Promoting beginners’ dancing classes on Facebook

For some years now, Johnsonville Club in Wellington has successfully promoted the Club’s February Beginners’ classes through a wide variety of media channels including printed posters (if funds allow), community newspaper ads and associated contributed articles, our website and our Facebook page.

This year, one innovation we trialled (along with free community radio notices and electronic noticeboards) was a Facebook ad costing $50, which was subsidised by the RSCDS New Zealand Branch’s ‘Dance Scottish’ initiative. I enjoyed the opportunity to develop and implement this new strategy.

Johnsonville Beginners’ Classes Poster

As there are a number of ‘fish hooks’ in advertising on Facebook, I thought I would share the process and the results so others could easily put this kind of promotion in place if desired.

For any promotion, it is essential to use a wide range of material and media channels (including any free community media available) to produce a fully ‘integrated’ campaign. Using just one type of channel in isolation may not produce the results wanted.

To initially promote any Johnsonville event such as a Tartan Night or Annual Dance, we produce a colourful and engaging poster to display on our Club noticeboard and share electronically on our website, Facebook and Club e-newsletter. The design of any supporting promotional material follows the look and feel of the poster. We used similar strategies for promoting our 2018 Beginners’ Classes.

Factors to consider for Facebook advertising

For Facebook advertising, there are a number of essential factors to first consider:

  1. Defining the target audience – Facebook allows you to define the audience for your promotion by age group. As this was a trial, and as Scottish Country Dancing does appeal to a range of age groups, we decided to have a wide target market aged 18 and over. However, our main aim was to appeal to younger age groups.
  2. Developing your key messages – design these to appeal to the target audience by concisely describing the benefits of dancing and entice them to respond. For some time, Johnsonville’s key message has been ‘fun, fitness and friendship’. We use this as the basis for all the promotion we do from Club nights to special evenings.
  3. Using an appealing image of people dancing – to catch the eye of the target audience. Showing a diverse range of dancers (the ‘fitness’), smiling (the ‘fun’) and engagement with others in the set (the ‘friendship’) works best. I highly recommend using an image taken by a camera rather than a phone, as generally cameras produce higher resolution images with a good depth of field.
  • Using short, concise text to grab attention – to ensure the target audience is engaged by the key messages and then clicks through to a website to get more information. Our text for the Facebook ad was: Scottish Country Dancing is a fun way to get fit and make new friends – all with top-tapping Celtic music! We welcome you to our Beginner’s Classes on 5, 12, 19 and 26 February, 7.30pm on Monday nights at Johnsonville School Hall, Morgan Street, Johnsonville. Our classes suit all ages from teenagers and upwards.
  • Having easily accessed and up-to-date information on a website about the classes – clicks on our Facebook ad went to the Beginners’ Classes Event on our website. However, an ad could just as easily click through to a Region or Branch website
  • Setting a clear budget – it is essential to insert a maximum amount you wish to spend when producing a Facebook ad, otherwise Facebook will continue run the ad and charge you accordingly.
  • Johnsonville Facebook Ad

    How to advertise on Facebook

    1. To advertise on Facebook, your Club, Region or Branch must have a Facebook organisation page
    2. Only your Facebook Administrator can set up an ad and pay for it by credit card
    3. Go to your Facebook page and in the left hand menu click ‘Promote’
    4. From the pop-up menu, click ‘Promote your business locally’
    5. Choose your target location – to get a sufficient ‘potential people reach’ to produce a measurable result, we chose a radius of Johnsonville + 10km
    6. Choose your target age group – we selected aged 18 and over
    7. You can include 3-5 interests to help reach the right people – however, Scottish Country Dancers come from all walks of life so we left this blank
    8. Add your headline, text, image and the call to action (we chose ‘Learn more’ with a link to the Beginners’ Classes details on our website)
    9. Budget and duration – to ensure we didn’t go over our budget of $50, we chose the ‘Choose when this promotion will end’ option, using a duration of 7 days at $7 a day
    10. Once you have entered your credit card details to pay for the ad, click ‘PROMOTE’ at the bottom right of the online form
    11. Your ad may take a few hours to appear, as Facebook ‘approves’ promotions before posting them.

    Our promotional results

    We were delighted with the overall results of our integrated promotional campaign for our Beginners’ Classes:

    • Over seven days, our Facebook ad had a ‘people reach’ of 2,476 with 74 click-throughs to our website and three shares (people sharing ads markedly increases people reach)
    • The ad did appeal to younger age groups, with the following results for click-throughs to our website:
    • The majority of click-throughs occurred in the first three days of advertising – perhaps a more effective way of allocating a spend of $50 would be $10 on two days, followed by $6 on five days
    • There was a 140% increase in views to our website for the seven day Facebook promotional period compared to the same period in 2017
  • Our Beginner’s Classes attracted 48 new dancers compared to 30 in 2017 – an increase of 60%
  • 17 new dancers from the Beginners’ Classes joined our Club as subscribed members
  • Six sets took to the floor at our first Club night of the season in March, with our new members joining Club members returning for another year of dancing
  • With the selected location of a radius of Johnsonville + 10km for the reach of our Facebook ad, the promotion raised awareness of Scottish Country Dancing throughout the Wellington Region.
  • First Johnsonville Club night in 2018

    I am quite happy to answer any queries about Facebook advertising. Feel free to email me

    Download this article in PDF format

    Loralee Hyde
    23 April 2018

    Published in RSCDS NZ Branch Kiwi News Volume 23 No 1 April 2018

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