In the competitive field of dance teaching, marketing your dance studio can be quite the challenge, not to mention cripplingly expensive for the smaller or start up dance studio. So how can you attract new students without breaking the bank?

Traditional advertising avenues such as the local Yellow Pages, or radio and television, however small the station, are just too far out of the advertising budget that many dance studios have to work with. In addition, how well this kind of investment works is almost impossible to track. You may indeed be gaining a new student as a result of a commercial they have seen or heard, but the chances are you will forget to ask, and hopefully they will be far more interested in listening to your expert dance instruction to mention how they happened to hear about your dance studio.

There is another, very effective and economical method of marketing your dance studio that you may have never considered, or even heard much about. In today’s economic climate, the savvy dance school owner should consider the great power of online advertising. Thanks to the great spread of everyday Internet use by exactly the people you need to target and the power of major search engines like Google, you can target specific geographical areas for people searching basic keywords, in this case things like “dance” “dance teacher” and “dancing lessons”. Even better, online advertising lets you target the specific demographic you are seeking. If you teach ballet for instance, you can directly connect with people who are seeking ballet instruction specifically.

But how does this kind of marketing really convert into great dance studio advertising? To be most effective you need to direct the person who clicked on your brief little online ad to a more expansive “landing page”. On this page you need to create a great and compelling reason for this potential customer, or visitor (they are “visiting” your page now) to share their basic contact information with you via a simple online contact form. Giving something way free is always a great way to achieve this. Why not offer a free trial lesson in return for the visitor sharing their name, telephone number and email address? The data from these forms is emailed to you immediately so you can follow up on these leads while your dance studio is still fresh in their mind.

The true beauty of using the Internet and this kind of dance studio advertising is how little it costs. You will only be charged for potential customers who take the time to “click” on your ad specifically, those people who are demonstrating a real interest in learning to dance in the first place. Online advertising like this really is the best and economically sensible way to make the best of your dance studio marketing dollar.