When a school owner tells me they need more students, the next thing they say is almost always “we need more leads.”
I understand why. Leads are the part you can buy. But in my experience, most schools that feel short on leads are actually short on something further down the line. This guide walks through where to look, in the order I would fix it.
More leads is usually the wrong fix
Start with the path a student takes to get to you. They become a lead. They book a trial. They show up for the trial. They enroll. Then they either stay or they do not.
Here is the framing we use in our free training: for every 100 leads, only 13 are still training at 90 days. The other 87 fell out somewhere between the form and the third month.
That is not a statement about your school. It is a way of looking at the problem. Run your own count and your number will be different. The point is the shape. There are four places to lose someone, and a small loss at each one adds up fast. Lose 5% at any one stage and you lose dozens of students a year.
Now think about what “more leads” does to that picture. It makes the top number bigger and leaves every leak exactly where it was.
I was on a sales call with an owner in Arizona whose school was stuck. They had hit 120 students, slid back to 106, and could not get past 120 again. He told me they had been getting 10 to 12 leads a day at one point. Then he told me the rest. “Right off the bat, 60% of them, bad email, bad phone number. Another 30%, ‘We didn’t sign up for this.’”
Do that math. Roughly nine out of ten of those leads were never going to walk in. The report looked great. The mat looked the same.
I do not tell that story to knock whoever ran those ads. The method was the problem. Leads that cheap and that empty usually come from forms that fill themselves in with whatever a person’s phone has on file. Nobody decided anything. So nobody shows up.
This week: pull last month’s leads and sort them into four piles. Never reachable. Reached but never booked. Booked but never showed. Showed. The biggest pile tells you what to fix first.
Fix follow-up first
For most schools I talk to, the biggest pile is “reached late, or never.”
A person fills out your form because, for a few minutes, trying a class feels like a good idea. That feeling does not last. If the first thing they hear from you arrives the next day, you are no longer answering a question they asked. You are interrupting them.
You do not need anything complicated. You need two texts.
The first goes out five minutes after someone fills out the form without booking a time. It does one thing: it hands them the link to your calendar.
The second goes out 24 hours later if they still have not booked. It asks whether they have any questions about the program. It is written to start a conversation, so you can find out what is actually in the way. Sometimes it is price. Sometimes it is “I’m out of shape.” Sometimes it is whether their seven-year-old is too young. You can answer every one of those, but only if they ask.
I put the exact wording of both texts, and what not to send, in a separate guide on speed to lead for martial arts schools.
This week: fill out your own website form with a friend’s phone number at 9 p.m. Time how long it takes for a human or a text to reach them. That number is your speed to lead, and you probably have never measured it.
Fix the trial show rate
The next leak is the booked trial who never walks in.
This one stings because it feels like a win when it lands on the calendar. But a booking is a plan, and plans made on a Tuesday for a Saturday get forgotten. The fix is simple and a little boring:
- Right away: a booking confirmation with the date and time.
- 24 hours before: a reminder.
- 2 hours before: another reminder, this time with your address in it.
That last detail matters more than it looks. Two hours before class is when someone is deciding whether to go, and the address in the text turns “where is that place again” into one tap for directions.
It also helps to let people pick their own class time on the form instead of waiting for you to call and schedule them. They book while they are still interested, and they picked the time themselves, so it fits their week.
Beyond the reminders, take the nerves out of it. A lot of no-shows are not flaky. They are anxious. Tell them what to wear, where to park and who will meet them at the door. If you are a kids program, tell the parent where they can sit and watch.
This week: count how many trials were booked last month and how many actually showed. If you do not have reminders going out at 24 hours and 2 hours, set them up or send them by hand until you can.
Then turn up ads
Only now does it make sense to pay for more people at the top.
When follow-up and show rate are working, every lead is worth more to you, which means you can afford to pay more for a good one and you will beat the school down the road that is still chasing the cheapest lead it can find.
A few things I would do differently from the usual setup:
- One ad per program. A parent looking for a kids class and a 30-year-old who wants to train are not the same person. Write to one of them at a time.
- A landing page per program, not a lead form. Send the kids ad to the kids page. Make the person type their own name and number and pick a class time. In my experience you get fewer leads and more students.
- Keep it local. Aim at people who live close enough to actually show up.
That is the short version of how we run Facebook and Instagram ads for martial arts schools. You can do a basic version of it yourself with one program, one page and a small budget, and you will learn more from that than from six months of boosted posts.
This week: pick your strongest program and check where its ad, or its link in your bio, actually sends people. If the answer is your homepage, that is your next project.
How to tell what a new member costs you
This is the number that changes how you think about all of it.
Take what you spent on ads last month. Divide it by the number of new members who came from those ads. That is your cost per new member. If you cannot tell which members came from ads, start asking every new student how they found you and write it down. A notebook at the front desk is enough.
Then compare that cost to what a member is worth. Back to the Arizona school:
- Tuition: $159 a month
- Average stay: about six months
- Lifetime value: $954
- Cost to get a new member: about $125
So they were paying about $125 to bring in $954. The first month of tuition more than covered it. A school in that position does not have an ad problem. It can afford to buy more members all day. What it has is a leak somewhere between the lead and the mat, or a back door that is open too wide.
The step before that number is worth tracking too: what it costs to put a booked trial on your calendar. Cost per lead tells you almost nothing, because a lead is not a person on your mat. A booked trial is at least a person with a time slot. Track cost per booked trial, then follow it through to cost per new member. I go deeper on the full scoreboard in how to market a Jiu-Jitsu school, in the order that works.
One honest note. Nobody can guarantee you a number of students, because nobody controls what happens on your mat. What you can control is whether you know your numbers well enough to spend with confidence.
What to do this week
- Sort last month’s leads into the four piles: unreachable, never booked, booked but no-show, showed.
- Test your own form after hours and time the response.
- Set up, or send by hand, the two follow-up texts at 5 minutes and 24 hours.
- Add a confirmation and reminders at 24 hours and 2 hours before every trial.
- Work out your cost per new member and your lifetime value, and put them side by side.
Do those five things and you will likely find more students in the leads you already paid for. If you want to see how the whole path fits together, from the first ad to the 90-day mark, I cover it in the free training. It is useful whether you work with us or not.