If you are passionate about dance, running a dance studio can be an extremely rewarding occupation. You will be waking up every day, sharing your passion with your students while encouraging and inspiring them to pursue their love for dance.
But, as you share your passion for dance with others, you also need to ensure your dance studio is running smoothly and generating enough money. To this end, you will need to come up with strategies that will help to streamline operations in your dance studio, attract new clients, retain existing ones and keep your business growing.
Fortunately, we’ve already done the heavy lifting for you. In this article, we will walk you through eight strategies on how to run a successful dance studio. So, whether you are looking to open a dance studio in the near future or you are already running one, the following strategies will help to keep your dance studio running successfully.
1. Create a Realistic Dance Studio Business Plan
A great dance studio business plan forms the foundation of running a successful dance studio. Hence, if you are looking to open a dance studio or you opened a dance studio without a business plan, it will be highly advisable to craft a realistic dance studio business plan.
Having a dance studio business plan comes with several benefits. The main benefit of having one is that it will describe your dance business in detail, including your goals and objectives, as well as how you will accomplish them. Simply put, it will provide a point of reference for all your operations, making everything run smoothly.
2. Hire the Best Employees
Your employees will be the first point of contact between your dance clients and your studio. Simply put, they will be the face of your brand and your business. Hence, you need to ensure you hire the best employees.
If possible, you should hire people with top-notch dance skills and adequate teaching experience. On top of that, you should also make sure you hire people with great soft skills. They should be friendly, customer-service-oriented, responsible and great communicators.
Once you’ve put together a team, you should then spend some resources on training them. As you may probably know, every dance studio has its culture or the way it operates. And, you want the employees you’ve hired to embrace your culture and get-up-to speed on your day-to-day operations.
Besides training them, you also need to equip them with proper tools, to ensure they can deliver effectively. There are plenty of dance studio tools out there, which can help your teachers to be more effective and stay organized. And if your teachers are more effective, then your studio will also be successful.
3. Invest in Dance Studio Software
Investing in dance studio software is non-negotiable if you are looking to make your dance studio successful. Without this software, you will spend the majority of your time tracking memberships, payments, and class scheduling, among others.
And at the end of the day, you won’t have adequate time to offer dance classes, and this is the key reason why you ventured into this business. But with when you invest in dance studio software, it will take care of most of these tasks.
Dance studio software will enable you to keep track of student information, class information, ticket sales, marketing campaigns as well as prospect management. Also, dance studio software will streamline the registration process for your students.
Another benefit of investing in dance studio software is that it will streamline the communications process. For instance, you can use it to segment messages for different groups in your class. With dance studio software, you will become more effective, productive and efficient, while delivering a streamlined customer experience.
There are hundreds of different types of dance studio software on the market. So, take your time, do your research and then select a solution that aligns best with your dance business.
4. Invest in Robust Marketing Strategies
For your dance studio to be successful, you will need to be constantly bringing in new clients. And to achieve that, you will need to put in place robust marketing strategies. There are several dance studio marketing ideas you can use, to reach your target client. Some of the most effective ones include:
- Social media marketing: Paid social media ads can help to push your dance studio content directly in front of your target audience. What makes these ads highly effective is that they are extremely targeted. For instance, if you are looking to reach a certain demographic such as parents with children within the ages of five to nine within a specific area, you simply need to input that information into your ads.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Whenever a potential dance client is looking for a dance studio to join in their area, it’s highly likely they will search in Google. From there, they may then choose one of the studios that appear on the first page of the search results. Hence, you also need to invest in search engine optimization, to make sure your dance studio’s website appears on the first page for relevant keywords in your area.
- Pay-per-click advertising: Your dance studio website will take quite some time before it appears on the first page of the search results. In the meantime, you can invest in pay-per-click advertising. With pay-per-click advertising, your dance studio website will also appear high on the search engine results page. But, you will have to bid for that space.
Other dance studio advertising ideas that can help to attract new clients include direct emails, flyers, newspaper ads, influencer marketing, podcast sponsorships, and YouTube advertising, among others.
5. Set Up a Referral Program
Referral programs provide a cost-effective way of bringing new members to your dance studio, expanding your revenue base and growing your business. And, setting up a referral program is not as hard as it may appear. You simply need to encourage your students to invite their close associates like friends, family or work colleagues to check out your dance classes, while offering incentives for those who manage to do that.
For the incentives, you can offer gifts like discounted memberships or physical prizes like workout bands, branded water bottles, meal vouchers, or movie tickets, just to name a few. The most important thing is to ensure that the incentive you are offering is valuable enough and worth the referrer’s time and effort.
6. Diversify Your Offerings
Another secret of making your dance studio successful is to diversify your offerings. By diversifying your offerings, you will set yourself apart from the competition, attract a larger client base and grow your revenues. Some of the strategies that you can use to diversify your dance studio offerings include:
- Different class sizes: Most dance studios offer group sessions. However, you should also consider introducing solo lessons in your dance studio. For such sessions, you will be offering undivided attention to students who may be looking to nail down a particular move or advance to higher skills. Solo lessons will also cater to potential students who may not be comfortable attending group sessions.
- Online dance classes: Some people who may be interested in joining your dance studio may not be in a position to attend in-person classes, due to various reasons like work commitments or distance. Hence, offering online dance classes will help to accommodate this group. Again, you will be increasing the revenue streams for your dance studio.
7. Offer Outstanding Customer Service
A major part of making your dance studio successful is by providing outstanding customer service. Customer service is at the heart of client acquisition and retention. If you offer great customer service, your students will keep coming back and even referring their close associates, thus helping your dance studio to grow.
On the other hand, if your customer service is poor, you will keep losing members to your competitors. And eventually, you may find yourself with an empty class, and you may be forced to close your studio. So, ensure you provide excellent customer service at every turn.
8. Focus on Growing Your Retention Rates
There’s a high chance you will spend most of your resources in trying to attract new members to your dance studio. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s also important to focus on retaining the students you may already have.
In fact, recent studies show that it costs approximately five times to attract a new customer compared to retaining one you already have. Also, increasing customer retention rates by approximately 5% can increase your profits by around 25%.
Therefore, you also need to come up with strategies that can increase retention rates in your dance studio. Some of the methods that you can use to boost retention rates include offering loyalty discounts and special perks for long-term students.
Increasing your dance studio’s retention rates will help to boost your revenue over the long term. Also, it will save you money on marketing while helping to foster a close-knit dance studio community.
9. Wrapping It Up
Running a dance studio is not easy. But, by implementing the above success strategies, you will streamline your management processes, set yourself apart from the crowd, attract more clients, increase your retention rates and boost your revenue. And as a result, your dance studio will thrive.