Marketing Martial Arts

At one time or another, we’ve all had a bad experiences with a service or business that makes us never want to go back. Ever.

It’s happened.

It’s going to happen again.

Now, if it happens to you, it happens to your customers.

And, they may have just had one of those dreaded experiences at your martial arts school.

Nowadays, people turn to online local directories like Google Places or Yelp to share their experience as a warning to others.

You can choose to ignore negative reviews or respond to them head on.

The choice is yours.

How often do you monitor your reviews online?

Having positive reviews has always been important but having positive online review is absolutely critical in today’s online obsessed world.

But what do you do when you have even one negative review in a sea of positive reviews? What do you do when you have more negative reviews than positive?

You can’t just ignore the problem and hope it goes away.

It won’t.

And it can (and will) only get worse.

You have to respond and try and make things right.

By saying nothing, you’re basically telling everyone who reads this you don’t care enough to respond and that person (more importantly) is right.

Either way, it’s bad for business.

It’s Time to Audit Your Reviews

If you haven’t done this in a while for your martial arts school, I highly recommend you take a look at what’s being said and what kind of rankings you are receiving. I hope you’re pleasantly surprised to find all positive reviews.

However, you might be surprised to find out that you have unhappy former students leaving one star reviews with a laundry list of all that’s wrong and evil with your business for your potential future students to read.

While there is no real way to calculate the true impact to your business, I think we can agree that it definitely hurts you. And bad.

What if the following example was your martial arts school?

Imagine what it would be like to load up your page and find that you have multiple negative reviews for your martial arts school.

That’s probably going to happen this martial arts school’s owner someday.

Check this out…

If you look at the red circles above, you’ll see that potential customers indicated that those reviews helped them. I don’t know about you, but I read those to mean “Hell no! I’ll never ever, never ever train here. Ever!” and can’t picture the person saying “Oh hell yes! I cant wait to send my kids here and pay all those hidden fees!”

Sadly, from the looks of things, this owner hasn’t ever looked at these reviews.

You can tell because they haven’t responded to them. Either they don’t care (which would be shocking), they don’t want to respond, or they don’t know they can respond (which they can as a verified owner of the page).

I’m hoping for the later but you never know.

What do you think?

I really want to know what you think about this and how you would handle it.

If this was your business, how would you respond? Would you take the same approach as this martial arts school owner and say nothing? Has this ever happened to you? How did you respond? Share with our community in a comment below!

Popularity: 1%