Your Guide to Jiu Jitsu Marketing

Remember Chris Bower?

He’s the Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt who choked a robber unconscious.

Bower showcases the power of jiu jitsu—he was able to takedown, submit, and restrain an attacker until the police arrived. Here’s another interesting piece of the story that’s missing.

Bower is also a gym owner.

He’s the founder of Bowerhouse MMA, a 600-member gym and martial arts studio in Frederick, Maryland. This robbery attempt, while dangerous, turned out to be a powerful marketing tool for his bjj gym. Today, we’ll look at the digital marketing steps you can take to promote your bjj academy.

Let’s dive in.

Jiu Jitsu is Growing Rapidly as a Sport

Recent estimates state that there are 3 – 6 million people (worldwide) practicing jiu jitsu. It’s growing in popularity, and bjj schools are growing with it. The IBJJF listed 304 academies in 2012, 1,324 in 2019, and 7,317 in 2025. Data from Google Trends confirms this growth trend as well.

Source: Google Trends

Should you be worried about the changes taking place in the martial arts community? If you’re running a jiu jitsu gym, what does this mean for you?

Demand for jiu jitsu instruction continues to grow
As competition grows, more bjj schools will open
This means marketing will be more important over time

The immediate assumption is that better marketing equals more students. That’s generally true, at first. However, if your gym is terrible, great bjj marketing will bring more attention to that fact.

Tread carefully.

Before you start your jiu jitsu marketing, you’ll need to verify that your gym is (a.) ready to receive new students, and (b.) prepared with the proper workflows to take care of them. To answer this question, Bernardo Faria (huge honor for me) looks at the anecdotal reasons behind student churn. Why do students quit jiu jitsu?

Students have had a bad experience
Students don’t feel welcomed or truly accepted into the bjj community
They’re frustrated with their progress
Life gets in the way (e.g., work, move, divorce, illness, injury, death, etc.)
They’ve been sidelined by injuries
It’s too hard on their body; they’re struggling to recover
They don’t have enough time

What does this mean?

You’ll need to come up with a compelling solution to each of these problems before you begin your jiu jitsu marketing campaign. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to shift your focus to your target audience.

The Keys to Profit: Understanding Your Target Audience

While there are lots of student segments, not all of them are profitable. The vast majority of customer segments are wildly unpopular. It’s important that you get a clear sense of two things in your target audience research.

Customers you don’t want
Customers you want

Which students are great customers for your jiu jitsu studio? You’re looking for people who meet two very important criteria.

Customers who are willing to buy
Customers who are able to buy.

Which customer segments best fit this category?

Boys between the ages of 7 – 12
Employed men between the ages of 25 – 34
Families with kids between the ages of 7 – 12
Active families looking to train together
Customers looking for self-defense training

Research tells us that most new students in your gym will be men. This isn’t to say that women aren’t interested in martial arts; many women are interested in combat sports, but they tend to gravitate towards taekwondo or karate. With standout athletes like Ffion Davies, Elizabeth Clay, or Bia Mesquita, this trend is slowly beginning to change.

With this in mind, it makes sense to allocate most of your marketing budget to the customer segments that are interested in jiu jitsu. As our bjj culture changes, we can (and should) change with it.

It’s also a good idea to further segment your existing students into more specific categories.

Beginners: These students require a significant amount of time, guidance, and attention. They need to be integrated into the social fabric of the gym and, depending on your gym culture, they may need protection.
Competitors: These students have big goals and aspirations. They’re hungry for knowledge and eager to achieve a great deal in a short period of time. This can place a lot of pressure on you if you’re not ready to perform.
Families: This is a profitable segment, but it also comes with higher expectations and greater responsibility. You’ll need to provide just the right amount of discipline and coaching to guide the kids in these families. When coaching parents and kids, it’s a good idea to ensure you have sufficient time and attention for both.

Why is this important?

When you focus your attention on the right customer segment, it’s easy to create marketing messages that resonate. This is an essential step as your targeting is a make-or-break moment for your marketing campaign. The majority of your long term success depends on this step.

Increasing Profit by Building a Strong Jiu Jitsu Brand

Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap (and eight other books on branding), says the brand is misunderstood.

Your brand is not your logo.

It’s not a promise, corporate identity system, product, or service.

It’s the gut feeling people have about your product, service, or company.

Your brand is your reputation.

Your brand exists in the heads and hearts of the people in the marketplace. External factors (e.g., design, testimonials, reviews, values) shape the public’s perception of your business, which creates your reputation.

What does this mean?

If you’re going to build a strong brand, you’ll need to do things that reinforce the reputation you’re going for. If you want your gym to be known for…

Creating champions, you’ll need to build a curriculum that trains the right people, turning them into champions (think New Wave, B-Team, Atos, or Fight Factory).
A strong kids program you’ll need to create a kids program that produces the results or outcomes parents want for their kids.
It’s strong jiu jitsu and wrestling program, you’ll want to create a program that integrates both disciplines well, so it’s easy for athletes to pick up both.
An injury-free experience, you’ll need to have the people, safety protocols, and processes needed to produce that result.

See what I mean?

If you want your gym to be known for specific things, you’ll need to build a brand around that specific goal. Your brand isn’t simply a flashy logo or design (though that’s part of it); it’s your reputation.

But wait, there’s more.

Your brand is actually a presentation vehicle.

It’s a communication tool customers use to evaluate and interact. Your presentation is a mix of tangible and intangible factors working together.

Intangible factors like appeal, reputation, exclusivity, clarity, ease-of-use, trust, culture, credibility, etc. The things your customers can’t see.
Tangible factors like color, layout, quality, typography, imagery, design, values, story, testimonials, reviews, policies, content, etc. All of the things your customers can see.

Here’s the important part about these tangible and intangible presentation factors. They absolutely must match. When these tangible and intangible presentation factors align, your customers feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed.

Imagine you’re told you’ll be training under a black belt. You go into the gym, expecting this:

But you end up with this.

See how these brand problems create distrust? If you ignore these issues, the consequences trickle down to your marketing.

What kind of consequences?

Poor clickthrough rates
Low/poor conversion rates
Poor return on ad spend (RoAS)
Poor local search rankings
Poor organic traffic
High bounce rates

Don’t forget, Google favors brands. Remember when Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google/Alphabet, said the quiet part out loud?

“Brands are the solution, not the problem. That’s how you organize the cesspool. In a world of no constraints, where anyone can publish anything, brand affinity is clearly high-wired. It’s so fundamental to human existence it’s not going to go away. How else would you organize society?”

See what I mean? The better you are at putting out the right brand signals, the more profitable your marketing will be. With that in mind, let’s look at several marketing strategies you can use to grow your jiu jitsu gym.

Marketing To-Do #1: Website optimization

There are three fundamental questions your web pages need to answer.

Where am I?
What can I do here?
Why should I do it?

Each web page should be appealing and clear. At a minimum, your jiu jitsu gym should include the following pages.

Home
Classes
Schedule
About
Contact

If you’re adding contact details to your site, make sure the name, address, and phone number (NAP) you’re using are consistent with your social media and review portfolio.

Another thing.

It’s obviously a good idea to add more valuable content to your site, but the pages above are the basics. Your website should make use of the following ingredients:

A strong value proposition. Your value proposition answers the “why” question. Why should new students train at your BJJ gym? Your value proposition is also a promise. When it’s developed properly, your value proposition creates a competitive advantage. A compelling value proposition meets four distinct criteria: (1.) New students want what you’re offering. (2.) Your offer is exclusive/unique to your BJJ gym, (3.) your offer is clear, and (4.) credible.
An irresistible offer. These offers come in many forms. Guarantees, warranties, extended free trials, extended return policies, promos, incentives, and performance requirements are all examples of an irresistible offer. Done right, an irresistible offer is frightening for gym owners but compelling for students. The right offer creates trust, safety, and comfort. It gives clients the spark they need to take a risk with you.
Urgency triggers in your message. If you’re running a traditional BJJ gym, you tend to focus on urgency’s evil twin, scarcity. Artificial scarcity is all about triggering urgency where there is none. Scarcity repels students. Urgency, on the other hand, creates action. Urgency is about two things. Transparency and follow-through. True urgency motivates students to take action promptly.
Outstanding presentation. It’s human nature. Potential members will judge you. Looks matter, but it’s more than that. The things your students can see (performance, wins, quality, skill, reviews) tells them about what they can’t see (values, character, trustworthiness). If both of these elements align, students believe your message. If there’s a mismatch, you create distrust, friction, and resistance in customers.

Your website is the hub. If you want to generate leads consistently, it needs to be the cornerstone, the backbone of your marketing.

Why the focus on your website?

Because everything flows back to your website. Your ads, social media posts, reviews, and local listings bring people to your site.

Marketing To-Do #2: Local Search Optimization

Your students use Google to search for a BJJ gym. How does Google determine rankings? Which gyms rank higher or are featured more prominently?

Google spells it out.

The highest-ranked jiu jitsu gyms (in Google) meet three important criteria.

Relevance: How well your Google Business Profile matches what searchers want.
Distance: How far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search (e.g., jiu jitsu chicago). If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, Google calculates the distance based on what they know about the searcher’s location.”
Prominence: “How well known your gym is. Remember, Google prioritizes brands. The more prominent and well-known your gym is, the easier it is to rank for local search results.

If you’re using SEO to increase visibility in Google’s local search listings, you’ll need to focus your attention on the following ranking factors.

A consistently updated Google Business Profile
Consistent name, address, phone (NAP) listings
A strong online review portfolio
Organic search engine optimization (e.g., on-page, links, social, behavioral, and personalization factors)

Consistency is the key here.

You’ll want to:

Optimize your website’s on-page SEO factors. Semrush has a helpful checklist you can use to optimize your web pages.
Optimize your Google Business Profile. Optimization is pretty straightforward. Claim your profile, and complete every section of your Business Profile. Be consistent and meticulous with your contact information. Add categories and attributes. Write descriptions, create posts, and add photos on a weekly basis. Add and respond to reviews; add your products and services, and set up messaging.
Build a strong review portfolio. Make it a habit to ask all of your students for reviews. But whatever you do, avoid review-gating. That’s the practice of soliciting reviews from a specific set of students to influence the quality of reviews. Focus your attention on the biggest platforms—Google, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, Yelp, and Bing Maps.
Optimize for off-page SEO factors. Building internal and external links, content syndication, citations, social media marketing, listing management, public relations, brand mentions, etc.

This isn’t rocket science; it simply requires effort.

The more consistent you are with each of these action steps, the easier it is to achieve consistent rankings.

Marketing To-Do #3: Content Marketing and Development

Most gyms aren’t doing content development at all. Those that do tend to focus on a very narrow band of content marketing—technique breakdowns.

There is little consideration given to the type of content that will attract more students.

This is a mistake.

A better approach?

Focus your attention on content engineering. When you approach content this way, you’re reverse-engineering the heuristics and details that Google wants to see.

You’re creating content for students first, search engines second.

How do you do this?

Start by asking the right questions.

Who is our audience? These are the people who consume your content. They’re completely separate from the students who purchase a membership or buy your merch. Your audience is made of a diverse mix of people—customers, industry experts, competing gyms, detractors, casuals, tire kickers, and fans.
What specifically do they want from us? The needs of your audience are diverse. You’ll need to determine which audience members you’ll cater to and which ones you’ll ignore (e.g., competitors, detractors, tire-kickers, etc.). Some of your audience members are simply knowledge seekers looking for information, which is perfect. Then there are students who are interested in a gym that matches their values and compatibility requirements.
Who are our customers? You’re looking for students who are willing and able to pay for training and services at your standard price point. These are long-term students who are conscientious and eager to learn. They have disposable income, and training is a priority for them.
What specifically do they want from us? Are your students status chasers who want prestige and bragging rights? Are students looking for training to protect themselves and their loved ones? Fighters looking to become professional grapplers? If you know what your students want, meeting their needs is much easier.
How do they want us to deliver content? If you’re speaking to men, do they prefer YouTube or Instagram? What if you’re reaching out to women? Would Instagram or Pinterest be a better option? Do your students want podcasts and videos? Diagrams and pitch decks?
What are the behavioral drivers of each group? This includes your student’s desires, goals, fears, frustrations, problems, culture, values, and norms. This tells you how to approach students and your audience; this data shows you how these groups communicate with each other, how you should speak with them, and how to strengthen relationships with each of them.

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can create content that speaks directly to the people you want in your gym.

Paying students.

Here’s a short list of the problems your content can solve.

How to choose the right gym
What you need to defend yourself effectively
Past your prime? How Jiu Jitsu can help you regain it
Why Jiu Jitsu is essential for self-defense
How to build self-defense skills in a short period of time

Can you see what’s happening?

When we know who we’re speaking to, it’s easy to create content for them. Even better, this content moves them closer to a sales decision.

Is there a systematic way to do that?

There is.

You take each of the problems/topics your students want you to address, and you sort your content ideas into three groups—ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu.

Top of Funnel (ToFu) content approaches student/audience problems from a high-level overview. This content is written to appeal to a broad audience and establish your brand. Content at this stage creates awareness.
Middle of Funnel (MoFu) content focuses on specificity. You’re creating content that delves deeper into the specific problems your students face. Content at this stage generates leads; it’s all about helping your students evaluate your offer.
Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) content should be focused on one thing: Closing the sale. Content at this stage facilitates conversion. This content is specifically designed to generate revenue—free trials, free instructionals, incentives for trying classes, discounts, Easter eggs, and more.

If you want exceptional results from your content, it needs to be built with a purpose and engineered. Here’s what you should have in your content plan.

Campaign data: This includes topical clusters, keyword clusters and groups, the things people expect to see when they use these relevant keywords, and the series of pages needed to satisfy the needs of a particular cluster. Your content should treat Google as another persona or audience member you need to satisfy.
Content briefs: These briefs provide people on your team with the specific information they need to complete their steps in the process. For example, your freelance writer wouldn’t necessarily need to have access to the content clusters you’ve created, but they would definitely need information on the audience or group they’re writing for.
Content plans: These are roadmaps that provide teams with a high-level view of the content trajectory for each campaign — the list of content we’ll need to create over the next year, the structure of that content, and how it all fits together. This also includes content strategy, how the content will be implemented, and how the plan will change over time.
Information plans (optional for start-ups): This outlines some of the more technical details of your content creation. For a new website, this may include the tagging structure, building quality backlinks, information architecture, navigation structure, etc. An information plan guides technical teams, showing them how your content (and site) should be built, structured, and maintained.

When you’re ready to create engaging content, I’d recommend the GaryVee model.

You create several long-form pieces of pillar content. All of your other content pieces, e.g., video breakdowns, podcasts, interviews, and instructional content. All of your content pieces come from your pillar content.
Use your long-form content to create short-form content in the form of articles, slides, video clips, shorts, reels, etc. These are excerpts of your long-form content.
Use social media to distribute unique pieces of content to your audience. Share these content pieces and promote pieces (long and short form) aggressively for the first 48 hours.

Here’s an important note about content syndication and distribution. It’s a great idea to avoid duplicate content across social media platforms.

Here’s why.

If you share the same short-form clip on YouTube, Instagram, and X, there’s really no reason for people to follow you on multiple social media platforms. They can follow you on YouTube and get the same content you distribute everywhere. If each platform receives unique content, your audience has a compelling reason to follow all of your social media profiles.

Marketing To-Do #4: Community Engagement and Local Outreach

Your community probably doesn’t care about your BJJ school. Local businesses don’t care about your gym either. If you want to generate a lot of goodwill in your community, you’ll need to create a lot of value for both.

How do you do that?

You follow Peter Thiel’s value formula.

If you’re trying to build your gym’s standing in the community, you’ll need to do two things well.

Create X dollars of value for the local businesses in your community.
Capture Y percent of X.

It’s all about finding and solving problems.

Come up with a never-ending list of ways to serve a select number of people and local businesses in your community—find problems and solve them. Here’s a framework you can use to generate a significant amount of engagement and community support.

Strategy #01: Teach what you know

Education attracts, information converts. Use this strategy to approach relevant businesses in the community who have an audience but aren’t effectively teaching or supporting them.

Here are a few examples:

Punch block series for bar goers
Grappling tactics for women in public places (e.g., shopping malls, grocery stores, transitional spaces)
Situational awareness training for public places (e.g., movie theaters, restaurants, bars, retail storefronts, etc.)
Low-risk takedowns for at-risk populations (e.g., women, children, professionals, etc.)

This is the easiest option.

The formula for making this work is simple.

Find complementary businesses (e.g., CrossFit gyms, shooting ranges, other martial arts studios, libraries, and schools)

Strategy #02: Give what you have

If you’re short on time, consider giving other businesses in the community something they want or need. Verify that your support fulfills a desire, meets a need, or solves problem. Ensure that it ties back to your gym in some way, while also providing what they want.

Your gift can be anything of value. You could…

Sponsor an upcoming local event
Make an in-kind donation or contribution
Offer a giveaway in the form of free classes or an extended trial membership
Extend a relevant free gift to local event producers
An exclusive offer that’s only available to specific organizations in the community (e.g., discounts for veterans, free training for domestic abuse victims)

Jiu Jitsu Tribe is a great example. This non-profit organization provides free jiu jitsu training to at-risk youth.

Strategy #03: Protect from harm

Some organizations (e.g., Law Enforcement, Firefighters, and EMTs) and members of the community (teachers, workplaces, and domestic violence victims) are frequently in danger. This is an opportunity for you to extend training to those who are vulnerable.

You can:

Share pin and restraint techniques for healthcare professionals
Offer free or discounted training to people in the community who have experienced criminal violence
Provide training that teaches people in the community to recognize danger and red flags
Work with complementary organizations (i.e., teachers, nurses, doctors) to spot and avoid danger
Create a cheaper, faster, or more unique way to train and support at-risk members of the community

Rener Gracie does this all the time.

If a kid is bullied, Rener or a team member at Gracie Breakdown reaches out to their audience and offers training to the victims free of charge.

Strategy #04: Be a connector

Connectors have a knack for networking. They’re able to create connections with others, and they’re highly skilled at bringing people together. Connectors have access to influential people, which makes them influencers as well.

There are several ways you can do this with your business.

Introduce organizations in your community that can provide value to others
Bring influencers together
Introduce two people, but seed the relationship with an idea
Host a networking event (e.g., digital meetups, conferences, workshops, etc.) but invite influential people and organizations
Nurture the relationships you spark

If you choose to go this route, understand that the connector play is a long-term strategy. If introductions are the structure, value is the glue. Give people what they want, seed the relationships with your ideas, then watch the results grow.

This strategy isn’t as easy to control, but the rewards are pretty significant. It just takes time.

Marketing To-Do #5. Paid Advertising and Promotions

You’re ready to use paid advertising to promote your gym. What’s the number one mistake most gym owners make with their paid advertising?

Shotgun marketing.

Gym owners throw their money at advertising platforms indiscriminately. The platform isn’t the issue here—Google, Facebook, YouTube, the approach is the problem. Inexperienced gym owners tend to:

Target people outside of their city
Focus on irrelevant keywords or interests
Treat all visitor traffic the same way
Send customers to their home page
Neglect their website
Ignore other forms of marketing to focus on local search engine marketing

This is no good.

If you’re going to put paid advertising to work, you need potential students to self-identify. You want people to sort themselves into one of three groups:

Cold traffic: These people are hearing about your gym for the first time. They’ve used relevant keywords or expressed interest in some way, but they don’t know you.
Warm traffic: These people know who you are. They’ve heard of your gym and they’re familiar with what you do. They’ve expressed interest somehow—they’ve watched a technique video you shared, listened to your podcast, or opted in to your newsletter.
Hot traffic: These people are repeat visitors. They’re familiar with you, and they’re actively considering your gym. They’re interested in making a purchase, and they’ve shown you that.

Okay, you’ve sorted your traffic into buckets. Now it’s time to put those buckets to work. How?

With 60-30-10.

The 60-30-10 methodology is an approach to paid advertising, popularized by Perry Marshall and Digital Marketer.

Here’s how it works.

You spend…

10% of your budget on Cold traffic. You promote your content to highly targeted groups of people who have never heard of you but are likely to be interested in jiu jitsu. You provide them with immediate value—a technique video, match breakdowns, helpful instructionals, detailed articles, etc. If you have to lose money, you lose it here to gain valuable insights everywhere else.
30% of your budget on Warm traffic. The people who are warm are familiar with your gym. They’re interested in your offer, and they’re open to engaging with you. This makes sense as your warm traffic is much more likely to convert.
60% of your budget on Hot traffic. These are the prospects who have opted in to multiple lists or are following you on multiple platforms. They’re subscribers to one (or more) of your lists. They’re followers on YouTube, Facebook, and Telegram. They’ve booked a personal, purchased an instructional, taken a trial class, etc. These people show purchase intent.

What sort of offers do you make with each group?

With Cold traffic, it’s important that you lead with value first. Use low-risk, high-reward offers with no/low opt-ins to build trust, create rapport, and capture leads. You can use educational content—free instructionals, technique breakdowns, free seminars/workshops, etc. to create interest. Choose a specific problem you can solve for customers. Share this content on your blog, Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram profile.
With Warm Traffic, you can share opt-in offers. Potential members pay with their contact information. In exchange, you give them high-value content that solves more of their problems (e.g., how to choose the right gym, bullyproof tactics for kids, self-defense for women).
With Hot Traffic, these prospects have self-identified. They’re interested and eager to hear more about your product offers. They have the ability and willingness to buy your products and services. Share free trials, promotional offers, memberships, merch, and bonuses to incentivize the sale.

Many gyms make the mistake of shotgun marketing. They create generic ads with poor branding, no value proposition, and poor budgeting.

The majority of your ad revenue should be spent on the students who are interested in training at your gym.

Conclusion: Use this Guide to Jiu Jitsu Marketing to attract more students

The demand for jiu jitsu will continue to grow. As more gyms open, the competition for students will also continue to grow. This means consistent marketing will be an important detail your gym needs to grow.

The immediate assumption is that better marketing equals more students. That’s generally true, but great marketing will force terrible gyms out of business. Before you start your jiu jitsu marketing, you’ll need to verify that your gym is ready to receive and take care of new students.

With a clear plan and consistent marketing, you’ll be able to attract, convert, and retain students, no robbery attempts necessary.

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