It’s Normal For Your Marketing To Fail
The following few paragraphs are not based on a true story..
I joined the national Karate association, paid my annual fee, joined a club and signed up for a Karate competition after my first class. Guess what? I didn’t win. I was annoyed and blamed the judges.
Of course I blamed them. I mean, I’d shown up, put in the effort for one lesson, entered a competition full of people who had trained for years, and I expected to hold my own? I had no business being in that arena. But that didn’t stop me from making excuses!
The next week, I did the same thing in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Walked onto the mat for my first match of the competition after having one single introduction class… and yep, I didn’t win that either. My opponent cheated! (At least, that’s what I told myself.)
Guess what happened next…
The week after, I gave Taekwondo a shot. I was feeling a bit under the weather having just recovered from a bad flu, but still thought I’d give competition a go. Didn’t win. Again. Apparently, my illness was the reason this time.
Then came Kung Fu. Surely this would be the week, right? I would have won, absolutely would have… but my shoes were too big. Too loose. I couldn’t move and kick properly.
Now, back to reality for a second.
True story:I had a phone call today with a Karate instructor who’s been teaching for over 40 years. Traditional Japanese gentleman. You can tell immediately that this is someone who’s mastered his craft. I have no doubt he knows everything there is to know about his style of Karate, and also teaching it.
During the call, he asked me:
“How do you advertise for martial art clubs?”
I gave him a quick, 10-second overview of what we do.
His response?
“Oh…. I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work.”
Now this is where I shared with him the made up scenario I just told you above. About the tournaments. The one where I enter match after match with zero training and wonder why I don’t win.
I then asked him:
“If I trained for a couple of months and sparred with a black belt… what would happen to me?”
He gave a low but sincere chuckle when he realised what I meant.
And now I’ll say the same thing to you.
What To Expect When Marketing Your Martial Arts Club
If you’ve tried marketing your martial arts club online before and it didn’t work — that’s ok. Honestly, it’s kind of expected.
Just like I shouldn’t expect to win my first competition after a single class (or even after a full year of lessons), you shouldn’t expect to launch a couple of ads and magically fill your club with new students.
Unless you’ve been deep in the online marketing space full-time for years, there’s no reason you should know how to make it work right away. In fact, this November marks my 20th year immersed in this world — two full decades of trial, error, testing, tweaking, and building strategies that actually work.
If you were standing on the sidelines, watching me compete after one lesson in your style, you’d likely point out dozens of things I was doing wrong. You’d know my stance was off, my timing was late, I wasn’t breathing right — all the 101 details that an expert would see immediately.
But someone else with NO martial arts background? They’d just say,
“Looks like the other guy won,”
…without understanding why.
That’s exactly how marketing works.
We’ve developed a specific, battle-tested marketing campaign that’s built only for martial arts schools. It’s not theory. It’s not guesswork. It’s managed daily, 7 days a week, across 41+ clubs here in Australia.
And when a new club comes on board— no contracts, by the way —they’ll often show me the marketing they’ve tried in the past. And just like you watching me in my first tournament, I can see all the things that went wrong. The structure, the message, the targeting — all of it. Not because I’m smarter, but because this is what I’ve done, full-time, every day, for 20 years.
So if your past attempts didn’t work — don’t stress. You’re not alone. You’re just where every white belt starts… before they start to learn the important things what actually matter.
