How To Promote Your Dance School, CrossFit Gym, Or Other Competitive Environment
When your hobby is inherently competitive like a dance studio, horseback riding facility, or CrossFit gym, it can be hard to build a connected community around your small business.
Healthy competition is fun and all, but all of your athletes will improve their skills when they are supported by their peers. It’s important to create a culture of celebrating each other, even when one member beats the other.
Build Healthy Competition Offline
Ensure you find ways to encourage all of your athletes, not just the star performers in class, lessons, or training sessions. This encouragement can go a long way in building confidence. You want all of your students to become the most elite competitors, right? If your top dancer, rider, or athlete has peers who will challenge them to improve their skills and practice more, then you’ll end up winning more competitions, retaining your top talent, and attracting new customers.
Display some sort of celebration in your lobby. This can be an athlete of the month, a most improved, a new personal best, most training sessions attended, previous competition highlights, or just someone you think deserves a little extra spotlight.
Set collective goals. Make sure that you aren’t singling anyone out and that there is room for outliers, but encouraging teamwork can help take the competitive edge off within your studio. For example, you can say we want someone to earn a personal best score on their dressage test this weekend. Or we want riders from our barn to earn 10 blue ribbons this summer. That way, each win is celebrated collectively.
Lots of fitness studios also host challenges for nutrition and new lifting goals. These are other great examples of creating collective goals. Just be sure these are fair by making them percentage ratios instead of flat numbers.
Celebrate Supportive Rivalries Online
The way you share news with your community also matters. For example, while you want to honor your soloists in your next performance, you also want to be respectful of the disappointed hopefuls who didn’t get the parts they wanted. Perhaps instead of a cast list posted in your lobby, an email announcement to announce the parts would let the dancers react privately and be ready to celebrate the top performers when they attend rehearsal next.
Recap your performances on social media. Did some of your athletes compete at The Arnold or the CrossFit Games? Post photos and videos to share how everyone performed. Call out specific names since they’ll be more likely to reshare your content when you do that.
Writing a blog may not seem like an obvious marketing tactic, but your blog is where you can post about wins and recognize your community members for achievements large and small. Did you have an amazing time at StarPower or USA DanceSport Championships? We want to hear about it! Who danced to what songs with who? How did they do?
Even if your community ends up competing against each other, you can still build a culture of celebrating each other and motivating everyone to work hard together for the next one.
Interested in more ideas to help your small business grow? Schedule a meeting so we can chat!