Increase Revenue for Your Martial Arts School with Events

Enhancing your martial arts business marketing plan by hosting regular events can be key to your martial arts school’s success, especially when it comes to selling upgrade packages, recruiting new students and retaining those you have. And, experts from the Martial Arts Industry Association recommend you host a minimum of one event per month at your dojo or school. As the owner of a martial arts school you may find that there never seems to be enough time in the day to plan and execute successful events. If you’re currently not doing many events at your martial arts school, here are some ideas to get you started.

Easy Event Ideas:

• Intro workshops
• Birthday parties
• Pizza party
• In-house tournaments
• Hand target seminar (or other upsell skill/weapon)
• Award ceremonies
• Adult clinic or workshop
• Summer class in the park
• Yearly community outreach event

Once you’ve decided on the type of event you’d like to host, then you can follow these steps:

• Figure out a time that woks for your school. Most martial arts studios find Friday evening and Saturday mornings are the most well attended events.
• Open your event to all family and friends of your current students or any lost students. This is a great way to get lost students back in your school.
• Create promotional flyers and post in school/front desk.
• Promote your event on social media and website- before, during, and after the event. (Here’s one of our “during the event” posts: http://ow.ly/zeBSc)
• Inform your team of the event and stress the importance of promoting it. Ensure that all team members are making regular announcements about it
• Create a list of students to invite personally and invite them with a parent present in the case of a youth event. Having a parent or guardian there when you invite your students is important because they will almost always encourage their child to participate in the event.
• Be prepared to offer an enrollment special if someone enrolls at the event. For example, you could offer a new student the first month free if the child enrolls for a minimum of 6 months.

While events might seem like a lot of work, it is important to remember that most schools are able to get several new student enrollments per event, so the effort is well worth the return on your time and money.

Hosting events is a great way to bring in additional revenue to run a more financially sound martial arts school. Looking for additional tips on how to run a financially fit school? Get your copy of our Martial Arts Benchmark Report.