays your school's brand and values, leaving a positive impression.

As you can see, nothing mentioned above focuses on beauty or fanciness. Instead, prioritizing a high-converting website that aids in ranking on Google and increasing your student count is far more critical.

Step 2: Invest in SEO

While SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers to the concept of optimizing your website to rank higher on search engines, we often focus on ranking on Google, as it accounts for 91.62% of all searches, while other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing account for only 4.39%.

Sounds cool, but why SEO? Well, there are two reasons:

1. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo provide the highest quality leads online. There's simply nothing better in terms of lead quality than search engine leads. Users searching on Google for "martial arts school near me" are actively looking to join a martial arts school.

It may not be your school, but they will soon join one. If you're not actively capturing search engine traffic, your competitors are. Additionally, search engine (Google) leads tend to stay longer compared to leads from Facebook and Instagram ads, resulting in more revenue for your business.

2. With Facebook or Instagram ads, even if you make them profitable, as soon as you stop paying for ads, your leads and new student enrollments stop as well.

Furthermore, the longer you run ads, the more expensive it becomes to acquire a new student until it becomes unprofitable. This is due to ad fatigue (where people see your ads too much and they become ineffective) or offer fatigue.

In contrast, SEO takes time to establish a solid ranking on Google, making it difficult for competitors to overtake you once you've achieved it. Once you're ranked at the top of Google, you'll have a foundation for predictably generating new leads and enrolling new students into your school month after month, even if you're in a small town.

We've seen schools running Facebook ads for more than five years eventually have to stop because the ROI just isn't there anymore. They find themselves back at square one as soon as they stop ads, with no incoming leads. Since retention on Facebook ads leads is usually shorter, they also lose the students that came from the ads.

This is why I highly recommend investing in SEO. The only downside to SEO is that it's not as scalable as running ads.

However, as I mentioned, your prospective students are searching on Google regardless of whether you work on your SEO or not. They'll either find you or your competitors. Personally, I would rather them find my business than my competitor's."

Step 3: Create Content

Just to be clear, this isn't your typical Gary Vee approach of posting 10 times a day on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok and hoping for increased business. While I have a lot of respect for Gary Vee, his advice isn't necessarily correct unless you aspire to become an influencer like him. There are fundamentally two problems with his "post 10 times a day" approach.

Not all content is created equal. Ask yourself if you read every post or watch every video on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. Of course not; you engage with what catches your attention and interests you. So, randomly posting every day can be a waste of time.

Even if you manage to gain a large following using this approach, it may not yield desired results. You could attract hundreds of thousands of followers, but only a small percentage may live near your martial arts school and potentially join. In my opinion, this isn't efficient and could take years to see any tangible results.

Instead, I recommend creating content to position your martial arts school as the go-to brand in your local market. To accomplish this, focus on three types of content.

Educational (Best):

Tips of the day
Instructional video
How to deal with X (programs)
Q&A (common questions you get all the time)

My preferred style and the simplest form of content to produce is to capture a few videos demonstrating your training/coaching methods with your students and share them.

The great thing about educational content is that everyone can make it; it doesn't require you to come up with anything crazy, but it pays if you can make it entertaining and educational.

Inspirational (Second Best):

Member transformation stories
Inspirational quotes
Inspirational stories using your heroes

While these are great, they're not as effective as education. They have a broader appeal and are great for increasing brand awareness and instilling brand identity in your market, but they can be hit and miss in terms of capturing potential leads.

Entertaining (Great but Hard):

Behind the scenes
Funny shorts
Poking fun at the norm
Drama

Entertaining content can be super powerful, but it's hard to create. If you can naturally pull it off, then all the power to you. Be very careful with this content, as there is a fine line between creating just funny dancing videos that may get you a lot of likes but won't help you improve brand awareness or strengthen brand identity.

Step 4: Create Top-of-Mind Awareness by Boosting Your Content with Paid Ads.

Just creating content is not enough; you also need to distribute it or no one will see it. There are three ways to distribute your content:

If you have an audience on social media, share your content.
SEO: Content helps with your SEO, and SEO, in return, helps you get more exposure for your content and your martial arts school.
Pay a few dollars a day with paid ads and boost them. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to distribute your content is to use paid ads, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or even YouTube ads. However, Facebook and Instagram are probably the easiest to use.

The idea is to boost 5-10 different pieces of content every month for just 1 to 2 dollars a day to increase your brand exposure in your local market. While this may not lead directly to leads, over months, you will become the most well-known martial arts school in your local market.

Plus, this strategy can help you:

Become the top-of-mind martial arts school in the area, so that when a prospect who has been consuming your content either decides to join a martial arts school or refer your school to their friend.
Improve your SEO because more people will search for your school.
Allow you to build a high-quality retargetable audience for the next step.
All for just a few dollars a day.

If you want to know exactly how to boost your content on Facebook, I'm sharing a video of me walking through one of our clients on how exactly to do this.

Step 5: Periodically Run Lead Conversion Ads

Everything up to this step is designed to help you establish your flywheel, but a flywheel takes time and patience. It can take 3-6 months or longer for the results to show.

But there are times when you need to really step on the gas pedal and get some students now. What do you do? This is where paid ads come in.

Yes, paid ads aren't bad and can work well when coupled with the right strategy, like this. And because you've built up a retargeting audience, you can now run your ads to "warm" prospects who already know, trust, and even like your martial arts school.

This results in higher quality leads, less chasing, more enrollments, and better retention.

Note: There is no one right way to run paid ads, but it usually comes down to two things: creative and offer

Step 6: Obsess Over Retention

Acquiring a new customer costs significantly more compared to retaining an existing member. Part of what makes the flywheel effect work is your ability to retain members for as long as possible.

It's far too expensive to invest in all the work required—developing a high-converting website, implementing SEO, creating content, and running ads—only to lose a new student.

This is also why simply running gimmicky Facebook ads offering discounts doesn't work. Leads who become students due to an offer often have a low retention rate. They joined because of the discount rather than your reputation and a genuine desire to learn martial arts.

Contrary to what most martial arts school owners believe, retention or reducing churn isn't solely achieved through having a retention strategy or tactics like reminding people to attend class.

Don't get me wrong; strategy and tactics can help improve retention, but they're secondary. From our experience, the biggest differences between students who stay for years versus those who stay for only a few months are intention, expectation, and experience.

Intention: Did the students join because they were genuinely interested in learning martial arts and liked your school, or did they come in because of discounts or some kind of "challenge"?

This is also why gimmicks such as "free 6-week challenges" usually don't work in the long run. Participants join for the challenge, not to become regular paying members. To retain them, you'll need to keep selling them challenges.

Expectation: Does your class meet their expectations? If they expect to gain 30 lbs in 30 days but your class cannot help them achieve that, they may end up disappointed and quit.

Experience: Did the student have a great experience with your martial arts classes?

Here, you can use retention tactics to create a wow experience, such as monthly progress check-ins, class reminders, or a rewards and achievement program, similar to what we use here at Monstro to help our martial arts school get more referrals.

The better your retention, the more effective the flywheel strategy.

Step 7: Have a Referral Strategy

Word of mouth is the best marketing any business can have, and we all want it, but the question is: how do you predictably and consistently get referrals for your martial arts school?

Well, there are three parts to getting more referrals for your martial arts school:

You need a decent size base to start. If you only have 10 students, it's kind of hard to get a lot of referrals. But hopefully, if you've been doing everything we've mentioned above and applied the flywheel effect to grow your school, then you should.

You need to delight your students and members with your classes and programs.

You need to have a strategy to encourage more referrals. People are more than happy to refer to your school if they like what they're experiencing, and it doesn't feel like they're pushing the referral onto their peers.

This means that you would want to put tactics and strategies in place that make the referral process seem as natural as possible. Here are a few examples:

Buddy Pass: At Monstro, our members use something called a Buddy Pass campaign to encourage more referrals from current members. The idea is to provide high-quality gift cards to current members that can be given to their friends or families who may also be interested in joining a martial arts school. The key is to make sure the gift card is valued. Imagine if you were given a $50 Starbucks gift card; would you give this to your friend if you're not going to use it? Of course, you would because you believe you're giving your friend a gift.

Achievement & Rewards System: Create a simple achievement and rewards system for members who attend classes and progress through your programs. This allows your students to earn rewards by referring you, and coupled with something like the buddy pass, they will be more than glad to earn rewards while giving their friend gift cards that make them look good.

Encourage Success Story Sharing: Another effective method for encouraging referrals is to simply encourage and provide an easy way for members to share their success stories on social media.

If a parent shares how well their son or daughter has achieved X in your school, chances are their friends and family will also be interested in experiencing the same type of achievement for their child.

This approach works with adults as well. If your friend lost 50 pounds and you feel out of shape, what would you do? You would ask how they did it, right? The key is to make the sharing process seamless. At Monstro, we've developed a process that allows members to share their progress and achievements effortlessly.

These are just a few tactics you can use to encourage referrals from your current students. For more ideas, check out our article on 12 clever ways to get more referrals for your martial arts school.

What's Next

Putting the flywheel effect to work for your martial arts school will require work and patience. However, in my opinion, it is one of the best approaches to growing a profitable and steady martial arts school without becoming a slave to your business.

At Monstro, our vision is to leverage technology and AI automation to empower school and studio owners to apply the flywheel effect with ease.

If you're interested in learning more about how Monstro can help you grow your school by applying the flywheel effect, book a demo, and we will show you how.