Apr 25, 2023 | Marketing
This is the fourth article in our ongoing blog series dedicated to helping dance studios understand the five steps of the local customer journey. In this article, we’ll review findability, SEO, and how to ensure your dance studio’s website can get in front of as many people as possible.
The simple truth is that a local customer journey can only begin if your website is found. As such, you must do everything to enhance your findability and search engine optimization. By deploying the right tools and techniques, you can ensure more customers find your website, learn more about your business, and ultimately enroll in your dance studio.
Enhancing Your SEO
These days, most local customer journeys begin with a customer finding a business or a website. As such, you have to maximize the findability of your website.
The basic components of SEO are the same across multiple industries. First, you should conduct keyword research to ensure that you are using the right search terms when someone is looking for your business, and you should incorporate those keywords in the text and metadata of your business. Next, regularly create content on your social media that links back to your website. If possible, seek links from other reputable businesses and directories. Finally, you must ensure your website loads fast and is mobile-friendly; doing so will boost your SEO.
Business Listings
Another key component of local marketing is listing your business in as many relevant profiles and directories as possible. As such, you should complete your Google profile to the maximum extent possible. You should also make sure to keep the profile updated and that you encourage customers to leave reviews. Leaving reviews is not only an excellent form of social proof, but regular and constant reviews make it more likely that search engines will pick up your business presence.
Of course, Google isn’t the only directory you need to pay attention to. There are also other major directories, like Yelp or Trustpilot. You should claim your business listing on these websites. Additionally, there may be local directories you can use. These directories are likely concentrated in your hometown area. Given the local component of these directories, filling them out is likely worth your time. Doing so can enhance your local marketing capability and make it easier for customers to find you.
GPS Listings
GPS listings are tied to the physical location of your dance studio. Filling out these listings will enhance your local findability. It will also ensure mapping programs can easily find your business. Individuals who try to look up directions can click on your location for more information. In addition, keeping your profile up-to-date will make it easier for others to find your business, and it has the ancillary effect of increasing your SEO.
There are many popular GPS listings, with Google Maps being the most popular. Google Maps also integrates with Waze. Other programs include Bing Maps and Mapquest.
Partner With EZTransitions
At EZTransitions, we get it: Marketing for dance studios is hard. We’re here to make it easier. Book a 30-minute call with us today to learn more about how we can help you master local marketing.
Apr 18, 2023 | Marketing
This article is the third in our series about how understanding the key phases of the local customer journey can help your dance studio thrive. This article focuses on how to build your reputation and turn your customers into advocates.
These steps complement each other. After all, you can’t turn customers into advocates unless you create an excellent reputation and service for them to help you sell. Customers are often viewed as more reputable, honest brokers of your brand than advertising, so this is a step you don’t want to skip.
Building Reputation and Advocates
The core building blocks that turn customers into advocates for building a positive brand reputation are the same in every business: You have to crush expectations, immediately remedy any customer service concerns your dancers may have, and ensure your clients are happy. You also have to listen to their concerns and respond appropriately to any challenges.
From there, you can take your most loyal customers and actively encourage them to become your advocates. By creating the right incentives and providing the right encouragement, you can use your customer’s positive experiences to build a positive impression of your brand.
Gaining Actionable Insight and Identifying Advocates
Building your reputation and finding your advocates requires a conscious effort and some in-depth analysis by your marketing team. During this process, you can also determine where your weaknesses are and what you can do to address potential customer landmines. Try these three tools to get started:
Surveys
Surveys are a great way to find what your customers think about you. You can give quick surveys via a QR code that leads to your website, enabling you to hear what your customers think of your business. Surveys should be brief and focused, so you get actionable data. Surveys can also be excellent marketing tools, since they show your customers that you value their opinion and want to improve.
Online Reviews and Social Proof
Customer reviews are hugely important: Customers are much more likely to give you their business if they see overwhelmingly positive reviews on a network like Google, Yelp, or Trustpilot. Conversely, if you have consistently bad Google reviews, you are much more likely to lose a customer’s business.
Why? Customer reviews are important forms of social proof. The idea behind social proof is that customers are more likely to have a positive impression of your business if they read about others having a good experience. Even better, one positive review is likely to influence the next reviewer.
You should therefore work to amplify positive Google reviews. You can do this in a few ways. First, ask your customers to leave good reviews. You can put reminders in emails to clients, lesson invoices, or any materials your dancers take home. Then post those positive reviews on your social media by sharing them directly and/or making them into attractive graphics. You can also link to review sites on your website, enabling customers to leave reviews easily. Finally, you should always respond to reviews — positive or negative — to show that you value your customer’s opinions.
World of Mouth / Referrals
You can turn your customers into active advocates by getting them to recommend your studio to others. The first step is simply to ask them to recommend you to their network. From there, reward those customers with a discount or other social proof showing you truly value these referrals. This incentive makes it more likely that other customers will make more referrals, creating a positive cycle.
Ready for the Next Steps?
At EZTransition, we want to help your dance studio expand its business, and we’re here to help you improve your local customer journey. Call today to book a 30-minute call.
Apr 11, 2023 | Marketing
This blog entry is the second in our series on the various tools and tactics you can use to enhance your reputation and grow your business. This article explains how to properly manage your follow-ups to ensure you succeed at local marketing.
Developing an appropriate follow-up process can be critical to your dance studio’s marketing: A local customer journey cannot begin if your dance studio doesn’t respond to inquiries. Fortunately, with the right tools, your dance studio can minimize the manual work required by follow-ups, creating an automated process that enables you to easily enroll more customers.
Following Up on Leads
If someone expresses an interest in your business, you should get back to them as quickly as possible, using the medium they contacted you on. However, you may face a key question: How often should you follow up?
The challenge is that there is no set answer. Different businesses have different guidelines. Some follow up three times, spacing those follow-ups out by one week. Others say five times a month is more appropriate. As such, you should experiment and determine what frequency works best for you.
However, if you follow up in the wrong medium, you may never connect with the customer. As such, how you follow up is almost more important than the number of times you follow up.
How To Follow Up
Customers may begin their local journey in different ways; some prefer email or texts, while others prefer old-fashioned phone calls or face-to-face conversations. Part of appropriate follow-up is ensuring you contact a customer the way they prefer or attempt to use multiple mediums. For example, on a solicitation to a customer, you can ask them their preferred contact method. This one question can save you time and ensure you respect your customer’s time. You can try using multiple mediums if you don’t have that information.
Keep in mind that there are also certain programs — like email automation — that can automatically reply to a customer. You can customize these emails based on the forms a customer fills out on your website. This question will ensure that a customer moves properly through your sales funnel. In addition, customers can receive different content based on their areas of interest, how long it has been since they contacted you, or what programs they have already signed up for. You can also use these programs as part of a reactivation campaign.
Your business can also pursue a missed text callback functionality. In this circumstance, you could automatically text someone if you miss their call. The text could be relatively simple (“Sorry we missed your call, but we will return it shortly! Please feel free to text here if it is easier to communicate that way!”) and enable your business to show your customers that you care and value their message. Again, this platform is good for brand awareness and ensuring your customers know you appreciate them.
Let EZTransition Help
At EZTransition, we understand the struggles dance studios face regarding local marketing. We have the tools and services to help you market your business and turn it into something more.
Ready to take the next step? Book a 30-minute call today to learn more about how EZTransition can grow your business.
Apr 4, 2023 | Marketing
Our opening blog article in our original five-part series explores the first step in optimizing the local customer journey at dance studios. We look at how establishing an effective website engages your prospects by presenting a combination of aesthetics, well-presented information, and clear call-to-actions (CTAs).
An optimized website propels the reputation of dance studios by gaining trust and credibility. Your website can achieve this by displaying studio awards, teaching accolades, industry experience, and facility offerings, giving students a better expectation in their dance journey. Also, it is important to include interactive site elements. Doing so guides visitors seamlessly through a dynamic process, encouraging interest and participation.
Aesthetics and Functionality
Your website’s overall design should provide the most welcoming experience as visitors embark on a local customer journey. While every website has a unique design layout, there are universal elements that contribute to a more fulfilling user experience, which include:
Using white spaces: Spaces between paragraphs provide some breathing room for visitors to process your displayed information. White spaces also help remove distractions so visitors can focus on your site message. On the contrary, long walls of text might overwhelm and turn visitors away from learning more about your offerings.
Display Testimonials: Prospective students can form positive impressions of dance studios by seeing the success of previous cohorts. Online users prefer social proof over polished marketing promotions. Detailed and genuine testimonials could do wonders for your local marketing campaigns.
Apply strategic visuals: A picture speaks a thousand words. Images and videos of happy dance students can help promote a conducive learning environment much better than a long descriptive paragraph.
Mobile-friendliness
Most online users (92.3%) browse the internet via mobile devices. As such, it is important to check your dance studio’s website for mobile-friendliness or risk losing their interest! Modern website creation platforms enable convenient toggling between desktop and mobile view for a complete assessment of your site display.
Automated Communication
It’s essential to develop trust in your website visitors, so smooth and undisrupted communication is a vital ingredient.
Understandably, keeping up with hundreds of customer queries flooding your site is difficult, especially during peak online traffic. That’s why you should consider automated communication for your website. Applying automated chatbots provides site visitors with 24/7 support that keeps them satisfied while your dance studios maintain a professional image.
Frequent Call to Action
The top-performing websites of dance studios usually feature multiple calls to action throughout their pages. Each CTA should drive a specific action, depending on the different stages of a customer journey.
Populating your websites with persuasive calls to action encourages visitors to take steps toward engaging your studio and starting their dance journey. Also, ensuring that your CTA stands out from the rest of your site content is important so visitors won’t overlook them.
Boost Your Local Customer Journey
Ultimately, a website gives your customers the first impression of your dance studio. Optimized aesthetics and user-friendly elements go a long way in properly introducing your skills, credibility, and expertise to prospective students and having them enroll in your classes.
With that said, there are additional steps that you’ll need to set in place to boost your dance studio business and local marketing strategies. The next article in our blog series explores the delicate process of following up with your prospects and how you can gain their interest and loyalty with a tried-and-tested approach.
Book a 30-minute call with EZ-transition to discover how we can help you develop the ideal marketing plan for your dance studio!
Mar 28, 2023 | Marketing
Advocacy is the final stage of the local customer journey and one of the most important. This is the stage where you focus on building loyal, repeat customers. These individuals have already become paying customers and are pleased with your goods or services. Now is the time to transform these repeat customers into advocates for your company.
Why is Customer Advocacy Important?
Developing customer advocates is not only important, but it’s also critical to future business success.
Repeat Purchases
As a small business owner, you know how important each sale is. You also know how long it can take to convert a potential customer into a purchasing one. Loyal customers don’t typically require the same time commitment. They often make repeat purchases with little to no coaxing. They are the first to attend sales events and participate in special promotions.
Recommend to Other
Customer advocates are also more likely to recommend your store to others, leave positive reviews and engage in social media. These factors are so important. According to a Nielsen study, 80% of Americans seek recommendations from their family, friends, and peers before purchasing. Without loyal customers to provide these recommendations and boost your store’s reputation, you risk losing out on these sales.
Boost Sales
If you’re looking for long-term success, your business cannot afford to overlook the power of customer loyalty. Between their repeat purchases and bringing in new customers, your most loyal customers have the potential to impact the success of your business significantly. One study reveals that your business could receive up to a 200% increase in revenue business growth with just a 12% increase in customer advocacy.
How to Develop Customer Advocates?
Now that you understand customer advocacy’s importance, you can build a strategy to develop customer advocates for your business.
Encouraging Repeat Purchases
Don’t take your most loyal customers for granted. Sure, they may not need as much coaxing to make a purchase, but they still need tending. These customers should be the first to know about upcoming promotions and sales events. You can direct them to these special offers and new products and services when they visit the store. If they’re shopping online, marketing tools, such as automated messages or special promotions at checkout, can help.
You can also encourage your most loyal customers to provide online business reviews on sites such as Google, Facebook, and Yelp. These reviews can serve as a promotion for your business and reach a larger audience.
Offering Customer Loyalty Rewards
Customer loyalty programs are among the best sales tools for building customer advocates. Not only do these programs give you a chance to thank your customers for their loyalty, but they can make your customers feel special and appreciated. There are many types of customer loyalty programs, including points-based, punch card, tier-based, and cashback. It’s recommended to choose a reward program that offers the best business alignment.
Providing Exceptional Customer Service
Your customer advocates are crucial to your business’s ongoing success, and you should treat them as such. Consider offering a special customer service number to your most loyal customers to ensure you handle any issue promptly. You also want to consider noting these customers’ premium status in your CRM platform to ensure they always receive exceptional customer care.
Our EZtransition’s all-in-one marketing platform can help you engage with customers, foster these relationships and convert your most loyal customers into lifelong advocates.
Book a 30-minute call to discuss our fully integrated platform, designed with robust customer features to guide you to follow up with your leads throughout your business’s local customer journey.
