7 Ways You’re Costing Yourself New Martial Arts Students Online Without Even Realizing It

From working with literally hundreds of schools of all shapes and sizes around the globe—big cities to towns that still have dirt roads—I have a certain perspective on marketing that’s hard to come by. One of the biggest things I’ve observed is that schools tend to be “behind the curve” on what’s hot now and bringing in new students.

This article focuses on just one marketing channel that I’ve observed to be extremely under-utilized: online review sites. Now, I know what you might be thinking, “Hey, I’m on Yelp! I’ve got this down pat!” Your opinion may change after you go through the checklist below of how to really get the most out of these sites.

1. Get listed, and get reviews on no less than a dozen review sites.

Depending on your area, there are as many as 50 review sites that rank well in Google. That means the more you’re listed on, the more potential you have to be discovered on search engines when someone searches “Your Town Martial Arts”.

For my own schools, I’m listed in and actively manage around 46 sites. I can’t tell you how many people come in and tell me, “I read all the good reviews and just had to come give it a try!” Many tell me they read a review on some obscure website I didn’t even realize I was listed on (my staff manages these sites for me).

It works.

2. Keep good reviews on file.

When most schools get bad reviews, they fume, they fuss, and they do nothing. If the bad review is clearly a fake, you can often get it removed by talking directly with the review site company.

But they won’t always remove it. So what do you do?

You bury it in good reviews. Have your students send you positive reviews that they don’t submit to the site. Keep these on file. When you get a bad review, insert these good reviews yourself into the site that got a negative review.

You’ll push the negative review down with reviews that are 100% legitimate.

3. Respond maturely to negative reviews.

If you have 10 positive reviews, and 1 negative one, that negative one could still be costing you new students. But if you reply in a very reasonable, positive way, you could flip the tables.

Most of the time, people leave negative reviews because they feel they were treated poorly. The best thing you can do is sincerely apologize in the review, and offer a way to make it up to them. Tell them that experiences like this are extremely rare, but you’re sorry it happened, and you want to do everything in your power to make them happy.

Will the person ever come around? Probably not. However, you’re not writing that response for the negative reviewer. You’re writing it for the hundreds of people who will read that review down the line. When they see that the owner of the establishment is a very compassionate, understanding person, they’ll be much more likely to ignore the negative review and come in. On the other hand, if you get negative reviews on the regular, it might be time to take a look at the way you do things.

4. Keep the reviews coming.

Ask for reviews.

Send emails to your students with clear instructions on how to leave reviews. Make it another system in your business. Make it easy, clear, and simple for your students to leave reviews.

You could even send them home with a flyer for their parents that tells them why you’d appreciate it so much, and exactly how to leave a review. You have to actively grow this marketing channel like any other.

Make it your goal to get to more than 100 reviews in a single month. Get creative. Think of ways to generate reviews. You know your students. You know what will get them motivated to help you out.

5. Beat Yelp’s filter.

Yelp suppresses a percentage of reviews to filter out fake reviews. But there is a way to submit reviews that rarely get filtered: have students who already have a Yelp account actively leave reviews on a regular basis.

For students who create an account just for you, ask them to spend a week reviewing other businesses they love. A) It’ll help those businesses. B) Their profile will gain “Yelp credibility.”

After a week of being active, the review they leave for you should stick. The reviews that tend to get filtered out are one-timers who have no “track record” of reviews. Yelp considers them untrustworthy.

6. Coach your students on how to leave a review.

You can email them a list of questions to think about, or direct them to a couple of good sample reviews that really hit the nail on the head.

You want the reviews to talk about how hygienic your facility is, how kind and supportive your instructors are, how they’ve gotten in great shape, and how their children’s lives are changing with every class.

Get them to write about the “meaty” stuff.

If all of what someone’s review says is, “I love Lion Martial Arts Academy. They are the best!” It’s not really going to help you. You want people to open up about why they love you so much. That’s what sells.

7. Just do it.

Online reviews can make or break your business reputation. Don’t just think about implementing this six-step process. Complete it. The better your online reputation, the better your enrollment and retention numbers.

If you’re concerned of the time it would take to manage all these review sites, outsource it. Maintaining your online reputation is that important.

Who do I recommend? MA Power Listings is a service provided by FC Online Marketing (self plug alert) that creates, manages and maintains listings for you in the top 40+ online review sites. Do it yourself, ask us (FCOM), or find another party to do it for you. Either way, get it done.

About the author: Michael Parrella is Owner and CEO of FC Online Marketing and the Creator of the iLoveKickboxing.com Fitness Franchise. FC Online Marketing has recently launched MA Power Listings, a new program to manage all of your listings from a single dashboard — and update them all in one clean sweep. For more information on MA Power Listings, visit https://MAPowerListings.com.

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