How To Get New Students This Halloween With $0 Ad Spend

When I first tried running a Trunk or Treat, I thought it would just be a fun community event. 

Candy (butterfingers are my favorite), costumes, maybe scare a few kids, hopefully without them crying. 

What I didn’t expect? Hundreds of local parents handing me their contact info in less than two hours… without me spending a single dime on ads.

[Btw- at the end of this newsletter, i’ll have a special offer for you to get this entire system for less than the cost of a double protein boorrito… Okay back to the newsletter.. ]

That’s when it hit me that Halloween is one of the most underused marketing holidays for martial arts schools. 

Everyone else is fighting for attention with Facebook ads, while you can create a line out the door with nothing more than a couple social media posts in your local community facebook groups. 

Want to create a successful Trunk Or Treat? Here’s the bird's eye view steps. 

• Build anticipation early. Parents love free, family-friendly events, especially if they feel exclusive. Post in your local facebook community events. But here’s the real pro tip… run this event 2-3 weeks BEFORE halloween. Don’t do it the same time as everyone else’s halloween event. Do it when there’s no competition, and you’ll get tons of people to show up.
  
  

• Create real scarcity. Require people REGISTER for your event before showing up. That way, you can capture their info as a lead, and make it smoother the day of. You can also use their info to “preheat” them as leads and hint about your special offer. You’ll also need to cap the registrations so your trunk or treat doesn’t turn into Project X.
  
  

• Leverage partnerships. Have  local businesses and your students volunteer to run trunks, you don’t need any of these of your own. Simply be the host and the organizer.
  
  

• Turn fun into students. Have a special offer you can give to people that day if they schedule their first lesson. 4 weeks for $49 or something similar. 

Every year we’ve run this, the same thing happens: hundreds of leads, families asking to join before the event even starts, and new students pouring in right as other schools hit their fall slump.

And the best part? You don’t need any budget. You just need to be the organizer. 

To make this easy for you, I put together the entire process in one 24 page doc. 

It’s called the  Halloween Marketing Guide: How to Get 100’s of Leads in Less Than 2 Hours. It’s the same playbook we use in my own schools, and the one my clients use to fill their mats every October.

It includes…

• Ready to use canva templates 

• Screenshots of facebook posts you can use for inspiration to fill up the event 

• The stupid simple way to turn trunk or treat  leads into students 

• Copy and paste email templates 

• How To Collect 100’s of leads for free, even if no one shows up lol 

👉 You can grab The Ultimate Halloween Martial Arts Marketing here for just $19 

This Halloween, you can either be the school that hopes kids show up after trick-or-treating… or the one that becomes the main event in your community.

Which one are you going to be?

As promised, 3 min read, no fluff, all strategy, 

Your hype man,

Matthew Brenner