Open House horror

You’ve been working on your Open House event for a month or so.  You have the face painting set, you’ve organised the guest teacher workshops, you have snacks ready to go and maybe even a jumping castle. You know you’ve put together a great event and cannot wait to share it with your existing dance families. But really you can’t wait to see all the new faces and potential new students coming to find out more about what being a part of your studio is like.

It’s now the morning of the Open House.  You turn up to the studio and start greeting your helpers. Everyone is excited, you’re confident that it’s going to be an awesome day. Then, as the event starts, you realise something…there are hardly any new faces and your studio is filled with current families. The day wraps up and you had a handful of potential new dance families turn up but nothing compared to the numbers you wanted.

Has this happened to you?

I know it’s happened to me when I was running my first open house. I’ve also spoken to many other studio owners who have gone through the same thing.

So what happened? It’s not the event itself. The problem is that you don’t spend 80% of your time, energy and resources on MARKETING your Open House.

You can have the best event on the planet but if you don’t tell people about it, no one will come!

So today I want to share with you three marketing strategies to get your open house out there to more people.

1. Internal Inferno – What I mean here is that you want to get your existing dance families super excited for the event. Too many studio owners just put “bring your friends” in the newsletter and leave it at that. Create custom made Facebook cover photos that your students can upload and share and then be sure to talk about it in your private Facebook group. You may also consider offering an incentive. An example would be that if they bring 3 friends they receive a freebie or discount of some kind…anything to get your current clients working for YOU. This small strategy alone can make a huge impact to the new people coming to your Open House.
2. Facebook Advertising – I talk about Facebook advertising a lot because it works and it’s an inexpensive way to share your event with people in your local area. Create localised adverts in the power editor that showcases the different activities you’ll have during the day. Take it one step further and create a re-marketing campaign where you can track people who visit your Open Day page on your website in order to send them reminder adverts through Facebook. You can also do this with your current dance family database.
3. Local Business Bonanza – Speak with local businesses about donating services or prizes for the day in exchange for promoting their business in some way. See if you can leave flyers in their store/shop or, even better, get them to do an email to their database to say that they are a supporter/sponsor of the event.

And don’t forget to collect everyone’s details who come to the event and add them to an email marketing sequence which invites them to try classes and eventually enroll. You need to touch base with them within 24 hours after being at the Open House to make sure you strike when the iron is still hot.  Waiting a few days to reach out will allow the “sizzle” of the event to die down so don’t hesitate!

These are just a few things you can do to increase your attendee numbers of potential new families at your Open House!

Good luck!

Clint

P.S. If you want more ideas or need feedback on your open day marketing strategies, then me and the other 230+ studio owners in the Dance Studio Owners Association would love to help. You can find out more about the Association here.

If you want to receive business and marketing strategies in your inbox each week to help GROW your Dance Studio, click here!