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Tools & Resources for Dance Studio Owners
At Dance Studio Breakthrough, we only recommend tools & resources that weʼve created, use ourselves, and/or have good understanding of through the shared experiences of studio owners. Running a dance studio is hard work. I hope you find the following to be helpful!
Content Creation
The content you create is heavily tied to your business growth. Like all marketing pursuits, creating well-planned, well-executed content that engages with your audience and creates a level of trust will directly affect your sales. Content creation is important because it builds trust, improves studio recognition in your community, establishes your expertise, creates leads, and helps with your SEO.
Top Blog Posts
ABOUT CONTENT CREATION
Top Tools
ABOUT CONTENT CREATION
Canva
Canva is entirely awesome, as you likely already know. It’s fantastic for creating amazing graphics for your studio’s website and social, and even branding pieces such as logos. Their free version has a ton of options and will work fine for many studios. Or at the paid level, you can access unlimited stock images, explore features like branding colors & fonts, and use folders for organizing all your creations.
Fiverr
Sometimes we small biz owners need help in areas that are not our forte. Fiverr is an amazing place to find someone to create content for your dance studio, such as writing website copy, making a printable freebie, or creating marketing materials (and that’s just the start). If you’re like me, you’ll get excited about the possibilities – give them a look! By delegating tasks to the Fiverr community, you can much more easily level up your studio’s content creation & marketing.
Creative Market
Creative Market has a ton of creative developers that create logos, fonts, backgrounds, website themes and etc. It’s a great spot to find reasonably priced graphics for use in your content creation. They offer 6 free products every Monday; I’ve downloaded a number of great graphics and fonts this way. I’ve used some of their dancer graphics in creating dance posters for my Etsy shop. 
And did you know you can upload both graphics and fonts into your Canva account (paid level) to use when creating your studio’s graphics?
Dance Studio Branding
Does your studio’s branding make a memorable impression on your target market? Good branding does just that. It also gives your customers and prospects a sense of what to expect from your dance studio, and is a way of distinguishing yourself from your competitors. Ideally, your brand is built to be a true representation of who you are as a dance studio, and how you wish to be perceived. Needing a rebrand or a branding tweak? Here are some tools & resources to assist you!
Top Blog Posts
ABOUT DANCE STUDIO BRANDING
Freebies & Products
If you’re needing a new dance studio logo, program bills or marketing materials, we can help with that! Visit this page of our Studio of Dance.com website to see examples and learn more.
DANCE STUDIO MARKETING
The bad news? Marketing is a must if you want to grow your dance studio.
The good news? Contrary to popular belief – marketing can be very creative, and much of it can be automated.
And there is no shortage of help to be found in this area, starting with the tools & resources listed below!
Top Blog Posts
about DANCE STUDIO MARKETING
Dance Studio Marketing Freebies & Products
Dance Studio Marketing 101 Guide (Free!)
You know you need to market your dance studio, but where do you begin? There are so many dance marketing strategies, you can easily get lost. The techniques and strategies in this guide will help you outshine your competition and bring new dancers through your doors. Oh, and it’s free! 🙂
Plan Your 1st Email Marketing Campaign
As awesome as email marketing is, it’s made up of several different components, each of which has a learning curve. Are you flummoxed about how to set up email marketing for your dance studio? Want help in getting your studio’s first email campaign in place?
This guide + workbook is designed to help you understand and put together the pieces. Clear instructions and worksheets are included to ensure you get your 1st email marketing campaign in place as quickly as possible!
Welcome Email Templates (Free)
Setting up email marketing for your dance studio? You’ll need an awesome welcome email that makes a solid first impression.
If you’re not sure what to put in that all important first email, you’re in luck! Click below for free (whoot whoot!) email welcome templates specifically created for use with dance studios!
Email Marketing-Welcome Sequence Starter
To experience the full benefit of email marketing and get more new dancers through your doors, you’ll need to write a welcome series (aka: sequence) for your new subscribers.
A series of four to five emails works well, in which you can introduce your studio, demonstrate your expertise, and offer an incentive for newbies, so they’ll register their child for classes. Now you just have to write them. Ugh!!
This series of templates takes the guesswork out of writing your dance studio’s welcome email series. They’re super easy to use – simply copy and paste the content into your email or a word doc and fill in the blanks, changing details as necessary.
Top Marketing Tools
Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you
click on some of our links we may earn a small commission.
In my opinion, ConvertKit is the best email service for getting started with minimal hassle. In fact, I’m lowkey obsessed with it! I’d used Mailchimp for years and always struggled with its setup and organization, resulting in my rarely sending emails out to my readers. It’s a downright relief to report that the ConvertKit user experience is very user-friendly compared to Mailchimp (and compared to Constant Contact, which I used for years prior to that).
You can ramp up your lead generation by putting ConvertKit popups and embedded forms into place on your website. Segmenting subscribers into focused groups is a breeze, which means you can easily send different content to those who show interest in your comp teams than those with preschool children. Use the segments in conjunction with automations and you’ll keep time spent on email marketing as minimal as possible. Pretty awesome stuff.
These blogposts contain lots of juicy info on the topic of email marketing & ConvertKit for dance studios:
With Leadpages, you can create an unlimited number of landing pages and opt-in forms, and effectively integrate them with your website, social media advertising, and social media marketing campaigns.
But wait… Why would you want to do that when you already have a dance studio website (aka: your #1 marketing tool)?
Landing pages are amazing for helping you achieve specific goals, such as generating more leads or to increase registration for your summer dance programs. They’re wonderful for promoting specific events (e.g. an upcoming Nutcracker production) or promotional videos of your studio. They focus visitors in on ONE specific thing and give them a clear, direct path to conversion.
Use my link below to try Leadpages for FREE for 14 days!
Dance Website Tools
Having designed websites for dance studios and performing arts organizations for over 20 years, I can comfortably say I’m an expert in dance studio website design, tools, and best practices. 
Below you’ll find a list of helpful posts from this blog, as well as a number of juicy tools and resources I can heartily recommend!
Top Blog Posts
ABOUT DANCE STUDIO WEBSITE STRATEGIES
Dance Website Freebies & Products
Custom Dance Studio Website Design
•Does your studio’s current website make you cringe?
•Or are you a new dance studio wanting to start things off right?
We would love to help you grow your studio through a fantastic new website!
At Studio Of Dance.com (our main business), we create beautiful, user-friendly, professional responsive websites for dance studios and performance arts organizations.
•Or are you a new dance studio wanting to start things off right?
We would love to help you grow your studio through a fantastic new website!
At Studio Of Dance.com (our main business), we create beautiful, user-friendly, professional responsive websites for dance studios and performance arts organizations.
Calls-To-Action Workbook (Free)
Are you wanting to increase enrollment at your dance studio through your website, but not sure how to do so? One of the first things I’d recommend is to improve your website’s calls-to-action.
Click below to get a (Free!) Calls-to-Action Guide + Workbook, featuring juicy tips and actionable steps that can lead more site visitors to and through registration!
Learn the Secrets of a Dance Studio Website Designer!
In this free 5-part email series called “Secrets of a Dance Studio Website Designer”, you’ll learn how to improve your existing studio website, which can lead to more eyeballs on your website and increased enrollment.
Click below to sign up for our newsletter and unlock the secrets!
Click below to sign up for our newsletter and unlock the secrets!
SEO Checklist (Free)
Are you frustrated that your dance studio’s website isn’t showing up nice & high in the search engine listings? It can be a challenge to improve your ranking, especially if neighboring studios are doing a great job with their own search engine optimization.
Use my #1 DIY search engine optimization tip to begin fixing this problem! Click the button below for a (FREE) SEO Checklist and instructions to get you started. registration!
Top Website Tools
Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you
click on some of our links we may earn a small commission.
I host this blog on HostGator and we host many of our web design customers’ websites on HostGator as well. We remain with HostGator because it’s known to have the best customer support (which is important to us) and it’s the fastest of the three we’ve tried out.
At $2.95USD/month to start with the basic plan, Bluehost is a very reasonably priced, hosting service that is almost never down and has excellent 24-7 customer service, a free SSL certificate for security. NOTE: We’ve never personally used Bluehost, but have heard only good things.
There are a TON of domain name companies out there, and I assume that almost all of them will do a decent job of selling you a URL. We buy and manage our domain names using GoDaddy. Why? Honestly, we started with them and it’s easy to use, so we’ve never had reason to change. 🙂
If you’re a DIY-er, you may want to consider using Squarespace to build your dance studio’s website. Squarespace is simple, straight-forward, and easy to use. While simplicity and a limited number of features can make life easy, it can also make life, well, limited, and that’s the downside to Squarespace. Still, very worth considering if you’re on a shoestring!
If you’re preferring to use WordPress to build your own dance studio website, I’d recommend checking out Envato Marketplace. Envato is an online community for creative assets, tools and talent. I used Envato Elements to find and buy my WordPress theme for this blog. They have a ton of options that are fun to look through & select from.
office and project management
I have ZERO doubt that at the studio you have a ton of things going on at once. When you and your staff are juggling classes, parents, registration, performances, competitions and etc, the services you’re using to manage everything become that much more important.
Here are my current favorites, with which you can streamline your studio projects and organize your staff and responsibilities. Note that many studio software services also have wonderful methods for organizing and managing your dance families, registrations, costumes and more.
Top Tools
FOR OFFICE & PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Asana
I use Asana obsessively to manage my projects, tasks, and creations. It's an excellent project management tool that can help your dance studio keep track of various tasks and staff members, create advanced to-do lists, and organize assignments. If you're ready for you and your team to become more organized and prepared for anything, give it a go!
Their Premium level includes extra bells & whistles, but their "free" level is completely awesome, and what I'm still happily using.
Google Workspace
Having email troubles at your studio? Too much spam? Are you fed up with your email service?
A number of our customers have found relief from these issues with Google Workspace.
If you don't have one already, you can get a domain-based email address through Google Workspace (strongly recommended), such as jill@yourdancestudio.com. You'll also have access to online storage, shared calendars, and video conferencing.
Top Tools
FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
If you’re needing help with your dance studio’s Facebook Marketing, we can help! Click below for more info on what’s included in our package, plus pricing and frequently asked questions.
Tailwind is my go-to social media scheduler. It handles Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook Posts, so you won’t have to spend your life on the computer. It feels so good to get consistent and schedule out my social! New members get one month free through the link below.
Preview is the Instagram planner in the world I use, and I love it. You can use it on your phone (iPhone and Android) and on your computer. With Preview, you can easily plan your studio’s posts, stories and reels, find the best hashtags, caption ideas, presets, and more.
Ok, I’m not going to mince words here… You need Canva for your dance studio. Whether you’re creating Instagram Stories, dance posters, or the header for your website, Canva can do everything you need it to to make sure your studio is on-brand and looking sweet! Click below to sign up!
Studio Shops & Ticket Sales
What’s the best way to start an online store for your dance studio? You’ve got no shortage of options! The best service for you depends on your particular needs (obviously). If you’re scoping out the possibilities, here are 3 options to get you started – Shopify to sell anything, Nimbly to host your online dance boutique, and Tututix to sell tickets to your performances.
Top Tools For Studio Shop & Ticket Sales
Shopify
With Shopify, studio owners can build and customize an online store and sell in multiple places, including web, mobile, in person, and across multiple channels from social media to online marketplaces.
Nimbly
A number of our web design clients use Nimbly for their studio's online dance boutique. With Nimbly, you can create dress code lists for individual or a group of classes, and/or open a full online storefront. You choose the prices!
Tututix
With Tututix, you can easily sell and distribute tickets to your dance performances. Assigned seats are no problem, and in addition to a print option, you can have tickets sent to email or smartphone.
Studio Software
We coordinate studio owners’ websites with their studio software service for online scheduling and registration, and so we knew Studio Director and Jackrabbit to be the most used options among our customers. Still, I didn’t expect this to become quite such a two-company race! Because they service the vast majority of the survey takers, I’ve focused primarily on them in this newsletter, but they’re not the only players.
Other studio software services include (but are not limited to) Akada/Danceworks, MindBody, Dance Studio Pro, and ClassJuggler.
Top Studio Software Tools
Jackrabbit Dance
Jackrabbit Dance is a reliable and robust dance studio management software that helps studio owners take control of their businesses. Many of our website design customers use them for online scheduling and registration.
Studio Director
Studio Director is the other studio management software most commonly used by our web design customers. With our dance studio software you can manage the complete enrollment process, automate your billing and payments, view records and reporting, and offer flexible scheduling.
Trademarked Dance Programs
To be clear, I personally have not used the following dance/art programs, nor do I know that much about them. They are programs that have been used by one or more of our clients and so I’m including them here in case you’d like to take a look into those possibilities.
Some Programs Our Dance Studio Clients Use
Fine Arts Club
A fun and active program for preschool-aged children focusing on enriched play that builds confidence, creativity and happy kids.
Social Media
Ugh, social media, am I right? Enjoyable to peruse in a leisurely fashion, but a time-wasting “pain in the tuckus” when it comes to generating content for your dance studio’s social channels. Below you’ll find 3 tools I’ve found super helpful in creating and managing my own social content, plus a FB marketing service for dance studios that could be of help to you!