In the competitive field of physical fitness and self defense, marketing your martial arts business can be quite the challenge, not to mention cripplingly expensive for the smaller company. So how can you drum up extra business without breaking the bank?

Traditional advertising such as the local Yellow Pages, or radio and television, however small the station, are just too far out of the advertising budget that many martial arts businesses have to work with. In addition, how well this kind of investment works is almost impossible to track. You may indeed be gaining a new student as a result of a commercial they have seen or heard, but the chances are you will forget to ask, and in their excitement to be learning such a great new skill will simply not mention how they happened to find out about your school. However, in order to survive and prosper, marketing your martial arts business successfully is crucial.

There is another, very effective and economical method of marketing your martial arts business that you may have never considered, or even heard much about. In today’s economic climate, the savvy businessman should consider the great power of online advertising. Thanks to the great spread of everyday Internet use by exactly the people you need to target and the power of major search engines like Google, you can target specific geographical areas for people searching basic keywords, in this case things like “martial arts” “self defense” and “self defense class”. Even better, online advertising lets you target the specific demographic you are seeking. By entering these kinds of keywords into a search the user is already demonstrating a real interest in the exact services you have to offer. Half the battle has been won already!

But how does this kind of marketing really convert into great martial arts business advertising? Most effectively you need to direct the person who clicked on your brief little online ad to a more expansive “landing page”. On this page you need to create a great and compelling reason for this potential customer, or visitor (they are “visiting” your page now) to share their basic contact information with you. Offering a free lesson coupon can be a great inducement for a user to enter their contact information into a short online form. You could also add several informative articles about martial arts practices to pique the user’s interest further. This contact data is immediately e mailed to you, so you can follow up on this “hot lead” promptly, while the user’s mind is still on the martial arts.

This is the true beauty of using the Internet and this kind of martial arts business advertising is how little it costs. You will only be charged for potential customers who take the time to “click” on your ad specifically, those people who are demonstrating a real interest in your services. Online advertising like this really is the best and economically sensible way to make the best of your martial arts business marketing dollar.