Our five powerful marketing ideas for dance studios are not for the faint of heart. Well, one or two of them can be done with little effort. But the point of these powerful strategies is to not only give you a few new tactics, but to help you shift your thinking in a way that will make you more successful forever.

Remember for all of these dance studio marketing ideas, trial and error is your friend. The science of marketing is not a formula anyone can execute in order to “win”. The science of marketing is to use educated “guesses” as to what will work the best, try it out, measure and learn from the results, and refine your strategy from there.

1. Transition from working in your business, to working on your business.

You may have heard this, and working in your business is not all bad in all situations. However, you have probably realized by now that to run a dance studio, you can’t just be a dance teacher anymore. In fact, if you do still teach, I’m sure you are asking yourself how you will possibly get everything done! The best book I’ve found to understand and solve this challenge (and one of the best books I’ve ever read) is The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. I listed to the CDs, and it changed by perspective as a business owner forever. This leads me to a specific example of this perspective I want to highlight: Idea #2…

2. Transition from thinking like a teacher, to thinking like a marketer of teaching services.

Have a proven low-cost way of constantly bringing in new students, and retaining old students. This idea comes from Sam Beckford, creator of a studio business seminar detailed at https://www.danceseminarpreview.com/. We can glean from one of Sam’s sales tools for the seminar, this list of seminar benefits, an outline of the components of how to market a dance studio. If you can’t afford the seminar, I’m confident that with some research and trial and error, you can fill in your own tactics. (Note, I don’t know Sam and have no idea what the reviews are on his seminars. He sounds good, but I suggest you do your research if you are considering it.) To begin fleshing out your version of his process, consider what you can do for each marketing component that you’ll need:

• methods to attract and advertise to new students (Sam has 14 methods)
• marketing support tools that help sell the studio in a hands-off way once potential students contact them (Sam uses five such tools)
• steps to keep students after they register to ensure they are happy (Sam’s company has a four-step process for this)
• steps to encourage renewal the following year, with a pre-payment incentive (Sam uses seven steps)
• tactics to get a student back the following year if they dropped out (assuming you want them back; Sam has four tactics)

Start testing out methods, steps, and tactics to fill in!

3. Hold a breadth of workshops.

I don’t mean dance workshops. I’m assuming you have that covered. I mean how-to workshops on dance hair, dance makeup, overcoming stage fright, back flexibility, and anything else dancers (or young dancers’ parents) care about. Make them open to non-members, and advertise them wherever you think interested people will be. Give members a cheaper entry fee. Consider group discounts, or even deeper discount for a member if they bring a friend (and the friend gets a discount too).

4. Get Reviews.

Word of mouth is arguably your best marketing asset. If you have reviews on Google and Yelp, you are more likely to show up when people conduct searches. You are not supposed to solicit good reviews, but it is perfectly ethical to ask customers for feedback on one of these platforms. You can even incentivize feedback, as long as you don’t suggest that people give good reviews. Don’t be afraid of bad or mediocre reviews. You can learn from them, and respond to them. This goes a long way in turning a negative into a positive.

Many of these ideas to use the power of word of mouth are dance studio marketing ideas too.

5. Think outside of dance.

Dance competes with all the other activities available that your students can choose to spend their limited time on and resources on. If you market as if your only competition is the other local dance studios, you are missing a huge opportunity. Educate folks on why dance is a better use of their time/resources than other popular activities. How are students investing in themselves? What are they learning besides dance skills? How is the fee more valuable than with another sport, hobby, or activity? How do you make students’, or their parents’, lives easier/better than other activity organizers do?

Melanie De Caprio is a marketing expert and CEO of New Sky Strategies. She can be reached at [email protected].