How I learned Marketing from Dancing Argentine Tango (and Copying My Competitors)

I learned how to use social media and content for marketing after meeting a handsome, expert tango dancer from Argentina.

We became a couple, and he taught me how to dance better in one month, than I had learned in the past two years of taking classes.

Soon I was assisting him in Argentine tango classes, and performing with him throughout Southern California, and later in Argentina. Through our marketing efforts, our classes were filled, and our monthly social dances were well attended.

Our successes together culminated in a three-day tango festival held at the Marriott in Burbank. People from around the world attended, as well as the majority of Southern California Argentine tango dancers.

Finding our way to success was not easy. It took quite a bit of trial and error.

But the key was learning from our competitors — and copying them.

The Slow Road to Success

My partner, Orlando Pavia Jr., already had a strong following because of his name (his father, Paiva Sr. was one of the first people to bring Argentine tango to Los Angeles in the 1970s).

However, in Los Angeles there were already many established tango teachers, so the competition for students was high.

Even if Orlando’s style of dancing was beautiful, and he was famous in Argentina and Europe, there were many people in Los Angeles who didn’t know about tango, and didn’t know about him.

So it became my mission to educate Los Angeles area would-be tango dancers about my partner, and about our classes and monthly social dances, called milongas, that we hosted.

Now at this point, I had been working as editor of The Malibu Times newspaper for about four years, and we were just launching Malibu Times Magazine.

So I was familiar using publishing as a PR tool, and creating brand awareness. But we used old-time methods such as newspaper announcements, events, and writing editorials and stories in the newspaper about the new magazine.

We had not yet implemented social media or content in any effective manner at the paper prior to the magazine’s launch.

Also at this point, I didn’t even have a Facebook page. Facebook was becoming all the rage, but I had no interest in hosting my personal life online.

Our first marketing efforts involved making flyers and distributing them at other social dances, and leaving them in places where potential dancers might congregate.

Word of mouth — actual face-to-face — was also a main driver of new students. Orlando would have to dance constantly with new women, who became enchanted by his style and would inquire about lessons.

When we started our monthly milongas, we collected emails via a sign up form. Not a digital sign up form mind you, but a handwritten list of various writing styles that we had to decode and input manually into a spreadsheet.

It was a slow and steady approach to growing our base of followers and students.

I eventually did what any good business owner or marketer should do at some point in their marketing strategy: I copied my competitors.

Watch and Learn

I started studying what successful teachers and milonga hosts did to market themselves — and create a total brand awareness.

One of the best was Yolanda Rossi. Disclosure: Yolanda is a client of mine, as I am building a website for her at the time of this writing.

Yolanda is a well regarded Argentine tango dancer, teacher, and promoter of tango in Southern California, and around the world.

She danced and taught with Orlando’s father, Orlando Paiva Sr. when he was here in 1970s, and in later years. (Sadly, Paiva Sr. died several years ago.)

Yolanda also created video cassettes, and later DVDs of tango lessons with Paiva Sr., and has a dance shoe and clothing boutique.

She knew my dance partner, and hosted and helped promote him when he first started coming to the States.

First Steps: Emailing and Message Boards

Yolanda’s method of marketing when I first met her was email, and Yahoo! Groups.

Yahoo! Groups, launched in 1998, is an online message or discussion board forum, which can be public or private. Membership can be open, or closed, and members can post messages, with the owner having the option to moderate messages to be published. Members can also subscribe to get updates via email.

While it’s meant as a discussion forum, Yolanda, and other tango teachers found Yahoo! Groups a great way to post information about classes, workshops and other tango events online. It’s still a main method of marketing for many in the SoCal tango scene.

Building a Brand: Websites, Photos, & Videos

Another person and I watched closely was Vladimir Estrin, who owns and operates the website Tangoaficionado.com I believe he was the first in Los Angeles to have a website that promoted Argentine tango in general to the local community.

The drive behind his Website was to engage the community and grow the love of tango.

His site was very popular because he took photos at all of the social dances and posted them online. We flocked to the site to browse through the photos.

Vladimir also shot videos and posted them on YouTube. A tactic that some teachers started to embrace.

Unfortunately, for the local tango community, he stopped developing and updating the site. However, local teachers and promoters still post their events on the site.

Marketing Tango with Social Media

Not too many people in the early 2000s had embraced Facebook as a way to promote tango events, but eventually it caught on.

In the early days, before Facebook Business pages came along, online savvy teachers and promoters would publish personal posts about their tango offerings. Later they used the Events tool, and still do.

Now, many use a combination of personal posts, events, and Business pages. And since Facebook has restricted organic reach, I also now see some tango teachers utilizing Promoted Posts and ads.

Those who sell dance shoes and clothing have Facebook stores, as well as online stores on their Websites.

Facebook is still the main social media platform that tango teachers and promoters use to reach their target market.

I Copied My Competitors and it Worked

Using these methods was still a bit of trial and error, learning how to use all these platforms, but copying our competitors worked.

I used Mailchimp to set up automated newsletters — every time I published a new blog post on my Website, a newsletter email was sent that week.

By publishing content that wasn’t just promoting our events, but also announcing other milonga openings, and festivals, we attracted new subscribers.

Having an sign-up form embedded on our site made it much easier to collect those emails!

We set up a Yahoo! Group account, and started posting events and other information.

I also built a Website, CoffeeandTango.com, where I posted events, photos, videos, and a tango calendar eventually.

And once I saw how people were using Facebook to promote events I did that too, and finally signed up for a personal account.

All these methods were quite effective, and we eventually hosted the Tango Masquerade festival in Burbank, with live music, dancing three nights, and tango classes that were packed.

Eventually, I implemented what I learned from promoting tango into the The Malibu Times newspaper and magazine’s online marketing strategy.

If You Want to Beat Them, Join Them

So the old adage, “If You Can’t Beat Them, Join them,” is tried and true.

If you have a competitor who is highly successful, they’re doing something right. So why not utilize their experience?

There is nothing wrong with studying and copying what successful people and companies do.

Of course, you’ll have your own unique selling point and mission statement for your company.

Take a look at your competitors Websites, and the content they publish. Do they have email sign-up forms, and where are they placed on the site? What other elements of their sites draw attention, and why?

Which social media platforms do they use, and have the most engagement? What kind of content are they posting on those platforms? Do they use polls, contests, question and answers, memes?

While I don’t recommend duplicating the exact design of a competitor’s website, or email template, you can cultivate and create your own unique campaigns, stealing a few ideas from them.

In Summary

If you simply don’t know where to begin with your marketing strategy, study your competitors.

Cultivate what appeals to you, and implement it into your unique strategy to reach your target market.

Through your own trial and error, you’ll find out which social media platforms, and other digital marketing methods work best for your digital marketing strategy.

Where to Read More

For Argentine Tango: CoffeeandTango.com. For more digital marketing stories and advice, CrackerjackScribe.com.

For Fun

Here’s one of my favorite performances with Orlando back in the day: