Martial Arts Marketing Agencies and AI Ad Tools: Nobody Publishes a Retainer

Martial Arts Professional Directory · Marketing, websites and advertising

Software publishes its prices. Billing publishes some. Insurance publishes a little. Not one company selling advertising management to martial arts schools publishes a retainer — not one monthly fee for running your ads, not one minimum term. A handful publish something adjacent, and those few numbers are the only public anchors this industry has. This entry puts them on record and gives you the arithmetic to judge a proposal without a benchmark.

Compiled 9 September 2026 from companies’ own published pages · No company paid for inclusion or placement · Methodology and disclosure at the foot of this page

What each one publishes

Read from each company’s own website on 9 September 2026, ordered by what they sell rather than by preference. Performance figures are the companies’ own claims, attributed to them and not audited by this magazine. Absence of a price means the company does not publish one, not that it is expensive.
Company	Published price	What it sells	What it puts on the record
97Display	None published	Martial-arts-specific websites plus a suite of marketing products — local visibility, lead capture, paid ads management, social proof and a CRM	Named school testimonials. Longest-established of the web-and-marketing providers built specifically for this industry
Market Muscles	Websites from $279 per month; software plans from $0 per month, then “flexible pricing based on your studio’s needs”	Websites and a full school platform for martial arts and dance studios: billing, attendance, rank tracking, email and SMS, point of sale, scheduling, digital agreements, an AI chatbot, lead management and reputation management	States more than 1,000 martial arts and dance studios served; names Stephen Reinstein as CEO and founder. One of only two companies on this page to publish a monthly website figure, and the only one naming answer engine optimisation as a product feature
Go2KarateSites	None published	Custom martial arts websites with hosting, mobile-responsive design, maintenance, e-commerce, copywriting and SEO, plus the Go2Karate marketing platform	Publishes the contents of its Core-10 Active package in detail — eight professionally written, keyword-optimised pages, contact form, auto-responder, thank-you pop-up, monthly email support and automatic monthly article syndication — without publishing what it costs
Website Dojo	None published	Martial arts websites plus done-for-you Google Ads, Facebook lead ads, Instagram and YouTube advertising, content, SEO and retargeting	Publishes two named packages — Apex Core for single-location schools and Apex Nexus for multi-location owners — with identical published feature lists and no price on either. Directs all pricing to a consultation
Martial Arts Agency (MAMA)	None published	Done-for-you lead generation and appointment setting	Publishes 2023 client averages: $81.70 cost per new member, 56 leads a month, 15 new members a month, and average client profit of $88,754 after paying the agency and the ad spend. The most specific numbers any agency in this category puts in public
Pack The Mats	None published for management. Recommends a starting ad budget of $10 to $30 a day	Facebook and Google advertising management for martial arts schools. Operated by Conversion Strategies, Inc., McHenry, Illinois	Publishes an unusual commercial term: “no long-term contracts. You get results, or you don’t pay.” That is a specific promise and it is worth asking exactly how “results” is defined in the agreement before relying on it
Veuze Media	$450 per month minimum ad spend; first month of management free, with no management fee charged in month one. Ongoing management fee not published	Meta advertising only — feed, story and reels ads, lead forms, targeting, retargeting and creative production — working exclusively with martial arts schools	The only company here publishing a minimum ad spend. Assigns a dedicated account manager and states that leads typically appear within 48 to 72 hours of launch. Publishes no cost per lead or cost per enrolment
EFC Managed Advertising	$350 per month per platform, on top of a $500 per month minimum ad spend	Facebook or Google campaign management, bolted onto its billing and software service	Publishes its own worked example: one platform comes to $850 a month all in. This is the only published management fee in the industry — and it comes from a billing company, not an agency
Martial Arts Media	$1 to start, 14-day trial, cancel any time. Ongoing price not published	A lead-generation system the owner runs, explicitly positioned against hiring an agency	Claims 400+ schools, 25,000+ paid trial sign-ups and $37M+ in client student sign-up value over 13 years. Australia-based, works internationally
Dojo Muscle	$97 – $537 per item	Print and direct mail — every-door direct mail campaigns, back-to-school collections, printed pieces	Prices everything like a product because it is one. The only company here you can buy from without a phone call

Three public anchors, and how to use them
$350 a month to manage one advertising platform is a published management fee. $450 a month is a published minimum ad spend. $279 a month is a published website price. None of the three makes those the right numbers for your school, and a specialist doing more may reasonably charge several times any of them. What they do is end the situation where a school owner has no reference point at all. When an agency quotes you $2,000 a month, you can now ask what the other $1,650 buys — and expect an answer.

The AI advertising layer, and what it actually is

“AI-powered advertising” has become standard language in this category, and it describes something real. It is worth being precise about where the intelligence sits, because the answer changes what you should be willing to pay for it.

Read from each product’s own published pages on 9 September 2026. The two platform tools at the foot are included as the baseline every product above them is built on; they are not martial arts products and are not sold to schools.
Product	Published price	What the AI does	What it adds for a school
Magic AI Ads Red Belt Software	None published — part of the Red Belt Gym subscription. Ad spend is separate and stated to be so	States that “AI optimization runs 24/7 to improve your ad copy, pushing what works and replacing what doesn’t,” testing text, headlines and audience segments automatically	Runs Facebook and Instagram campaigns without opening Meta Ads Manager, with pre-built martial arts campaigns — 6-Week Challenge, Free Class, Trial Pass, Private Lesson — and templates for BJJ, Muay Thai and MMA. Leads land in the CRM and trigger follow-up. Suggests most schools start at $10 a day
Market Muscles AI tools	Bundled into the website and software plans above	Automated lead follow-up and customer engagement; an AI chatbot; AI-built websites with SEO and answer engine optimisation	Keeps the follow-up running when the front desk does not. The AEO claim is notable: it is the only company in this directory selling optimisation for answer engines as a named product
Meta Advantage+ Not a martial arts product	No fee beyond ad spend	Meta’s own campaign automation: creative combinations, placement, budget allocation and audience expansion, optimised continuously against your conversion goal	Available to any advertiser directly inside Ads Manager, at no charge above what you were already spending on ads
Google Performance Max Not a martial arts product	No fee beyond ad spend	One campaign across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Google’s AI combines your assets, generates additional text and video, bids in real time on conversion probability and moves budget to the best-performing placements	Same: available directly, with no charge beyond ad spend

The thing to understand before you buy an “AI ads” product

Every AI advertising product sold into the martial arts industry is a layer on top of Meta’s and Google’s own automation. The AI doing the optimising belongs to the ad platforms, is included in your ad spend at no extra charge, and is available to you directly. No martial arts vendor has trained a model that bids better than Meta’s inside Meta’s own auction.

That is not a criticism, and the layer is worth real money. What it adds is martial arts campaign templates that have run before, creative you did not have to write, lead routing straight into your CRM, follow-up that fires without anyone remembering, and not having to learn Ads Manager. For most school owners that is a genuinely good trade.

But it is a convenience and integration product, not an intelligence product, and it should be priced and judged as one. Two questions settle it: what does this cost me on top of my ad spend, and what does it do that Advantage+ or Performance Max does not already do for free? A vendor who answers both plainly is selling you something real.

How to price a proposal when nobody publishes

You do not need the market rate. You need to know whether a specific proposal makes you money, and that is arithmetic you can do before the sales call.

Work out what a student is worth. Average monthly tuition multiplied by how many months a student stays. A school at $150 a month with an average stay of 14 months has a student worth about $2,100.
Set your ceiling. Decide what you are willing to pay to acquire one, as a share of that value. Many operators work to somewhere between five and ten per cent; at $2,100 that is $105 to $210 per enrolled student.
Convert the proposal into that number. Retainer plus ad spend, divided by the enrolments it is expected to produce. An agency at $1,500 a month plus $1,000 of ad spend needs to deliver twelve enrolments a month to hit $208 each.
Ask whether that enrolment number is plausible at your intro-to-enrolment conversion rate. If you convert 40% of intros, twelve enrolments means thirty intros, which means enough leads to book thirty people onto the mat. If the proposal does not survive that chain, it will not survive contact with the month either.
Compare it to the public figures. $81.70 per new member is what one agency says its clients averaged. $850 a month all-in is what a published managed-advertising service costs on one platform. Treat both as claims rather than benchmarks, but they are fair things to put to anyone asking you to sign.

The four numbers to make them commit to

Cost per lead — total spend divided by enquiries. Cost per intro — the same divided by people who actually get on the mat. Cost per enrolment — divided by students who join and pay. Payback period — how many months of tuition it takes to earn the acquisition cost back.

An agency that will not forecast these, or will not report against them monthly, is selling activity rather than students. The terms are defined in the glossary.

What to establish before signing

Who owns the ad account, the pixel, the domain and the data. If the agency owns them, leaving costs you your history. This matters most with the platform-based providers, where the website, the CRM and the ad account can all belong to the same vendor.
Is ad spend included in the retainer or on top? The single most common misunderstanding in this category. Two companies here publish a minimum spend precisely because of it.
Minimum term and notice period. Twelve-month lock-ins are common and are not compulsory; at least one company in this table advertises having none.
How a performance guarantee is actually defined. “You get results or you don’t pay” is a real commitment and a good sign. Get the definition of “results” in the contract: leads, intros booked, or students enrolled and paying. Those are three very different promises.
Who answers the leads. A lead that nobody calls within minutes is not a lead. Establish whether that is your front desk’s job or theirs.
What happens to the website if you leave — particularly with providers who build on their own platform and host it themselves.
What the AI layer costs separately, if the proposal includes one, and what it does beyond the ad platforms’ own automation.
Named results from schools your size, in your discipline, that you may telephone.

A note on agencies outside the industry

Plenty of martial arts schools are well served by general small-business marketing agencies that build websites and run Google and Meta campaigns for any local business. Nothing about a martial arts school makes its advertising technically unusual, and a good general agency in your own town may beat a distant specialist.

The specialist’s advantage is narrower and more specific than it is usually sold as: campaign angles that have already been tested against parents of six-year-olds, an understanding of the intro-to-enrolment sequence, and creative that does not have to be explained. Weigh that against a general agency’s usual advantages — being local, being contactable, and quoting a price. The main table above lists companies whose published positioning is specifically martial arts; that is a scope decision, not a judgement.

One general agency is named here because school owners ask about it. RevMarketing builds what it calls high-performance websites with conversion optimisation, and sells organic marketing, Google Ads, social advertising, consulting and author publishing services. It publishes no prices, and it publishes nothing about martial arts — there is no martial arts positioning, client type or case study anywhere on its site. That is recorded as a fact about its published material rather than as a mark against it: a general agency that does good work for local businesses is not obliged to specialise, and its publishing arm is a genuinely unusual pairing for an agency an author-operator might want.

What it does mean is that the specialist’s one real advantage — angles already tested against parents of six-year-olds — is not on the table, and you will be teaching the agency your business. Some owners consider that a fair trade for a contactable local partner. Price it explicitly: ask what the first ninety days cost while they learn the category, and who pays for that learning.

The comparisons these companies publish about each other
Several providers in this category rank for “competitor alternative” searches with their own comparison pages. Those pages are written by a company that sells the thing being compared, and the competitor column is its own characterisation of a rival it is trying to displace. Read them for the questions they raise, not for the answers they give — the same rule this journal applies to vendor-published software round-ups.

Measured reach

Estimated monthly US organic search sessions for each company’s own domain, Semrush, 9 September 2026. Companies in this category sell through referral, podcasts and paid traffic rather than through organic search, so these figures indicate very little about capability. They are published for consistency with the rest of the directory.
Company	Organic sessions / month
97Display	523
EFC	230
Martial Arts Agency	60
Martial Arts Media	2

Methodology

Every figure was read from the company’s own published website on 9 September 2026. Where a company does not publish a price, the table says so rather than estimating one, and no figure has been taken from a third-party round-up or a competitor’s comparison page.

Performance claims — cost per member, schools served, revenue generated, time to first lead — are reproduced as the companies state them and attributed to them. Martial Arts Professional has not audited any of them, and no company in this category publishes an audited figure.

Market Muscles, Go2KarateSites, Website Dojo, Pack The Mats, Veuze Media and Red Belt Software’s Magic AI Ads were added at the request of readers. Each was then researched from its own website only and is reported as found. The description of what Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max do is taken from Meta’s and Google’s own product documentation.

Search-reach figures were compiled on 9 September 2026 and cover the four companies tracked at that date; the entry will be extended to the rest at the next revision.

The main table covers companies whose published positioning is specifically martial arts, plus the two advertising platforms every one of them runs on. General small-business agencies also serve schools; one is named above at a reader’s request and reported from its own website on the same terms as everyone else. No company was contacted before publication, given advance sight of this page, or invited to review it. Any company willing to publish a retainer, a minimum term or an audited cost-per-enrolment figure is invited to do so, and this page will record it. Corrections are published under our editorial policy.

Disclosure

Martial Arts Professional has no advertising, affiliate or referral relationship with any company listed on this page and receives no commission on anything a reader buys. No fee was accepted for inclusion or for position.

The magazine is published by NAPMA, the National Association of Professional Martial Artists, whose CEO and Chairman, Grand Master Stephen Oliver, also founded Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a coaching company for school owners. Martial Arts Wealth Mastery is a coaching programme rather than a marketing agency and is not listed here. This directory does not cover business coaching at all, for the reason set out on the directory index: a comparison in which the publisher is a participant cannot be neutral. If a commercial relationship ever exists between any of those organisations and a company listed on this page, it will be named in that company’s row.