Your Marketing Plan Depends on Your Student Count

Owners in our group send me their marketing plans all the time. Most of them list perfectly legitimate activities. The problem is the order. One plan I reviewed recently had a referral campaign at the very top.

For his school, that was exactly backwards. He had well under 100 active students, and at that size a referral campaign is close to the least productive thing you can spend time on.

That’s the point of this article. There’s no such thing as a good marketing plan in the abstract. The right plan depends on how many active students you have today, because the channels that work at 400 students are nearly worthless at 40, and some of the channels that rescue a 40-student school are ones a 400-student school has outgrown.

Why does student count change what you should do first?

Three reasons.

Critical mass. Referrals, buddy days, birthday parties and graduation guest invites all come out of your existing student body. If you have 40 students, there just isn’t enough traffic there. If you have 400, there’s a steady stream.

Staffing. Programs like summer camps only make sense when they’re full. The last thing a small school should do is put a staff member in the building from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. to look after 10 kids during the day.

Cost per lead. Paid clicks and social ads have become some of the more expensive leads you can buy. A larger school can afford that traffic and has the systems to convert it. A small school usually can’t, and doesn’t yet.

The plan by school size

Active students	Do first	Add now	Skip for now
Under 100	Live events (find 10–20 in the next 90 days); host programs with elementary schools, employers and youth leagues	Character-development lessons for new students; follow-up on old inquiries; reactivation only if the dropout list is big	Referral campaigns, graduation guest invites, summer camps, rank-advancement camps, paid ads
100–300	Keep the live events and host programs running	Buddy days and birthday parties	Heavy paid-ad spend and summer programs, until the base grows
300+	Referral events that replace monthly attrition	Google clicks, SEO, website conversion and social ads, backed by a 30-second lead response and multi-channel follow-up; summer programs	Nothing is off the table, but keep the grassroots engine running

Under 100 students: what should you do first?

Find 10 to 20 live events in the next 90 days

Farmers markets, fairs, carnivals, church events, fall festivals, movie theaters on a blockbuster weekend. Live events are where most of the owners we coach make aggressive progress early: they come home from one event with 50, 75 or 120 appointments.

The number one excuse I hear is “there’s nothing going on in my area.” There always is. Spend 10 to 15 minutes asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity and Claude for every family-oriented event within five to seven miles through the end of the year, then keep pushing: find more Halloween events, more Thanksgiving events, more holiday shopping events. Then do it the old-fashioned way too: city and rec center websites, the big churches, banners in the parks, bulletin boards at grocery stores and coffee shops, local parents’ social media groups, Nextdoor and Eventbrite. I walk through the AI side of this in how to use AI to find local events.

Don’t know how to run a booth yet? Doesn’t matter. Buy a prize wheel, get a clipboard with the right paperwork, and go. You’ll learn more at the first event than from any document.

Set up host programs

The other place a small school gets the biggest head start at the lowest cost is getting into organizations that already have a lot of your future students, and reaching those people through the organization. My team calls these host or endorsed-host programs.

For the kids’ market, that’s elementary schools: public, private, charter, Catholic, Montessori. Most of my elementary school work was done directly with the PE teacher or the after-school director, occasionally the principal. Go to the PTA meetings. Find out where your current students go to school and have their families walk you in and introduce you. Around each of my suburban schools there were usually about 20 elementary schools, and if I was working with three-quarters of them, I was in great shape.

For adults, it’s employers. Over the years I worked with five of the ten largest employers in our metro area.

Pick targets that are specific. A national fast-food chain serves everybody, so it’s hard to do anything targeted with it. A youth flag football league with about 1,200 kids is a different story. There’s a lot you can do with that.

Two warnings. First, the biggest point of failure is talking to one person at one school, hearing “the district doesn’t allow that,” and quitting. Keep knocking. Second, don’t confuse a paid gig with a feeder. The daycare that wants to pay you $200 a week for a class isn’t growing your school. Look for the arrangement that sends families to you. More in the endorsed-host playbook and the five-gate permission pipeline.

Start character-development lessons with new students

The one internal item I would start right away at this size is character lessons and development for every new student. It doesn’t fill the school this month. But if you start it with everyone coming in the door, it gradually permeates the whole school, and by the time you’re at 150 students it’s simply how you operate.

Follow up old inquiries and, maybe, old students

Always follow up on old inquiries and old leads. That’s useful at any size.

Former student reactivation depends entirely on the size of the list. If you have a database of 500 people who dropped out over the last two years, there’s a lot of value there. If you have four, it isn’t going to get you very far.

What should a small school ignore?

• Referral campaigns. Under 100 active students, you don’t have the critical mass to generate much referral traffic. If some come, great. Don’t spend time chasing them.
• Graduation guest invites. Same reason. Not enough graduations, not enough guests.
• Summer camps. I personally don’t like summer camps, but even setting that aside, a camp that leaves one staff member minding a handful of kids all day is a cost, not a growth engine.
• Rank-advancement camps. Grand Master Jeff Smith is a big fan of these, and at the right size they’re valuable. Under 100 students, they’re not where your hours should go.
• Paid ads. Google and Meta leads are fairly expensive now. Get momentum from live events first.

100 to 300 students: what changes?

Keep the live events and host programs going. That’s still your growth engine. Now you have enough students to add the two internal events that actually work: buddy days and birthday parties.

Buddy days are special events where a good share of your students each bring a friend: a board-breaking day, a glow-in-the-dark day, a lightsaber day. Birthday and pizza parties are the other format, where one student brings 15, 20 or 30 friends to celebrate.

What doesn’t work as a consistent feeder is handing out a stack of guest passes, offering pro-shop credit for referrals, or teaching great classes and hoping people talk. Maybe you do those anyway. Just don’t count on them.

And with birthday parties, book the follow-up class before the party or on the way in the door, not with a pitch at the end. That one change is the difference between 75–80% of guests scheduled and almost none.

300+ students: what does the plan look like?

At this size, referrals should replace attrition on their own. Say you have 400 students and lose 2% a month. That’s eight students a month to stay even, and your buddy days, birthday parties and pizza parties should be producing that without any ad spend. If they aren’t, that’s an internal problem to fix first.

One technique that helps at this size is helping new families isolate the groups they belong to. “Who do you know?” gets a blank stare. “Who in Billy’s third-grade class would he really click with? Who does he ride bikes with? Who in his scout troop?” gets names.

This is also when the paid and online side becomes worth the money. A bigger school should be buying every Google click it can use, doing a good job on SEO, making sure the website converts, and running social media ads. That’s not inexpensive marketing. It tends to produce some of the more expensive leads out there. So it only pays if you have a system that responds to every new lead within 30 seconds and follows up by text, email and direct mail. Whether an agency runs it or you do, keep a close eye on the conversion process.

Summer programs become worthwhile too. With 300 students, you can run some really exciting things next summer because you have the numbers to fill them.

How do you rewrite your plan this week?

1. List every marketing activity you’re considering.
2. Put the biggest likely win at the top and the smallest at the bottom.
3. Cross out everything your current student count can’t support.
4. Turn what’s left into a one-page task list with a name next to each line.

When you’re managing a small staff, the surest way to make sure nothing happens is to hand them a stack of documents. Keep it to one page. If you want a full framework for ordering the list, use the SORT method.

Quick Answers

Should a small martial arts school run a referral campaign?

Not under 100 active students. There isn’t enough critical mass to generate much referral traffic. Put that time into live events and host programs instead.

When do buddy days and birthday parties become worth it?

Somewhere around 100 students. By 300 to 400 students, they should be replacing your monthly attrition on their own.

When should a school start paying for Google and social ads?

When it’s big enough to afford some of the more expensive leads available and has a 30-second lead response and multi-channel follow-up in place. For most schools that’s 300 students and up.

Are summer camps a good idea for a small school?

Usually not. Keeping a staff member in the building from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for 10 kids is the last thing a small school should do.

If you want the whole system rather than one fix at a time, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com, or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.