Regardless of whether you’ve been running your dance studio business for days, weeks, months, or even years, it’s never too late to start promoting and marketing your dance studio.
If you want to make sure your dance studio is profitable, knowing how to market and which platforms to tap into could be the difference between having fully booked classes and not. In this blog post, our team of marketing experts will be going through some of the marketing basics.
What Is Dance Studio Marketing & Why Is It Important?
If you've been running your dance studio successfully for years with little to no marketing in place, you might be wondering why you need it at all. After all, word of mouth has likely been a powerful driver of enrollments for you.
While word of mouth is undoubtedly an effective and organic way to attract new students, it’s not always the most reliable or scalable method. That’s where having a marketing plan, however basic, comes into its own, with various benefits including:
Reaching new customers who wouldn’t have otherwise heard of you (people who have just moved to the area or someone wanting to start a new hobby, for example).
Ensuring that your dance studio is coming up on Google and Social Media ahead of your competitors.
Helping to increase revenue, more revenue means more money that you can invest back into your business, students, and teachers.
The more students your school has, the more opportunities you can afford to offer, including events, competitions, and more.
First Things First: How To Get Started With Marketing
Like with anything, you can’t just go into marketing all guns blazing. There are a few things that we recommend you have in place first, such as:
Strong Brand
Why is having a strong brand important for your dance studio? Having a strong brand is fundamental in the world of marketing, it’s something that your team, students, and families can buy into, feel a part of, and be proud of. Having a strong brand helps to increase trust and authority within the dance community.
A brand will often consist of:
A logo
Name
A colour scheme
A Tag line
These things will then feed through to your website, flyers, signage, social media, and more. Companies such as Pineapple Dance Studio, Dancewear, and Royal Academy for Ballet have extremely recognizable and well-put-together brands. That their customers buy into and place their trust in. (Learn more about how to name your Dance Studio in our blog post: 'How to choose the right name for your dance studio'.)
Set Up A Social Media Page
The easiest way to get in front of your customers is to meet them where they are. In most cases, this is going to be on social media. This is why it is important to ensure that you’ve got a social media presence with a dedicated social media account, either on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or all three.
Top Tip: When creating a social media account, it’s important to ensure that you’re setting up a business page and business profile. This way, you will be able to see insights, control comments, and have access to additional features and information.
Online Vs Offline Marketing
When thinking about marketing, it’s important to know the difference between online marketing and offline marketing, what you can do for both, and how it can benefit your dance studio.
Offline Marketing
This, as the name suggests, is any marketing that you do that’s not online, including:
Word-of-mouth marketing
Creating banners and brochures for local distribution
Newspaper advertising
Partnering with local schools, suppliers, or community centres
Online Marketing
Online marketing is the complete opposite of offline marketing and encapsulates everything that is done virtually. Including, but not limited to:
Social media marketing
Website creation
Google Business Profile creation and updating (more on this later)
While this can all sound overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. We recommend focusing on only a couple of these aspects to start marketing your dance studio.
Local Marketing
Nine times out of ten, if you’re a dance studio owner, you’re not going to want to market UK-wide; you’re just going to want to focus on your local catchment area. To help with this, there are a couple of things you can do. One of the main ones is setting up a Google Business Profile.
Learn more about local marketing, in our webinar here.
