Whether it's ballet, hip hop, salsa, or ballroom, dance classes are a fantastic way for people of all ages to learn a new skill and improve their fitness level. Dance schools also provide an invaluable opportunity to socialize and connect with others who share a passion for dance.

Effectively promoting your class will be the foundation for its success. Marketing and promotion are fundamental in generating new customers, a larger class attendance, and ensuring the success of the class and the dance studio.

However, promoting a class can be challenging, especially if you're just starting.

In this article, we'll discuss the key steps to developing a dance studio marketing plan, including knowing your target audience, building an online presence through social media, email marketing, website, using paid ads, word of mouth, localised marketing and special promotion.

The first step in your dance studio marketing is identifying your target audience. Who are the people you want to attract to your dance school? Are they children, adults, seniors, or a mix of all ages? What level of experience do they have? Are they beginners or advanced dancers?

These are questions you need to answer! Customer-focused marketing will have the highest-yielding results and help you attract more students.

Your potential students want to feel understood and know they can count on you to deliver a class reflective of their abilities and desires. Understanding your target audience and their needs will help you to tailor your marketing efforts and focus your promotion directly on their interests.

Focus your marketing efforts on where your potential customers will see it. Let’s say you define your target audience as school-age children. You will want to focus on promoting your class through schools, community centers, and children's programmes. If adults are your target audience, you will focus on promoting your class through local gyms, studios, and on social media platforms.

2. Build a Strong Online Presence: Master Digital Marketing

Today's digital market requires a recognisable, consistent, and effective online presence to be at the heart of your dance studio marketing. In this instance, your online presence refers to your social media platforms and website.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are great tools for reaching a wider audience. To effectively utilise these platforms, it is vital to understand their differences, what benefits each platform offers, and how it connects you with your target audience.

Creating a Facebook page is the ideal platform if your target audience is children. School-age children are unlikely to be on social media. By default, your online marketing should focus on the child’s parents or guardians. The most commonly used social media platform by adults in this demographic is Facebook.

You can use this Facebook page to post schedule updates, photos, or videos. This group can be private if you plan to share photographs of the children.

Instagram and TikTok are ideal platforms for dance studio marketing focused on teenage students and the 20-30 age range.

Instagram is perfect for sharing photos and videos of your class in action and will connect you with new customers. Instagram can provide a more localised approach as you will use location tags to assign the post to your area.

TikTok has a broader reach and the highest potential, of all the platforms, for producing viral content. This opportunity to generate a viral video will improve the dance studio's marketing and give unrivaled exposure to your class.

YouTube is the ultimate platform for sharing videos. You can create a YouTube channel and post videos of your class performing, of you teaching dance moves, and generally promoting the dance studio. We recommend repurposing TikTok videos as YouTube Shorts, a fast-paced and easy-to-digest form of content.

Email marketing can be an incredibly effective way for dance studios to reach out to current and prospective clients. By creating a targeted email list and crafting compelling email campaigns, you can keep your students informed about your class schedule, special offers, events, and performances.

One of the main benefits of email marketing is that it is highly personalised and allows you to tailor your message to the specific interests and needs of your audience. You can segment your email list based on factors such as age, experience, and interests, and send targeted messages that resonate with each group. This information can often be easily exported from the dance studio management software.

Another advantage of email marketing is that it is highly cost-effective compared to other forms of advertising. You can create and send emails using free or low-cost tools, and reach a large number of people with just a few clicks. Plus, you can track the success of your email campaigns in real-time, allowing you to make adjustments and improve your results over time.

The hardest thing about email is getting someone to open it, so when you’re typing your email out, make sure that you give a lot of thought to your subject line. Check out our blog post on 

Again, this depends on your target audience. A younger demographic will use Instagram as their primary search engine, while an older demographic will use Google. However, whichever age range your class is aimed at, a website remains the foundation for your online presence.

A website should be the central hub for promoting your dance school, providing information including the dance class schedule, its price, and the studio’s location. Additionally, we recommend including testimonials, blog posts, photos, and videos on your website. An active blog is a necessary part of dance studio marketing as it can improve your SEO optimisation, allowing you to generate organic leads for your class.

A link to your website can be added to your social media bios, making it easy for new customers to sign-up!

As your studio expands, you can also link your website with dance studio management software or an online booking system, such as 

Local marketing strategies can be used as an effective way to promote your class and reach new customers within the surrounding community.

Claim your business on Google: Google Business Profile

 that allows businesses to create a profile on Google, which can appear in Google Search and Google Maps. The profile includes information such as the business name, address, website link, phone numbers, hours/days of operation, reviews, and photos. This increases your chance of being shown or Google search results when customers search your business name or business type, especially in a specific location.

You can also partner with local businesses or organizations, such as gyms, schools or community centers, to offer promotional discounts or flyers and attract prospects. Additionally, we recommend looking into local publications, such as newspapers or magazines, which provide a valuable advertising channel that directly connects you to your local community.

Another way to use local marketing is to participate in community events or festivals. Get involved and showcase the dance studio through live performances and demos! You can even host a free group class or open house days and get passersby involved. If they enjoy this spontaneous class, they will be encouraged to seek out the dance studio’s upcoming events and timetable.

Paid advertising is a great way to reach a wider audience and promote your dance school. You can use platforms like 

We have summarised the key steps below but if you are interested in a more detailed step-by-step guide, check this blog post on 

how to advertise a dance studio on Google Ads

. Other platforms have more or less similar settings.

Defining your target audience was our first step for a reason!

Before creating your paid ad, define your target audience based on age, location, interests, and other relevant factors. This definition will ensure your paid ad is customised to reach the right people.

Knowing your target audience will determine the form your ad takes. You may choose an image-based ad, a video ad, or a carousel ad. Assess the format and platform for your paid ads once you know who your students are.

We recommend setting a budget for your ad campaign and choosing an effective bidding strategy. This budget should reflect what works best for you and your class! You can choose to pay per click (PPC), per impression, or conversion.

Monitor your ad campaign regularly to see how it's performing. Use the data to adjust your targeting, ad format, and budget. These results will impact how you use paid ads in the future.

Word of mouth is a powerful form of marketing that can help you promote your dance class without spending a penny!

When your students enjoy your dance class, they pass this on to their friends and family and increase enrollment. To encourage this word-of-mouth marketing, you can consider offering incentives based on the results.

To encourage word-of-mouth marketing for your dance class, offers and incentives can be an effective strategy. There are a variety of approaches you can take. These include, but are not limited to, free trials, referral programmes, testimonial incentives, loyalty programmes and merchandise.

Free trials can come in two forms and are a great addition to dance studio marketing. You can make the irresistible offer of a free class to any potential new students. Ask current students to invite their family and friends, or share the event on their social media, to generate new customers and increase enrollment.

Alternatively, you can host a free event at the dance studio with a live performance to create a buzz around the class.

Using a referral programme as a part of the dance studio marketing will encourage existing customers to refer their friends and family to your dance school. For each successful referral, consider offering a discounted or free class to your current students and prospective students.

Testimonial incentives are another great way to promote your class. Why not consider offering a discounted or free dance class to students who provide a testimonial about their positive experience?

Testimonials make great additions to your website or social media channels and can help to attract new customers. Additionally, reviews left on Google or online bulletin boards will enhance your google listing and support you in generating more organic leads.

Creating a loyalty programmes is another way to reward your existing customers for their continued loyalty.

Loyalty to the dance studio is defined in two ways: the number of repeat classes the student attends and the increase in enrollment and the number of new customers they bring to the sessions.

Rewarding students based on these definitions will help you to retain your current customers and encourage them to continue promoting your class by word-of-mouth.

The benefits of using merchandise as a marketing tool are numerous. For starters, merchandise is a tangible item that your dance community members can take with them and use in their everyday life, serving as a constant reminder of your dance studio. It also helps build brand recognition and loyalty, as people are more likely to remember your studio if they see your logo or brand on a regular basis.

Merchandise also has the added benefit of being a walking advertisement for your studio, as your students will be wearing your branded items out in public, potentially attracting the attention of others who may be interested in taking your classes.

Moreover, merchandise is a relatively inexpensive way to promote your dance studio compared to other forms of advertising. While advertising in local newspapers or on radio can be costly, merchandise can be produced in bulk at a low cost and given away or sold at a markup, providing a source of additional income for your studio. With these benefits in mind, incorporating merchandise into your marketing strategy can be a smart move for any studio owner looking to promote their classes and increase their student base.

The successful promotion of your class relies on understanding the target market for your dance studio. Determine their age, location, fitness levels, and experience. After you have created your customer persona, tailor your marketing efforts to reflect their needs.

Your marketing efforts should include the maintenance of a consistent online presence through social media and a website, using localised marketing, paid ads, and experimenting with offers and incentives.

The final, fundamental step is reflection. You need to reflect, honestly, on your marketing efforts. Which have seen a high ROI, and which have been unsuccessful? This reflection will help direct your marketing efforts in the future, increasing enrollment and your dance class's chances of success.

How to Promote Dance Classes: Dance Studio Marketing Ideas

When your activity business grows to a decent stage, you might soon face tradeoffs between selecting which marketing campaign/ channel/ message to continue, and which to deprioritise. In this post, I will talk about some of the key metrics you need to start collecting in order to help you make that decision.

For a business to continue to grow, one of the key things is to attract new customers. For any marketing campaigns (digital or offline), you need to measure two key metrics:

 This is the estimated total value a customer can bring to your business throughout their whole relationship with your business. There are several ways to calculate it, the most common one being [Average Order Size (£x) * Average Number of Orders per Customer in a Fixed Period]. The actual value does not have to be precise, as long as it is largely in the right order of magnitude.

: This is the cost to acquire one new customer. Generally, it is calculated as [Cost per Action / Success Rate]. Let's look at two examples, one being an offline campaign and the other being online Google Ads

If you run an offline campaign by hiring someone to distribute leaflets, say the cost is £10 per hour to distribute 100 leaflets, each costing £0.10 to print. The Cost per Action is £0.2 [£10/100+£0.10]. Let's say from that 100 leaflets, you manage to attract 5 customers. The Success Rate is 5% [5/100]. Therefore the CAC for a leaflet campaign is £4 [£0.2/5%].

If you use Google Ads to advertise your business, you will see a report of Cost per Click (CPC) and Conversion Rate (CR), which are the two elements in the formula above. You will have to set up Google Tracking properly in order to get an accurate measure of the Conversion Rate.

It is intuitive to conclude the first equation of measuring marketing campaign effectiveness:

Usually you would expect your CLT to be a multiple of CAC, given that you need to factor in the cost of providing services to your customer. Depending on your business' gross margin, you need to decide which multiple is a minimum for you to continue a customer acquisition campaign.

If you run multiple online campaigns (for example via Facebook, Twitter and Google Ads), it is important to track and compare the performance of different channels, to ensure you are investing in the highest-performing channel.

The tool most businesses use is Google Analytics, essentially tracking the number of visitors for each channel and the success rate of each channel. For more details on how to set it up, check out my 

Once you set up, there is another step you need to follow in order to help Google Analytics track the source of the customers more accurately. This is called Campaign Tracking. 

Campaign tracking lets Google easily identify what is the source of a visitor by using "utm". The easiest way of doing this is to make use of the 

In your campaigns, instead of simply linking to your website/ a particular event page, you should include the expanded URL generated so that Google can track the source of the visitor and attribute the result more accurately.

Make sure you always use "utm" in your campaigns, even if you currently only run one digital campaign. You never know when you may expand to other channels! It also helps you compare the performance of that single campaign against organic flows.

After the correct setup, you will find that your Google Analytics reports are much more insightful. Pay attention to the Ecommerce Conversion Rate column in the screenshot below. You can easily compare the volume and effectiveness of different digital campaigns.

Please leave a comment below if you have any questions. We would also love to hear about your experiences using these tips and some of them might prove useful for other readers.

How to measure marketing campaign effectiveness

Email marketing is one of the key digital channels any business should utilise and master well. Not only is it more effective at acquiring new customers, but it is also much more cost-efficient and suitable for small businesses with limited (marketing) budget. In most cases, email marketing is virtually free (other than the cost of time and effort to do it right).

Email is estimated to be nearly 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than either Facebook or Twitter according to 

In this post, I will lay out a few areas of focus to help you start the journey. Like most of my posts on 

, it is meant to provide you with a starting point on the subject, rather than a comprehensive guide.

The first step is to start building your audience list. There are several ways in which you can get started with this.

A pop-up window can also be a useful tool to collect potential customers. Most modern website builders, such as 

) have built-in functions that support pop-up windows.

Don't miss the opportunity from new customers

Invite your customers to join your mailing list by linking to a sign-up form in your regular transaction emails when someone places a booking with you. With Pembee you can configure your booking confirmation email to include this link.

Offer something useful in return for sign-up

You may have seen websites offering free e-books or advice on certain topics, but one can only access after signing up for a mailing list. You can also adopt this strategy, for example, by offering a free online video (say if you are a yoga studio), or an e-book about the basics of oil painting (say if you operate group classes for painting). The key is to think about what your potential customers would find useful.

Don't forget about all the other channels where you interact with your (potential) customers!

Add a link to subscribe to your Twitter/ Instagram posts.

Include a QR code in your posters and marketing material.

With the introduction of GDPR, even smaller businesses need to pay special attention to user consent, and it is advisable to keep track of your mailing list recipients' preferences. Again most email marketing tools have a built-in "unsubscribe" option included in all the marketing emails you send. This way you are not only GDPR compliant, but also helps you focus on those truly interested in your business offering.

Even if you operate in the most niche business, your potential customers are likely to be very different, so why send your customers the same email?

Segmentation can be based on various dimensions. More specifically, we are going to focus on demographic vs. behavioral.

This is one of the most straightforward segmentation methods, looking at your customers by metrics such as age, gender, or location. It also depends on how much information you have about your customers (for example, you will probably only know an email address for a new website subscriber, whereas you may know a lot more about a return customer). One strategy could be to send a "generic" email for customers without detailed information, and 1-2 variations of more tailored emails for those who you understand better.

This is based on customer behaviour and interaction with your business. For example, if you are a yoga studio, you could segment your audience list into:

: For anyone who has just signed up to your mailing list;

: For anyone who has attended your studio no more than once in the past month;

: For anyone who has attended your studio more than once in the past month;

: For anyone who has attended your studio on a weekly basis with a weekly class pass.

In the next section, I will talk about how to make use of these segments.

Now that you have a decent list of (potential) customers and customer segments, it is important to understand what is considered "a good email".

, only 1 in 6 marketing emails were "read" by recipients, and in certain industries, that could be as low as 1 in 10. 

Some dos and don'ts when writing your email.

It is important to find a tone of voice that suits you and your business. 

One of the most simple ways to do so is to send from a person rather than from your business. 

Visualising your email recipient with a clear persona also helps: It doesn't have to be perfect or very detailed, e.g., think of your audience as Mary from Liverpool, who is a 35 year old professional and enthusiastic about Yoga. What content (picture and word) would catch her eyes? 

Combining with the next tip, your emails will be more personal and powerful, and therefore more likely to be read.

This links naturally to the previous section on customer segmentation. Let's continue with the example of the yoga studio: In response to the Covid crisis, the yoga studio is launching a new outdoor yoga and want to email its subscribers with this news.

The content of the email should vary depending on the customer segment. For "new subscribers", focus on the fact that this is a good way to trial the studio in a Covid secure way, and perhaps offer a free trial for the first lesson. For "yoga enthusiasts", maybe it is better to focus the content on the benefit of outdoor yoga, and the fact that the studio is back to business and would be delighted to welcome its loyal customers back. You know your business much better than anyone else does, and find an angle that conveys your message, while tailoring it for the recipients.

Every marketing email should have a goal and a "Call to Action" button linking to that goal. Using the same example above, do not expect that email recipients will take the effort to visit your studio's website, find out the link to the outdoor yoga, and sign up using the form online. You should include the link to the dedicated page and make it stand out.

Keep in touch with your customers so that you are always on their minds (but do not spam by sending emails daily). For a new subscriber, make sure to send a welcome email immediately after sign-up. (You can establish an automatic sequence with most email marketing tools.)

It is crucial to track your email performance so that you can continue improving your tone of voice and your content. How many recipients opened the email? How many clicked on the link to the specific webpage? How many purchased a class because of the email? Answers to these questions will provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Again, most email marketing tools have this function built-in. If you don't have one, there might be some simple add-ins to add onto your email client portals. For example, Gmail has a 

 that allows you to check if a recipient has opened your email. To track how many clicked on the link, you need to enable Google Analytics and configure your link to include campaign details. I will cover more details on how to use Google Analytics in my upcoming post.

Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear about your stories and your questions, which might prove useful for other readers. And don’t forget to subscribe to our mailing list!

Introduction to email marketing for group activity providers

Another free service offered by Google! Similar to Google My Business (check out my 

 if you need a refresher), mastering Google Analytics (GA) warrants a whole series of articles which I will write and post later on. Here we will go through some key concepts with a step-by-step guide on how to set up. Like most of my posts in this 

Digital Marketing for Group Activities Providers

series, it is meant to help you start using some of these amazing tools, rather than as a comprehensive guide.

To enable the basic tracking function, all you have to do is to drop a line of code in your website pages, following the instructions 

. This will give you some basic information, such as the demographics (e.g., age, gender), interests, and behaviour (e.g., new vs. return visitors, frequency of visits).

At first glance, you may not find this information useful, but a regular review could potentially help you improve your website performance and increase conversion.

Here is an example of some of the information that can be tracked.


Personally, I find the most helpful view is in the behaviour section, where you can have a page-by-page breakdown of user behaviour on your website, how long they have stayed on each page and how many customers closed out your website afterwards.

You will be able to know which pages are the most frequent landing pages (i.e. pages people first visit), and focusing on improving the quality of these pages can potentially lead to more business.

The basic Google Analytics tracking reports can only get you this far, given the limited information it contains. However, with a little bit of setup, Goal Tracking could be a game changer for your business.

A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. 

Think of it as an activity completed by your visitors that is meaningful to your business. Examples of goals could include making a purchase, or submitting a contact information form.

Let’s take the example of tracking a customer’s purchasing journey. Let’s call this website example.com. Typically an online customer would visit a certain activity/ class page that contains all the information about what you are offering (example.com/page/activity), click on Add to Cart button, redirected to Cart page that lists out all the items they have added (example.com/cart), click on checkout to start the checkout process, first step being filling in contact details (example.com/checkout/contact), second step being filling in payment details (example.com/checkout/payment), with the final step being an order success page summarising the order details (example.com/checkout/order-success).

[Depending on the way your online shop is set up, the actual implementation and customer journey might be slightly different.]

By setting goals in Google Analytics, you will be able to track the behaviour of a particular customer throughout this journey, and understand where in the journey you can improve in order to generate more business.


To set up Goal Tracking, simply go to the Admin page in Google Analytics and select Goals. Set the Destination as the final page you want to track (in our example, the order success page). Follow the steps that your customers will take and input the intermediary steps.


You can test your setup by clicking on “Verify this Goal”, which will perform a retrospective test based on the information from the past 7 days. It will say “This Goal would have a X% conversion rate based on your data from the past 7 days”. If there are successful customer purchases in the past 7 days, this number should be positive. If it is zero, you might want to check whether your page url setup is correct (or it could be that there has been no purchase in the past 7 days, in which case you should finish set up and wait for a few days until there is a successful purchase).

After a while, the Goal Tracking should be able to provide you with some important information about your customer conversion funnel. You can view the report by going to “Conversions - Goals” under the Report section.

In this example (and this is actually the result from a real online store I used to own and operate, sadly no longer in business but gave me valuable insight into the inner-workings of digital marketing), you will find out that out of the 1,400 or so visitors, about 70% added something to the shopping cart, out of which about 60% started the checkout process by adding contact information and a further 60% added payment details. Finally about 594 (or about 40% of the total 1,400 visitors) completed a purchase.

You can also drill down this report by having more granular insight, for example, filtering for specific product pages to see if the performance varies by products, split your customers by looking at “return customers” vs. “new customers”.

This information will help guide you on potential improvement to your online purchase journey. For example, should you offer discounts for certain activity to increase the conversion rate if that activity is constantly under-performing other products? Should you optimise your activity description page to make it more inviting? 

A more advanced view is when you have configured the ecommerce settings. Most e-commerce systems should have this function built in already, and all you need to do is to drop in your Google Analytics user ID. If you have built your own checkout system, you will have to edit the code according to the user manual 

The benefit of E-commerce Tracking, compared with Goal Tracking, is more accuracy. It can track specific behaviours such as clicking on the “add to cart” button, rather than relying on page visits. It can also track the value of the transactions, so you will have a more complete view of the business impact, rather than counting the number of completed goals alone.

Once set up, you will be able to see the conversion funnel (similar to the Goal Tracking funnel), conduct revenue analysis (product revenue/ campaign costs).

Do get started on these free methods and leave a comment below to share your experiences. We would love to hear about your stories and some of your questions might prove useful for other readers.

Analyse website and campaign performance with Google Analytics

, we have explored several tips to improve your unpaid search results, completely for free. However, free search results will only get you to a certain degree. If you are considering growing your business further, the paid Google Ads might be a place to start.

Part 2: Increasing traffic through paid Google Ads

Google Ads is a paid advertising service that lets any business reach out to millions of potential customers. When used correctly, it is a powerful marketing tool to attract new customers and grow your business, but it could also easily cost you thousands a month without generating any visible results. For a small business with a limited (marketing) budget, our suggestion is to approach with caution. If your business is at a reasonably stable stage but may be facing stalling growth, Google Ads might be a good channel to further grow your business.

Digital Marketing for Group Activities Providers 

series, it is meant to serve as a starter's manual, rather than as a comprehensive guide.


Before rushing to set up Google Ads, there are a few things you need to prepare and make sure you have a clear answer for each of them.

Do you have any other marketing channels (for example, referral programme), and are you measuring their effectiveness (e.g., ROI - return on investment)?

This is important because Google Ads is only one part of your overall marketing plan, and measuring its effectiveness against other channels will tell you how useful it is and how much budget you should allocate to it.

Other marketing channels could include referral bonus, leaflet, print media advertising, and many others. Do you know how much each of the channels is costing you, and how much revenue does it bring back to your business? For more details on how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing channel, stay tuned for our upcoming posts.

Upfront “testing” budget for Google Ads

It takes time and money to build and improve a Google Ads campaign, how much are you willing or can you afford to put aside for Google Ads (almost treating it as a sunk cost that you may never recoup)?

In a nutshell, the way Google Ads works is that you “bid” for certain keywords, the algorithm will determine, among the many hundreds or thousands of bidders, which top ones to show to the user who searched these particular keywords. The bid price is one factor, but not the only factor in determining whether or not your ads will get shown. Other factors include quality of the website (speed to load, mobile-friendliness), past interaction quality (how long do previous users engage with your website - do they close it out immediately, or do they stay around and engage with the content), etc.

To get Google Ads running, you will need to sign up for an account, and most importantly, set up the free Google Analytics tracking tool (see the post on Google Analytics for more details). This helps you understand your audience demographic and behaviour, at which stage do they drop out of the sales conversion funnel, and what is the cost vs. benefit for your Google Ads campaigns.

Let’s walk through an example to understand some of the basic concepts.

First of all, you will need to specify what is the goal and what type of campaign you would like to run. For starters, we would recommend choosing “Sales” and “Search Campaign”. Note that the “Shopping Campaign” can be extremely useful, but only if you are selling some physical goods - so chances are that the “Shopping Campaign” may not apply to your business providing group activities.

Then you will need to specify what is the end goal of your campaign, most likely a visit to your website. Note that you can specify the exact website address (i.e. specific activities) you want the campaign to direct to. We will talk more about it in the testing phase below.

The next page has more advanced settings, most of which are pretty self-explanatory. The important ones are setting a daily budget for this campaign, and bidding strategy.

The bidding strategy directs the algorithm to focus on what matters the most.

There are essentially two groups of bidding strategies with two variations each.

The first group is focused on a “conversion event”, i.e. a purchase in most cases. You can either focus on the number of conversions or the value of the conversion. This group of bidding strategies requires a correct setup with Google Analytics and is recommended. Normally we would simply choose “Conversions”.

The second group is on the clicks itself, either number of clicks to your website, or the share of impression (how often do you appear in the search results). You may already realise that this group is less ideal because a click does not necessarily translate into a conversion, which is what most businesses care ultimately.

The next step is choosing the keywords, we will talk more about it in the testing phase.

The final step is to create a few ads, by filling in headlines and descriptions. We suggest creating 2-3 ads with varying headlines and descriptions, as the Google Ads algorithm will “learn” and dynamically place the most suitable version depending on users’ profiles. If you struggle to come up with many variations of taglines, just try two, one with full sentences and another with phrases only.

When you click “Done”, the campaign will be created and the ads will start running shortly (usually in a few hours as Google needs to check that it is compliant with its terms and conditions and local laws).

Now let’s move on to the next phase to finetune your campaign.

Once you have decided to embark on the journey of Google Ads, it is important to set aside some time for this testing phase (depending on the nature of your business and frequency of customer engagement, it could range between a couple of weeks to several months).

There are a few key things you need to iron out in the testing phase: What products/ services to focus on, what keywords work best, what campaign parameters to optimise.

You may remember that at the first step of creating a campaign, you were asked to fill in a website url which will direct potential customers to this link. If you offer different classes/ activities, for example, a taster course vs. an 8-week course, a group lesson vs. a private lesson, you will need to think about which ones you’d like to focus on. This is obviously linking to what you are trying to achieve and the nature of your business. It may be that most of your loyal customers start from a one-day trial lesson, then naturally the trial lesson should be the product of focus.

You may remember the step about filling in keywords when creating a campaign. You can edit that once the campaign is created, by clicking on that campaign and going to “Keywords/ Search Keywords”.

You can add as many keywords you like for each campaign, by clicking the + button. To get inspiration, “Keyword Planner” in the “Tools & Settings” panel is a very helpful tool, which gives you the search volume for specific keywords, with suggested variations that maximises the potential audience size.

“Discover New Keywords” lets you explore different options of keywords and tells you the monthly search volume and bidding price range.

“Get Search Volume and Forecast” helps you test the likely result (number of visits to your website, estimated cost, etc.) after you have selected the preferred keywords.

After the ads have been running for a while, you will be able to see a “Search Terms” report, which summarises all the keywords that your ads have appeared under, and the performance for each (number of impressions, number of clicks, click-through rate, costs, etc.). This is an important part of the testing phase where you need to monitor carefully and adjust your keywords accordingly. This links nicely to another important concept - “Negative keywords”. These are the keywords that you do not want your ads to appear. For example, for a Yoga studio in Manchester, you may find that your ads appear under the keyword “Outdoor Yoga mats”. Clearly, you don’t want to spend money on searches like this! 

Given the nature of your business, chances are that you are only focusing on a specific geographic region or demographic group. Therefore it is important to specify a few parameters so that the budget is focused on the most suitable audience.

In the campaign settings panel, you will find a section for demographics (which lets you include or exclude people from certain age groups, gender, or household income) and locations (you can specify a city, region, or within a radius of a specific location). Do bear in mind that the more precise you specify these parameters, the fewer potential audiences you will get.

Another important angle to consider is that not all of your customers may be confined to a specific parameter. For example, holidaymakers could plan ahead in a different region, husbands could purchase gifts for their wives, etc. Therefore you may not want to completely exclude those audiences.

One way to solve this is to set different bidding adjustments, instead of excluding them. For example, if the majority of your customers are from Manchester, but you do get the odd bits of bookings from across the country, you can set bidding adjustments for Manchester and the broader UK. Similarly, this can also apply to different demographic groups and even keywords.



The time it takes to complete the testing phase varies greatly, and often can be blurred with the monitoring phase. The key concept in this phase is really continuous monitoring and improvement of your bidding strategy.

For each campaign you have, there are a few key metrics that you need to monitor.

 This is the % of people who have seen your ads that actually click on the ads. In a way, it measures the quality of your ads. If you have different ads, you will be able to see the performance difference and prioritise the most effective ones.

This is another way of measuring the quality of your ads, by comparing it to your competitors. It shows your ads’ share in terms of total impressions and total clicks.

 This measures how successful your campaign is, i.e. how many people actually purchase after seeing your ads. Note that this requires the conversion tag to be set up (see the preparation phase - bidding strategy)


There is not really a benchmark that can tell you whether your campaign result is good or bad, but generally, the click-through-rate is considered normal at around 0.5%-2%. For cost per conversion, you will want to make sure that the value it brings to you (in terms of sales) exceeds the cost.

Hope this post gives you a basic idea of how to start leveraging Google Ads to grow your business. We will post some more advanced tips to optimise your Google Ads results in future posts. Please leave a comment below with any questions or suggestions.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Group Activity Providers - Part 2

SEO is a “hit” word in the digital marketing space. Just like Google is almost synonymous with search engines, SEO in many people’s minds almost equates to digital marketing. The whole concept may seem daunting to a lot of small business owners who may not have had any prior experience dealing with search engines (I will be focusing entirely on Google, and let’s face it, if you don’t get it right on Google, you’d be losing 80%+ of your potential customers - When is the last time you used Bing or Yahoo?).

So, should a small business predominantly offering in-person experiences, such as summer camps, art/ language/ sports courses, invest in Search Engine Optimisation?

Let’s first start with a definition of SEO, as this is helpful for the recommendations later. According to Wikipedia:


Search engine optimization is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. SEO refers to the 

Inherently, there are two sides to SEO, unpaid and paid results. In part 1, we will look at the things you can do to improve your search results, completely for free.

Part 1: Improve your unpaid search results for free

You should always optimise your business website to improve your chance of being on the top organic search results. We are not going to focus on the inner-workings of Google’s search algorithm and how you should optimise your website for that. Instead, I will list out a few simple actions you can take.

Claim your business on Google: Google My Business

This is a completely free service offered by Google

, and almost definitely the first step you should take for your business’ digital marketing journey. This increases your chance of being shown when customers search your business name or business type, especially in a specific location.

Let’s use “Manchester Yoga Classes” as a quick example. From the search result below, you can see how important it is to claim your business, as Google placed some of the top yoga studios in Manchester in this Map format (called Google Maps Pack), occupying the top half of the first search page.

As you can see, Google has only displayed three businesses in the Google Maps Pack, and you have to click on “More places” to expand this list.

Research shows that these top 3 results take away almost half of the search volume.

Therefore, if you operate in an area where there are tens or hundreds of competitors, you will need to work a bit harder in order to appear on top of the list.


Optimising Google Business Profile warrants a whole new article (I will write more about it in a separate post), but for now, do sign up and fill in as much information as you can, including your business website, phone number, and some catchy photos.

Marketing tips

How to Promote Dance Classes: Dance Studio Marketing Ideas

How to measure marketing campaign effectiveness

Introduction to email marketing for group activity providers

Analyse website and campaign performance with Google Analytics

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Group Activity Providers - Part 2

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Group Activity Providers - Part 1

Digital Marketing for Group Activity Providers