Dance competitions are a great place for dancers to showcase their talent, while meeting other dancers and growing their community. Dance studios looking for dance school marketing ideas have a number of potential avenues to pursue, including hosting dance competitions.

We think it’s one of the best ways for you to boost your brand’s visibility, for a number of reasons. It’s a great opportunity for cross-promotions and partnerships, getting noticed on social media, and growing your local dance community. While organizing a dance competition is no walk in the park, if you can pull it off, it will be a great step forward for your business’ exposure. Here are some things to think about, when creating and managing a dance competition to grow your school.

RELATED: Growing your Dance Studio on a Budget

Do your Research

First, look around at the other relevant dance competitions, so you can do some market research. Depending on the caliber of your dancers and the types of competitions they attend, you may have to look at local, state, national or international dance competitions. What are the fees for dance schools, participants and guests, in your area? Do they provide refreshments for guests? What do they do well and what could they improve on?

Ask your dancers who have spent a lot of time in competitions, to see what to do and what not to do, when running competitions. If you are located in a major city, you will likely know a few dancers who have traveled and competed internationally – an excellent knowledge and experience base.

Organize and Plan

Once you’ve figured out who you would like to have be a part of the organizing committee and you’ve crafted an overall vision of what you want to see at your dance competition, you’ll have to figure out how to execute. What ticket sale platform will you be using? How will you deal with a large number of guests during intermissions, food and washroom breaks? Where are you sourcing trophies or prizes from? Who will be determining timelines and who will enforce them? Don’t forget, if you find event sponsors (a great way to stretch your budget further), they will likely want some input as well.

The organizing committee will need to examine all of these factors, in order to determine the best way to make the completion fun and talent-filled, while running efficiently. If you’re organized from the get-go, you increase your chances of things going smoothly and people enjoying themselves.

Social Media Is King

Social media marketing should be a cornerstone to any business, along with an overall digital marketing plan. Engagement is what you’re looking for and a successful, social media-friendly dance competition should help produce a ton of that. You can encourage people to correctly tag your school and hashtags, by having your MC mention it, as well as having it on pamphlets and posters. Capitalizing on the new Facebook Live and Instagram Live features can also be great way to further spread your message. You can even purchase a custom Snapchat filter, so all of the snaps can have your branding on it; just make sure it looks on-brand and doesn’t get in the way of the subject (or people won’t use it!)

Find Sponsors and Partners

While running a dance competition is one of the best dance school marketing ideas, it’s not cheap. You will have to pay for the venue, vendors, organizers, staff, trophies and more. To help you cover the costs and to possibly turn a bit of a profit, you’ll need sponsors. Make a list of businesses that share a similar target demographic as your dance school, without them being a competitor — juice bars, athletic wear shops, yoga studios, and lifestyle brands are just a few potential examples.

You’ll have to provide incentives for them to join, which means you’ll need to find an accurate projection of the number of eyes that will see the sponsor’s logo and/or information. Don’t forget to contact the media, so you can create even more publicity under this dance school marketing idea.