In this article, we’ll go over our 5 more unconventional ideas for marketing a modern dance studio business. We’ll also add a twist and provide actionable tips for 10+ well-known marketing ideas that you might already been using to promote your dance studio.
We’ll cover the following dance studio marketing ideas:
✅ Email Marketing
⭐ Registrations not open yet? Add a reminder form
✅ Offer an early bird-discount
✅ Social Media Marketing
⭐ End-of-session surveys to promote next session
⭐ Bulk Dance Certificates
✅ Customer Referrals
✅ SEO and Content Marketing
✅ Bulk SMS / Mass Texting
✅ Testimonials and online reviews
✅ Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads
✅ Open House and Free Dance Lessons
⭐ Kid’s Dance Birthday Party
⭐ Using AI (ChatGPT) to market your studio
✅ Event more ways to Market your Dance Studio
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About the author: I’m Olivier, co-founder of Activity Messenger, a modern dance studios software. I also run a multi-franchise business dedicated to introducing sports to children aged 2-9 with over 100 employees. Over the last decade, I’ve spent over $200,000 on Facebook and Google ads, sent hundreds of email marketing campaigns, all aimed at increasing enrollment in classes and camps. I also help our clients build a successful dance studio with the help or our dance studio management software.
✅ Indicates a more traditional dance studio marketing ideas. We add a modern twist so that even experienced dance studio marketers can gain new insights.
⭐ Indicates an unconventional marketing ideas. These may be a bit advanced for new studio, but will generate novel marketing ideas for established studios.
📌 Pro Tip: These are tips for both established and new dance studios looking to improve their marketing strategies
📌 Tip for new studio owners: These are tps for newer dance studio owners looking to grow revenue
You may be surprised that I put this at the top (or that it’s unconventional), but I truly believe that this is the #1 missed opportunity for dance studios.
Here’s why:
At Activity Messenger, we see hundreds of businesses using email marketing to remind clients to sign up for their next class.
Which is great.
But many of them only reach current or past students.
And they don’t have an option for potential clients to subscribe to their newsletter from their website.
At my children’s sports organization, when we added the subscription option, we were surprised to see how many prospects opted in to receive notifications about future sessions.
Once we started building our email list, we also decided to segment by registration status.
Here’s why:
We’ve all gotten that marketing email a few days after a purchase that promotes the exact class you just signed up for.
Makes you want to unsubscribe, right?
And that’s exactly what people were doing.
So we switched to segmenting by registration status and 3 things happened:
The reason?
Attendees now know that our outreach is relevant based on their past and current registrations.
They get fewer emails when they register early, so they are less likely to unsubscribe.
They get more if they haven’t registered yet, so they’re less likely to forget to sign up for Sophia’s to Dance classes this fall.
Busy parents love this!
When communicating with potential customers, there are some key strategies to remember:
Immediately send a welcome email. This allows them to further interact with you when they’re most interested. We’ve had success adding:
This engages potential clients from the start, rather than simply thanking them for joining our email blast. Great way to start building a successful dance studio.
📌 Pro Tip: Just by adding an email subscription form, we had over 100 new subscribers in less than 10 days during peak registration times. A lot of parents come to our site from an ad or search. In many cases, their child is too young, or they are simply not be available for the current session. These are quality leads who want you to be in touch the next time a session is available.
📌 Tip for new studio owners: We had a client who added an option to sign up for her newsletter even before her dance studio website was ready. By the time she opened up for signups, she already had 200 people signed up for her newsletter, which had a huge impact on her first session. If you are just starting out or still in the early stages, simply adding a CTA to subscribe to your newsletter will help you grow much faster.
Last fall, I wanted to enroll my oldest in a dance class. I visited the dance studio’s website and was ready to buy.
But registration had not yet begun.
A few days went by and I completely forgot to register my son.
When I remembered, I had missed the first few weeks and didn’t bother to sign him up.
I ended up choosing a competing studio for the winter session.
My son loved it.
That studio lost my entire family (3 kids) to their competitor.
This can be the difference between a struggling and successful dance studio.
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All the studio had to do was open registration much earlier to turn us into customers.
As an operator, I know it’s not that easy.
I can hear the excuses going through your head:
“But I haven’t confirmed the location.”
“I’m not sure I’ll have the staff.”
“No one will sign up this early”
“My business is unique and this would never work in our industry.”
Ok… so say I accept your excuses.
I can still help you avoid losing clients for simply not having registrations up early enough.
With one simple tweak.
⏱ A reminder form.
In our business, we recently had over 112 people fill out a reminder form before registrations for a program that only had 42 spots.
When registration opened, the classes filled up in a matter of hours (some in minutes).
Reminder forms can be easily created using Google Forms. With Activity Messenger, you get the advantage of being able to reconnect with people in bulk with nice email templates and bulk SMS.
One of the biggest marketing hacks that helped us grow our business to 7 figures in annual revenue was so simple.
We open registration as early as possible (and much earlier than our competitors).
We offer early bird discounts to encourage early registration.
This helps with cash flow, staff scheduling, and best of all, you now have an army of ambassadors telling their friends to sign up before classes fill up.
Today, some of our classes fill up months in advance.
It takes a little time, but after a few sessions, parents know that classes fill up quickly and start registering earlier.
As a result, we have more information to adjust our advertising budget, open new classes, or even change class types to optimize revenue.
📌 Pro Tip: We’ve been doing this for years and we usually have 25% to 30% of our registrations in before most of our competitors have even started taking registrations. It helps us better target our ads and email outreach because I know which classes need more visibility.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: If you are just starting out, it might be tempting to offer your classes at a lower price to get some momentum, which is a great idea. But you’ll want to lock in your price. If you’re offering a class for $80 that you eventually want to charge $160 for, make sure that’s clear to all customers so they don’t assume you’ll always be a low-cost option.
A participant survey will help you understand your customers’ likes, dislikes, and where you need to improve.
With Activity Messenger, you can automate an email 2-3 days before the last class of the session.
You can also follow up with people who have given you a great review and ask for a social media testimonial.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: This is probably one of the most important marketing channels to start with. You’ll want to ask questions about how the class went, but also about dance type and scheduling preferences, which you can then adapt to better serve your local dance community. For example, parents may love the Parent & Tot class, but find the day and time to be terrible to fit into their family schedule.
Certificates can serve a more strategic purpose than simply recognizing an dancer’s achievement. Sending branded certificates in bulk to participants is also an effective marketing tool. Kids love to show off their accomplishments, so chances are good that proud parents will post certificates around the house and on social media.
Adding your logo to certificates turns them into free advertising. When these certificates are displayed at home, they remind families to sign up for the next class and spread the word about your studio. When friends and family see this on social media or when they visit, it sparks word-of-mouth, potentially bringing in new clients for future sessions. This is one of the most unique and underutilized of our dance studio marketing strategies.
Design eye-catching certificates: Make sure your certificates look great and feature your studio’s logo prominently.
Celebrate each achievement: Give certificates for various milestones, not just at the end of a session.
Encourage social sharing: Encourage your dancers to post their certificates on social media. Consider launching a contest to win merchandise or a free session to boost social sharing.
📌 Pro Tip: This can be done manually but we recommend you use a bulk certificate generator like Activity Messenger or Certifier. Activity Messenger’s integration with Canva makes it easy for you to design on brand certificates.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: This tip is especially true for new or growing dance schools. You want to create a sense of belonging and celebrating accomplishments with certificates is a great way to spark that in your dance community.
Referrals take advantage of the trust and credibility from personal recommendations, which makes it an incredibly effective way to attract new students to your Dance Studio.
Just as you would trust a friend’s recommendation for a great restaurant, people trust their friends and family’s recommendations for dance lessons.
📌 Pro Tip: You’ll want to make it easy for current students to recommend you. Have flyers, social media posts, personalized certificates and other easy ways for people to share and be rewarded for bringing people to your studio.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: Client referrals are the easiest way to grow. Your clients do the work for you, and when they refer friends and family, it also increases the likelihood that they will sign up for many more sessions at your studio.
Another of our favorite dance studio marketing ideas is the use of SEO and content marketing to increase their online visibility. Through website optimization and the creation of valuable content, studios can rank higher in search engine results and establish themselves as authorities in the dance community.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization involves optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results, making it more visible to potential students.
Actionable Insights:
Content marketing involves creating and sharing content that is both informative and engaging, to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
Actionable Insights:
The right content can significantly boost your SEO efforts by providing your audience with the information they’re searching for and keeping them engaged on your site longer.
Actionable Insights:
Content marketing is not just about attracting new students; it’s also about building and nurturing a community around your dance program.
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By combining SEO strategies with compelling content marketing, you can increase visits to your dance studio’s website, attract more students, and build a thriving dance community.
📌 Pro Tip: Writing content for Google can be a long process but is a must to build a successful dance studio. To speed things up, record yourself or create a video, then ask AI to create a blog post from the audio or video file. All you have to do next is edit and add anything that might be missing. This can easily increase your content production by 10 times.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: Focus on long tail keywords and local searches. Both will be much easier for you to rank for quickly until your dance studio website gains authority in Google’s view.
Dance schools can greatly benefit from using bulk SMS or mass texting as a marketing tool. This allows dance studio owners to reach audiences directly on their mobile phones, ensuring messages about promotions, dance programs, events and new classes are seen immediately.
Bulk SMS provides a direct line to your students, ensuring that important updates and offers get delivered in a timely manner.
Actionable Insights:
Text messages to former students can be a great way to rekindle their interest in a return to your dance school.
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Mass texting can simplify the process of making studio-wide announcements and ensure that everyone receives the message at the same time.
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Text messaging can help connect your dance school with your students and build community and loyalty.
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By integrating bulk SMS into your dance studio’s marketing strategy, you can improve communication, boost student engagement, and ultimately increase enrollment and retention.
Dance studio marketing strategies should always include the use of testimonials and online reviews. Encouraging existing dance students to share their positive experiences on your website and social media platforms can have a significant impact.
Read our Guide: How To Get More Reviews For Your Dance Studio
Online platforms such as Yelp, Facebook and Google are prime places where prospective students and parents search for the best dance studios. You’ll want to make your presence seen with positive reviews.
Actionable Insights:
Positive reviews can be turned into powerful testimonials on your Web site or in marketing materials that will further enhance the reputation of your studio.
Actionable Insights:
You can greatly enhance your online reviews by capitalizing on the positive feedback received in end-of-session surveys.
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By focusing on collecting and presenting positive testimonials and reviews, dance studios can enhance their reputation, attract new students and increase the loyalty of existing students.
A dance studio website can increase its visibility and attract new students by using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC is a model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. This allows you to appear on google for targeted keywords relevant to the studio’s offerings, such as “dance studio classes” or “ballet classes for kids.
PPC campaigns can place your dance studio’s website link at the top of search engine results pages. This ensures high visibility to potential students who are actively searching for dance classes.
Actionable Insights:
PPC advertising offers any dance studio website the advantage of immediate visibility, bypassing the time it takes to achieve high organic search rankings, which can be especially beneficial for new studios or those in competitive locations.
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📌 Pro Tip: Incorporating PPC ads into your dance studio’s marketing strategy provides immediate visibility in front of potential new dancers, drives targeted traffic to your website and ultimately leads to increased studio revenue and growth.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: PPC, especially when combined with a new student offer, can be a great way to increase initial enrollment in your studio.
You can’t talk about the best dance studio marketing strategies without talking about open house events and free dance trials. Both are ideal marketing strategies for attracting prospective students and their families and is a risk-free opportunity to experience the quality and atmosphere of your classes firsthand. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s for everyone. New dancers get an in-depth look at your studio, meet the instructors and ask any questions they may have.
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📌 Pro Tip: Whenever I have a free trial class or open house, I always make sure to invite current students. It’s a great way to build your community, thank your existing clients, and they help welcome potential new dancers during the events.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: Open Houses are a great way to get people to visit your studio for the first time. I highly recommend combining an open house with PPC and flyer distribution to get as many people into your studio as possible and make it the hot spot in town.
Children’s dance birthday parties offer a unique opportunity to showcase the studio’s facilities, teaching style and vibrant community. Dance studios can create a memorable experience that leaves a lasting impression on all attendees, many of whom may love it enough to sign up for the next session.
Children’s dance birthday parties are an excellent marketing tool that provides a hands-on introduction to what your studio has to offer.
Actionable Insights:
Dance studio management software like Activity Messenger makes it easy to automate targeted emails six weeks before a child’s birthday. This serves as a timely reminder to parents planning their child’s party and keeps your dance studio top of mind.
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After hosting a birthday party, follow-up marketing to participants can leverage their recent positive experience at your studio to encourage further engagement and potential enrollment in a dance lesson.
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Regularly featuring birthday parties in your dance studio’s newsletter can keep this service top-of-mind for your existing clients, potentially sparking interest for future bookings.
By using children’s dance birthday parties as a marketing tool, dance studios can not only provide a fun and engaging service and increase revenue, but also strategically attract new students and grow their community.
Learn how Activity Messenger also helps with children’s party digital waivers, attendance and personnalized invitations.
📌 Pro Tip: When done well, kids parties are not only a great marketing strategy, but can have a big impact on your bottom line. Set strategic times for back-to-back parties and make it as seamless as possible for parents to book. This will ensure that all time slots are booked well in advance, making it as profitable as possible.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: Offering discounted parties at the beginning is a great way to not only thank your first customers, but to get them to bring their friends and families and help build a strong dance community around your studio.
Using the best tools to run and manage your studio can make your life easier. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into your dance studio’s marketing strategies can significantly increase efficiency, personalization and engagement.
Here are actionable insights:
Dance studios can effectively incorporate AI into their marketing strategies, leading to more personalized communications, efficient content creation, and ultimately, a stronger connection with potential and current dance students.
Branded merchandise creates visibility and a sense of belonging by turning your students into ambassadors for your dance studio.
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Inspirational dance quotes can uplift your students and remind them why they love to dance (even on the days that are harder for them). They can also serve as a powerful marketing tool when paired with your studio’s branding on merchandise, social media, or in-studio decor.
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Getting involved in local events through sponsorship is a great way to get your studio noticed and demonstrate your commitment to the community. Whether it’s a local sports team, a charity event or a school function, your dance studio can gain significant exposure.
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You can significantly increase your studio’s online visibility with a well-optimized Google My Business (GMB) profile. This free tool allows you to manage how your business appears on Google Maps and in search results. It makes it easier for potential students to find and choose your studio. Click here for a full guide on how to set this up.
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Volunteering in your community can raise your studio’s profile and build goodwill. Participating in community service projects or local events not only shows your studio’s commitment to the community, but also provides networking opportunities.
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Traditional flyers remain an effective tool for reaching new dance students, especially in local neighborhoods. They can be posted in community centers, local businesses, and public bulletin boards, providing broad visibility at a low cost.
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Community bulletin boards can be an excellent place to advertise your dance school. These boards offer free advertising space seen by a wide audience, from local supermarkets to libraries.
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This article was focused on how Activity Messenger can you market your dance studio. But the platform can do much more for your dance studio.
Recital ticket sale for Dance Studios
Online waivers for dance
Progress Report for dance students
Job Application Form for Dance
Online Attendance tracking
Best Dance Quotes
4- Social Media Marketing
Don’t be afraid to pay for social ads.
Facebook & Instagram Ads are a great way to promote your dance classes and camps.
Paying a few dollars a day to drive traffic to your website is well worth it.
Some people think that posting on your business profile is enough.
But organic reach has dropped dramatically in the last few years. Paid ads have become more important.
I usually create one set of ads per session.
It is not as time consuming as maintaining our social media and gives us much better results and reach.
All you have to do is set up an image or video ad. Target a radius of a few miles/kms around your location. Budget a few dollars per day. And there you go.
Instead of having a few open spots in your classes, a few hundred dollars of ad spend will give you that extra boost to fill your classes.
This has the potential to dramatically increase your profit margins, as every additional enrollment in a class is virtually pure profit.
📌 Pro Tip: On a 7 day window, I typically get a cost of $7 to $10 per purchase on Facebook ads. Which is great. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of value. A lot of people will sign up without clicking on the ad or after the 7 day window is over. And a surprising percentage of people sign up for our newsletter, which gives me options for future outreach.
📌 Tip for new dance studio owners: We know that finances are usually tight when you open your studio. But we recommend that you spend a decent amount on advertising to promote your studio. This dance studio marketing strategy will attract more students and get a bigger snowball rolling from the start. Then you offer amazing classes and students will re-enroll and start telling their friends.