I went down the rabbit hole on branding and brand strategy. One of the things I came across was a 6-hour video from Caleb Ralston on YouTube.

Why it’s worth your time: Caleb was the Director of Brand for Alex & Leila Hormozi, and the Brand Strategist for Gary Vaynerchuck where he grew their personal brands to over 13 million social media followers. (Oh yeah, he also led the brand strategy for their businesses.)

I co-founded Dance On The Edge in 2018 and we would draw one hundred attendees to our initial events. This week, I’ll teach you what we did to reach 10,000 Instagram followers and attract one-thousand attendees.

Disclosure: I left my role at Dance On The Edge in 2024, and this not intended to represent their current operations.

I had 9 years of experience in the Latin dance community, and had a small reputation for teaching salsa and bachata. The other cofounders had similar experiences, which helped us earn the trust of other dancers when we announced that we were going to create events for dancers.

In 2018, Facebook was the king of anything related to social media and event planning. We didn’t know how to create a business page so we created a FB Community for event updates and asked everyone to join. Our marketing plan was to post the event details in the FB community and get people to RSVP there.

We eventually created our first business page Instagram because we learned that most of attendees learned about our events from there.

We spammed the tagging feature to gain the attention of news reporters and magazines. We did this because traditional media liked to source topics from the public when thinking about their next story, so we tagged them as a way of saying, “Hello!!! Look at what we’re doing. Come check us out!”

One day we noticed that attendees would repost our photos and videos if they were in it, so we took a lot of photos and videos.

After the events, we posted photos and tagged the people in them, which they almost always reposted to their account.

We later found out that people also shared the photos to other users—people we didn’t know—which benefited us in two ways: 1) a new person learned about our events and 2) the Instagram algorithm increased our reach as a reward for getting a lot of shares.

Going back to news reporters, we also captured photos that fit their reporting needs (think groups and wide shots). This made it easy when they wanted to write a short story or featured us in a larger story.

Pro tip: We looked up email addresses for news reporters and emailed Word Docs promoting events dates, times, and contact info if they ever wanted to chat.

People would zone out when event descriptions were too long. We came up with “Free, Fun, and Family Friendly” to roll off the tongue.

We mentioned it anytime we spoke in a public, and repeated it so often that attendees and reporters also used it to talk about Dance On The Edge.

At the events, our team acted as hosts and had mini conversations with attendees. We welcomed and thanked first timers for coming. Then we broke the ice by introducing them to other attendees.

Repeat attendees were recognized and we made references to previous conversations to show we remembered them.

Personal interactions from the team helped people feel excited to be there, which made our event photos very popular. Attendees couldn’t wait to reshare our posts.

We could post or send emails everyday leading up to an event, but there would always be someone who claimed they had no clue. So we made it a point to promote upcoming events in one-to-one conversations, especially if they were having a great time.

“You’re having a great time? Awesome. See you at the next event on ABC date!”

“You wish your family could’ve made it? No worries. They can come to the next one on ABC date!”

“Still trying to learn that dance move? All good. Let’s practice it with more people on ABC date!”

By us making personal invitations, people publicly RSVP’d or invited their friends on Instagram to the next events.

Today, Dance On The Edge has almost 15,000 Instagram followers, and attracted 2,000 attendees to their recent event. Their growth strategy might have changed since I left, but the fundamentals are still the same: make great experiences and tell people about it.

Romi

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