– Tools & Resources –
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
A fun and active program for preschool-aged children focusing on enriched play that builds confidence, creativity and happy kids.