HOW TO PROMOTE A DANCE SCHOOL ON INSTAGRAM – TOP 10 TIPS

Find below how to promote a dance school on Instagram. The best 10 dance studio marketing tips for dance schools, instructors & classes in 2023. Boost your dance studio sales with the best digital marketing and social media tips including Instagram marketing for dancers and dance schools and dance clubs.

Mau from eDigital shares below how to use Instagram to generate leads and increase sales for Dance Studio/Dance School businesses.

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DANCE STUDIO MARKETING ON INSTAGRAM

Mau shares the top 10 tips when promoting a dance school on Instagram.

THE BEST 10 DANCE STUDIO MARKETING MARKETING TIPS FOR INSTAGRAM

Before I share some of the best marketing tips to promote your dance studio on Instagram, I would like to say I am a Latin dancer: I dance salsa and bachata and I am currently learning Kizomba.

I have also been working as a Digital Marketing Specialist for over 17+ years, I help marketers manage and optimise their digital marketing campaigns in order to increase brand awareness, preference, leads, sales and loyalty. I offer weekly campaign management that includes reports from the best social media analytics tools. And secondly, I also offer customised strategic training workshops where we look at objectives and plan strategies to achieve those objectives.

10. INSTAGRAM MARKETING FOR DANCE STUDIO OWNERS

It is very important for Dance Studio owners to know the key stats of Instagram on their own market.

Let’s take Aus as an example, there are more than 5 million Australians using Instagram.

Most of these Australians are between the ages of 15-35 which includes what we marketers called them: Gen Y Millennials (81-95) and Gen Z Centennials (96-2012), therefore if your dance studio is targeting this demographic, your dance studio must be using Instagram.

Instagram offers two main opportunities:

Organic reach. You can reach teens and young people interested to book a dance course through free posts (organic) and engage with current dancers or their parents interested to book a second or third course.
Paid reach. The second opportunity is to target a specific demographic and psychographics via Instagram ads. For example, you know that most of your Dance Students are between 20-35 years old and live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs as your dance studio is located in Bondi Junction. Then you can create an Instagram ad that targets people of that age who live only in the eastern suburbs area. You can even go deeper and only target people interested in dancing.

Note: TikTok is also a key channel if you want to grow your dancing studio. TikTok by default was popular due to fun dance performances and funny videos. Apart from publishing fun dance videos on TikTok, you should use some of the best TikTok hashtags for likes.

9. FINDING YOUR AUDIENCE FOR YOUR DANCE STUDIO ON INSTAGRAM

The most valuable audience for your dance studio may be the worst audience for another dance studio.

Before you try to find an audience on Instagram, tt is important you have nailed down the key or niche audience you want to reach on Instagram.

There is a variety of ways to find and reach your most valuable audience on Instagram.

Start following, liking and commenting on photos of people who have tagged a) the dance type you offer and/or b) the city/suburb you are located in. You can use some of the best Instagram tools or automate “likes” and follow” with some of the best Instagram bots for free and real instagram followers . Just ensure you pick one that allows you to auto-like or auto-follow geo-specific hashtags. Example: I want to auto-like photos that include the hashtag: #hiphop AND #sydney.
If you do not want to pay for an auto-like tool, you can just start following people to upload photos of the dance type or similar dance types you offer like their photos and comment on them.

Your Instagram Strategy has be different from your Facebook Strategy as the user expectation for engaging on each platform is different

8. INSTAGRAM AUTO-LIKE AND AUTO-FOLLOW TOOLS

If you are a dance studio owner that reaches a specific geo area, there is no point in automating “likes” of hashtags that are not close to or around your studio. It is crucial you automate the “likes” tool allows you to auto-like ONLY dance-related photos in your area.

You want to be able to target photos that contain both #ballet AND #sydney.

You can find some of the best bots for likes and followers on Instagram.

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7. DANCE CONTENT FOR INSTAGRAM

There are different content types to engage potential and current dance students. However, I would suggest focusing on

a) Successful student stories.

Below is a great example of a popular post on Instagram with 170k+ likes of Madrid Dance Center celebrating the 80 year’s birthday celebration of Antonio Salas, a professional dancer of Ballet Nacional de España.

Madrid Dance Center Antonio Salas birthday celebration popular Instagram post

Madrid Dance Center Antonio Salas birthday celebration popular Instagram reel post.

b) How-to’s and Step by Step dance movement guides

c) Inspirational content: an amazing unique dancing move or performance, how to recover from injury, etc.

YouTube has to be part of any Dance Studio Content strategy as young people are also going to YouTube to find these types of content. Make sure you optimise the title and descriptions on your YouTube channels.

You do not have to reinvent the wheel, you can use the same videos you are publishing on Instagram, and also on your YouTube channel. Sometimes curating the best content can also bring high levels of engagement. Meaning you do not necessarily need to produce content. just group different pieces of proven highly popular content into one single blog post, article or video.

Dance studio owners have to be relaxed in their tone, non-commercial in messaging and consistent in their use.

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6. INFLUENCER MARKETING FOR DANCE STUDIO OWNERS

There is a big buzz about Influencing marketing.

Who is the best influencer for a Dance Studio?

People who have not only to pay for a course but who have paid two or three times a course!

It is imperative for dance studio owners to ensure they are following these people and giving them the right reasons and tools to create what we call “Authentic Advocacy”.

The right reasons for them to post authentic advocacy might include:

awards
certificates of completion,
final dance shows/performances
competitions to win something money cannot buy, etc.

You can launch a “paid” influencer campaign once you have fully engaged your most profitable customer segment who is – and I wanna say it again – the people who have already trusted you and bought your product not only once but more importantly multiple times.

With limited time, resources and budget, it is key to keep focused on the basics first:

A great Instagram feed and bio
A great website
A great Youtube channel

Once the above is done, I would suggest getting in touch with us so we can help you run the best influencer marketing campaign for your dance studio.

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5. LEVERAGE DANCE CELEBRITIES’ POPULARITY TO GET EXTRA REACH

Posting content related to dance celebrities you truly admire can also offer you extra reach. It is important you tag the corresponding hashtags that will bring people into your celebrity content.

Some of the world’s top dance celebrities you can create content around include:

Albert Torres (American Salsa dancer)
Alex Morel and Desiree Godsell (Bachata dancers)
Alla (Leyla) Kushnir (Belly dancer)
Anna Pavlova (Russian ballet dancer)
Carmen Amaya (Spanish flamenco dancer)
Channing Tatum (Streaper, pop dancer)
Eduardo Paim (Kizomba dancer)
Fred Astaire (American ballroom dancer, tap dancer)
Ginger Roger (American ballroom dancer, tap dancer)
Jabbawockeez (Hip-hop dance group)
Lola Flores (Spanish flamenco dancer)
Maddie Ziegler (American tap dancer, ballet, lyrical, contemporary, acro, jazz and aerial dancer)
Martha Graham (Ballet and Contemporary dancer)
Michael Flatley (Riverdancer, tap dancer)
Michale Jackson (Created his own unique style mixing locking, popping, jazz, mime, tap and ballroom dance moves)
Misty Copeland (Ballet dancer)
Patrick Swayze (Ballet dancer)
Sofia Boutella (Classical dance, hip-hop, street dance)
Willi Ninja (voguing dancer from the Harlem Ball scene)
Yanis Marshall (French male classical ballet and jazz dancer who dance on heels)

4. CONSUMER CONTESTS/COMPETITIONS TO GROW YOUR DANCE STUDIO BUSINESS

There are six aspects to any successful Instagram contest:

Prize: make sure the price is relevant to what you offer.
Method of entry: make it as easy as possible for people to enter.
Promotion – Pre- During and Post. Planning is key here. Pre: start promoting your competition at least two weeks in advance so people have time to think about what to do to enter also allowing time for people to share the opportunity. During: feature best entries of the day or week via email, Facebook post, blog post, etc. Post: final winner announcement and how the winner is enjoying the price.
Duration: one month max.
Partner: Partnering with a related local business that has a bigger Instagram following base will help you amplify your competition.
Competition’s terms and conditions: ensure all the legalities are approved by a lawyer.

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3. POST INSTAGRAM STORIES CONSISTENTLY

Instagram stories are the result of the popularity of ephemeral and goofy (odd, opinionated, awkward) content led by Snapchat and will not slow down anytime soon.

The cool thing about Instagram Stories is that allows dance studio owners to record live classes and dance performances or take photos of students and teachers and add them to an aggregated Instagram story that lasts for only 24 hours on Instagram.

While Instagram photos are typically reserved for perfectly composed image shots, Instagram Stories allows dance studio owners to share the ephemeral, un-polished lighthearted little moments that may not be as picture-perfect and can be sometimes silly moments your audience will love to see.

It is important to know that Instagram allows only videos or photos taken in the last 24 hours. A way around this will be to screenshot the photos so they come up again on your camera roll as photos taken in the last 24 hours.

For videos you cannot do that, so you will have to use a third-party tool to re-post the video on your camera roll. (Meta trixter will change the date of your photo or video or Storied for Instagram will make a copy of your selected photos or videos into your camera roll.

When your followers visit your dance studio profile page that has a current Instagram story, they will notice a coloured circle around your dance studio profile photo. When they click on the profile photo, their followers will be taken to your story. When a user views a story where you allow messaging, they’ll see the option to send a message at the bottom left of the story.

The message will end up in your direct message inbox, as opposed to Instagram posts where comments are publicly visible.

Steps:

Do dummy test stories and delete them, till you are confident you got some decent stories to be published.
Start testing different story types: student profiles/performances, teachers’ profiles, other popular dancers, team life in a work environment or outside work, time-limited dance studio promotions, behind the scenes and/or sneak peeks of what’s coming up (make customers feel included), dance tips, dance tricks, education resources, other venues where students can train or dance, upcoming dance festivals or congresses, takeovers a la Snapchat.
Do not forget your call to action in your copywriting > best lead people to your bio link as it is the easiest way for users.
Remember to make a judgement on what sort of content deserves the urgency of a 24-hour transient Story vs. the permanency of the highly curated, polished and traditional Instagram feed.
Last but not least, ensure you save your Stories so you can use them on other social media platforms or websites. You can even use them for “In case you miss it” or “Throwback Thursdays #tbt” stories.

The first brands that jumped into Instagram stories were:

Net a porter
MTV
NASA (Nasa is one of the top 10 most popular brands on Instagram)
General Electric
Loreal makeup
TechCrunch
Urban Outfitters
ASOS
Elle UK
Mac Cosmetics
blueprint
Mercedes Benz
Maclaren
Forever21
Amazon

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2. INSTAGRAM ONLY MAY NOT GENERATE THE SALES YOU NEED

Google Ads allows you to optimise bids based on your dance studio geo time characteristics and dancer context. Let’s say potential dance students are on their mobile phones searching for a dance class you carry in your dance studio. By optimising bids for these key buying moments, you can encourage these potential dancers to visit your physical dance studio.

You should…

Adjust Google Ads bids based on closeness to your dance studio locations. As local inventory ads are primarily served to people close to your dance studio, use location bid adjustments to increase bids based on proximity to your location extension addresses. This way, local people will be informed of available products in your nearby stores.
Adjust Google Ads to capture your potential students on their mobile phones. Local inventory ads are designed to capture hyper-local queries (especially on mobile) which would drive traffic to your dance studio. Consider using stronger bid adjustments for mobile to maximise this potential.
Increase Google Ads bids during your dance studio’s open hours and high-traffic hours. Keeping bids active 24/7 and using a positive bid adjustment during store open hours can increase your ad relevancy to potential dance students. You can also have stronger bid adjustments during high-traffic days and hours.

1. LAST THOUGHTS

My last two suggestions are:

Stop looking at the new flashy tactical social media tools and be more strategic into how they can first increase customer lifetime value which means how you are going to get current customers to buy more premium, more often, more quantity and give them the tools and resources to advocate on your behalf.
Be consistent with your delivery. If you do not have time to reach your followers not even on a weekly basis, it is not worth your efforts. Use a social media campaign manager who can do the work on your behalf. This process can be solved via a great strategic marketing workshop with the help of a digital marketing consultant.

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CONCLUSION

Effective dance studio marketing is critical to expand your reach and bring more revenue into your dance studio. Well-planned and crafted digital marketing promotion strategies make a big difference in running your dance school business by targeting prospective customers and retaining loyal ones.

eDigital can help you conceptualise, plan, develop, run and optimise successful Instagram marketing campaigns that generate leads and sales for your dance studio.

Our digital marketing services include:

Strategic planning for social media and other digital marketing channels.
Online advertising management and optimisation: Google Ads Search, Display, Re-marketing and social media advertising.
Training: social media marketing training and digital marketing training.
SEO strategy and execution. Including content development:articles, stories, eye-catching and SEO-optimised visuals.
Celebrity and influencer marketing campaign strategy.
Brand development. Logo creation, brand personality development and design of marketing materials.
Consumer contests/competitions/giveaways.
Email marketing. Dip sequence design and deployment.
Conversion rate optimisation. It is also called “path to purchase” optimisation.

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HOW TO PROMOTE A DANCE STUDIO ON INSTAGRAM

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