Menu
For the last year, I’ve been traveling ALL over the United States training BJJ in dozens of different gyms. It’s sort of my lifestyle – travel full-time, train at the best gym I can find. And lucky for me, what that experience has given me is an absolute master class in being a ‘new’ prospective student selecting where I want to train martial arts.
In those instances, I’m almost exactly the model target audience that your gym is looking for – I’m already convinced that martial arts is the best, I already know what disciplines I like to train, I don’t need any more information.
I’ve already talked at length about making sure your online presence is right, so I’ll leave that topic alone for now. Assuming you’ve got that all under control, there is only one way you can make your gym stand out to a prospective student like me: CONTENT.
It’s not hard to understand why content like original videos & photos changes the equation completely for a prospective student. No matter how badass your gym or school’s name is, no matter how great of a franchise you may be associated with, you’re pretty much at square one convincing that prospective student that your gym is better than your competition. So how can content evolve your argument? Let’s break content down to its components: video, photo, written content.
This is probably the first thing a prospective student who is actively looking for your gym will find. They’re going to see photos of your gym on your Google Maps or other listings, your website, or your social media. And they’re going to judge you! Not in a mean way.
They want to see if your space is cool, if your instructors & students look welcoming, what kind of gear you wear, and what your discipline looks like in action, and you have this one chance to show them. You can create unique, original content that shows a prospective student all of these things and truly speaks thousands of words to make you stand out from the competition (we can help make it easy) OR you can show prospective students cheesy stock photos. Up to you.
What I love about video content is that it may be found by people actively looking for your gym, but we also use amazing techniques that serve videos up to people who aren’t even looking yet – talk about a leg up. More on that in future blogs. In this context, video takes your originality, your uniqueness, and turns the volume way up.
With video, your prospective students can meet your instructors, take a tour of your space, get to know your philosophy, and really become sold on what you do. Not only does this massively help form a connection with your prospective student, but it also has the hidden benefit of steering away students who won’t be a good fit for your gym. That’s a huge advantage. What amazes me is how easy creating video can be (we make it even easier), yet I RARELY ever see a single video from some of my favorite gyms.
Usually, when I talk about written content, I’m talking about blogs. Obviously, blogs have huge benefits for your gym, but in this example, when I say written content, I’m talking about content that you can’t actually write yourself… I’m talking about REVIEWS! If you’ve got some great photos and videos that a prospective student can check out, there’s only one other place they might go, and that’s to see how your reviews look.
We’re not asking for a 5-star record, either. People know that things happen. But you need to make sure that you have plenty of positive reviews from your active students to show your community spirit. We have lots of ways we incentivize and make getting reviews automatic so that it becomes easy to manage for martial arts gym owners.
Did I mention enough times that we can help with all of these to-do items? Every Marketing TEA client starts with a Content Session, where we build original content into the core of your marketing strategy.
So if you are looking for a way to transform your Martial Arts school, gym, dojo, team, program, whether you teach Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Taekwondo, Karate, Boxing, Kickboxing, Self-Defense, Judo, Wrestling, Muay Thai, or any other discipline that trains, inspires, and ignites your community, it’s time to bring the power of content marketing to your business in a whole new way. Let’s chat.