168 - The 5A Content System: How This Martial Arts School Owner Grew 127K Instagram Followers
Alan La from Invincible HQ™, grew to 127K Instagram followers using his 5A Content System,without fancy equipment or viral stunts. In this episode, he breaks down how martial arts school owners can escape the "instructor trap" and create content that actually converts.
IN THIS EPISODE:
- Why the martial arts industry is falling behind in marketing
- Why "fly on the wall" content beats produced videos
- The $20 tool that makes the biggest difference
- How to turn existing classes into weeks of content
- The 5A Content System (Authority, Access, Applause, Ascension, Action)
- Making martial arts less intimidating through behind-the-scenes content
- And more
*Bring 50 Enrollments Into Your Martial Arts School Every 90 Days Need help growing your martial arts school? Watch Training + Take The Assessment
TRANSCRIPTION
ALAN: So I literally started on the streets and, you know, really just trying to find enough students to keep the dream alive. And I’ll be honest, like back then, I didn’t have a massive marketing budget. I didn’t have money, pretty much, but I was fortunate enough to be starting my school right when social media was beginning. And I took that as an option. I saw social media was this thing where it gave me the ultimate kind of equaliser with other massive schools that have been established for like decades.
GEORGE: Hey, it’s George. Welcome to another Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. Today I’m joined with Alan La from Invincible HQ. How are you doing, Alan?
ALAN: I’m good. Thank you, George. Just want to say again, thank you for having me on and look forward to see how I can help school owners and coaches.
GEORGE: Amazing. So a little bit of context that led to this interview. So I met Alan at one of our Partners Intensive events in Sydney, and we just had a brief little chat, spoke marketing, spoke ads. It was in between sessions. And then I had a look at Alan’s socials and I was watching some of his Instagram stuff that he was doing. Firstly, if you want to be inspired as a martial artist, Alan’s skill and kicks are just bar none.
But then together with that, just watching how he packaged everything and then just seeing the amount of mass following that Alan has, I think it was 127,000 followers on Instagram. So to learn here from Alan as what he does as a martial artist, but also from the publishing standpoint and growing a mass audience, which are three skills that you very rarely see together in the martial arts space. So thanks so much for jumping on, Alan.
ALAN: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m grateful to be here.
GEORGE: Awesome. So let’s just, I always like to just start from the beginning. What’s a bit of your background? What got you started in martial arts? And we can go from there.
ALAN: Okay. Well, first of all, I’m Alan La and I’m the founder of Invincible Worldwide. And most people see me as the guy with a hundred K followers and 20 million views. And they assume that I’ve got some secret marketing degree or whatever. What a lot of people don’t know is that I started out as the furthest thing from what you call the influencer thing. I was a shy kid, just started teaching martial arts in the back of my parents’ house when I finished high school and eventually that grew and then I had to move out to local PCYCs and stuff like that.
But then sometimes we’d get kicked out. So I had to teach in local car parks. And so I literally started on the streets and, you know, really just trying to find enough students to keep the dream alive. And I’ll be honest, back then I didn’t have a massive marketing budget. I didn’t have money. Yeah, pretty much. But I was fortunate enough to be starting my school right when social media was beginning.
ALAN: And I took that as an option. I saw social media was this thing where it gave me the ultimate kind of equaliser with other massive schools that have been established for like decades. So I decided I’m going to go all in on trying to figure out this social media thing. And I thought that was my way to kind of be heard and get my name out there.
I remember then this was like early stages, once a couple of our YouTube videos took off and went viral. I thought, oh, this is amazing, seeing the results. And then I thought, all right, cool. I’ve got this kind of formula and I’ll start playing around with this, experiment with it.
ALAN: And then as you know, social media evolved and changes. So I’ve seen it from the early days of YouTube to now Instagram Reels, Instagram carousels and Stories and it’s constantly changing. But what I’ve noticed is that yes, these things change and it’s not about luck, right? I’ve actually realised it’s actually systems and principles. And so I’ve used the same principles to go viral on Instagram as well. And it’s just systems.
ALAN: So what I’ve realised is it’s not luck and don’t chase luck or trends. So I’ve used the same principles to now run a seven figure school in Sydney and also be able to help school owners to install the same proven systems to build and also build their team. So they can stop trading hours for dollars and finally build a business that kind of supports their life and do what they want to do.
ALAN: Because when I look at a lot of school owners, I feel like particularly in martial arts, we tend to get stuck in our old ways and we like to just stick to tradition. As much as we try to keep up with the pace of where the modern world is going, I feel like as an industry, we’re not enough. You know, there are a lot of industries out there where things have moved so fast, but in martial arts, I don’t know, we’re a bit slow. So I’m passionate about really helping school owners and coaches to push forward and yeah, that’s why I’m grateful to be here with you, George and share whatever I can.
GEORGE: It’s interesting you mentioned the level playing field because that now again is actually just levelled again. And I’d love to dive into your systems and principles because that’s sort of the language that I resonate with and then everybody can adapt and add their own unique ability to it. But if you think of you saw social media as this opportunity, I can kind of recall when I started this podcast, I also saw it as an opportunity to just, well, nobody’s really doing these kinds of things and it’s good to just use it as a platform.
GEORGE: But the old model of you needed all these followers was like, that was the method. And for anyone paying attention to social media now, there’s been this shift of social to interest-based where the algorithms go by interest. And so I guess if you think of what makes this chat with you today relevant is you’ve got all this experience and you’ve got this mass following, but for anybody that’s maybe not there and starting out, adapting principles and being able to produce good content can actually get you the same virality now without the mass following. And so that’s where the algorithms have evolved to.
GEORGE: So I would like, and if you could share whatever you feel comfortable sharing, but you mentioned the systems and the principles. How do you go about that? How do you look at content in a way, in a system that gets you the visibility that you’re after?
ALAN: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It’s always changed. For example, Instagram, when it first started, I remember hitting over just 500 followers. I was like, oh man, I got so excited. And then you get to a thousand, you get really excited. And back then it was about the followers. The more followers you had and the more likes, you felt good. And you’re absolutely right, just probably a couple of months ago, Instagram now is all about the views.
No one cares about the likes or the followers anymore. And they’ve kind of levelled out the playing field where someone who has fewer followers might actually get more reach than someone who’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. So it’s actually levelled the playing ground really, really well.
ALAN: So what that means now even more is that the content that you’re creating has to be even more interesting. Whereas in the past, you just kind of create your own content and if people like it, people will follow. But now you’ve really got to have the ability to capture people’s attention really, really fast, within three seconds. So I think that’s a big thing.
ALAN: Going back to principles, I always believe in principles, same thing growing my martial arts school. I don’t believe in following trends. I think you have to be different. Being different is what captures people’s attention. If they scroll and you look the same as every other martial...
