May 11, 2026

3 Obstacles Marketers in the Firearm Industry Face and How to Overcome Them

By Andy Hallinan, Warrior Marketing Group Founder

Why Marketing Still Feels Hard in the Firearm Industry

The Industry That Builds Warriors — But Struggles to Find Them

Here’s the uncomfortable truth many firearm industry professionals will not want to admit out loud: most firearm businesses are excellent at what they sell — but not so great at selling it.

I know because I was one of them.

I’ve been running Facebook ads in the firearm industry for 15 years. I currently lead a marketing mastermind group called the Firearm Marketing Accelerator — a community of shooting ranges, gun manufacturers and firearm businesses that collectively generated an estimated $11.6M dollars in revenue in the last 12 months. We’ve done this in a large part by evolving into direct response marketing. As a firearm instructor myself, I’ve personally trained over 30,000 students and written what has become the best-selling marketing book in the firearm industry.

I didn’t figure any of this out because I’m smarter than you; I figured it out because I struggled longer and learned more lessons the hard way than most people are willing to.

The promise I’m making in this article: the obstacles most of us think are stopping our businesses from growing in this industry may not be what you think they are. And once you see that, everything can change for the better.

Obstacle #1: “We Can’t Advertise on Facebook”

This myth is quietly costing our industry millions of dollars every year.

At last year’s NSSF Marketing & Leadership Summit, Chuck Rossi announced that Facebook is actively easing its restrictions on the firearm industry. This isn’t a rumor — it’s policy. Mark Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan show and said plainly, ‘I got censorship wrong.’ Facebook has since rolled back many of the restrictions that had firearm businesses on the ropes.

In fact, when I took the stage at this year’s NSSF Marketing & Leadership Summit, the name of my presentation was: “Yes, You Can Run Ads with Guns in Them on Facebook.” Because you can. I do it every day. And when your competition still believes the old story, your willingness to run the right ads gives you a direct advantage.

The compliance problem isn’t as big as our industry has convinced itself it is. The real problem is something else entirely.

Obstacle #2: We Have Limited Channels — And Even More Limited Tracking

Here’s the actual problem most firearm businesses are living with: we don’t know how much it actually costs us to acquire a customer.

Think about your current marketing spend. If you’re like most firearm industry professionals, you rely on magazine ads, banner placements on partner websites and sponsorships. We tiptoe around our social media posts due to legacy restrictions and we spend a ton of money on trade show booths. How many marketing dollars can you trace directly to a customer walking through your door or making a purchase on your website?

For most businesses I work with, the honest answer is: we have no idea.

This isn’t a small problem. If we don’t know your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), which is the dollar amount it takes to get one customer to say yes, we can’t build a solid marketing budget.

So, we guess.

And when we’re guessing, we’re way more vulnerable to the natural highs and lows of the economy. One slow month, and the first thing that gets cut is marketing, which guarantees the next month will be even slower.

The firearm industry is short on marketing channels — but we’re even shorter on the discipline to track every dollar spent back to the acquisition of a customer or an email address.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The tools exist. The data is available. Our industry is just one of the last to demand accountability from its marketing spend.

Obstacle #3: We’re Running Awareness Marketing When We Should Be Running Response Marketing

There’s a long-standing debate in marketing between brand awareness and direct response. Brand awareness says: get your name out there, build recognition and trust that sales will follow. Direct response says: every dollar you spend should produce a measurable result.

My position, after 15 years in this industry, is this: with very few exceptions, every firearm business should be using direct response marketing.

I operate by two rules.

Rule One: Every dollar we spend on marketing should be traceable to the acquisition of either a customer or an email address. If I can’t track it, I don’t spend it.

Rule Two: The North Star metric for every firearm business should be the ratio between CPA and Lifetime Value (LTV). What does it cost you to get a customer? And what is that customer worth to you over their entire relationship with your business?

When you know those two numbers, everything else becomes a math problem. I know that if I spend $40 to acquire a customer with a lifetime value of $2,400, I should spend every dollar I can find to acquire more of them. The business compounds. Revenue becomes predictable. Growth stops feeling random.

When you don’t know those numbers, growth feels hard — because it is.

The Real Reason Growth Still Feels Hard

The firearm industry isn’t just being held back by compliance, limited channels and fierce competition. We’re also being held back by an inability to demand accountability from our marketing.

But here’s what I’ve also learned — and what I wrote about in The H30K™ Method: the businesses that grow the fastest aren’t just running better ads. We’re telling a better story.

My marketing framework — The H30K™ Method — is built around five points that every firearm business should optimize:

Experience. Every customer who walks through your door or buys from your website should have a radically better experience than they expected.

Meaning. Today’s consumers buy from businesses that connect mission to meaning in their own lives — and they vote with their dollars.

Transformation. Our marketing needs to clearly define who the customer can become after they say yes to your business. That’s the gap between good marketing and great marketing.

Journey. A customer isn’t a one-time transaction. They’re a relationship. When your marketing is built on LTV thinking, the journey is how you build a business that lasts.

Invitation. Every piece of content, every ad, every email is an invitation — not a sales pitch. They can’t say yes if we don’t invite them.

When you combine a real marketing system with a real story to tell, track your data from click to close and give your customer a transformation, growth doesn’t just become systematic — it becomes automatic.

About the Author

Andy Hallinan is the founder of Warrior Marketing Group and the Firearm Marketing Accelerator, author of The H30K™ Method, and a firearms entrepreneur who built a million-dollar training organization from a backyard shooting range in Inverness, Fla.

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