Branding Tips for Pole Dance Businesses

These recommendations are from Ashley Robinson’s webinar “Aerial Ambition-Branding and Marking Talk Shop with Ashley Robinson” held on September 14, 2022. Members can watch the entire webinar at this link.

Ashley Robinson is a business creative turned aerialist. Ashley uses her knowledge gained in their corporate lives to enhance the lives of aerialists and pole dancers.

A Rose by Any Other Name

What’s a brand? How do you describe a brand in general terms? Is it a logo? A color palette? The content you post?

In Ashley’s words: “a brand is a recognizable representation of a product or service that solves a problem or creates an experience”

Ashley gives some excellent examples of recognizable brands in her talk like Nike and Apple. When designing your brand, you want to make something that is true to yourself. You have to show up as a representation of your brand every day, so don’t strive to be something you’re not.

Google Yourself

Before deciding on a company name or brand, do some googling. Whatever comes up first now will come up first for a long time while you are still building your brand.

With how saturated the internet is, it’s hard to find unique names for businesses. Some other places you can check are places like NameChk or Instant Username Search to see if your desired username has already been taken.

While social media is not the end-all-be-all, if you’re going to have profiles across platforms, consistency will help people find you in all the places. For example, if you’re @Jane.Doe on Instagram, but @Jane_Doe on TikTok and Jane.Doe_Pole on another platform, it’s going to be challenging for people to find you across platforms (and possibly challenging for you to remember which variation you are on which platform).

Research Your Hashtags

It may sound silly, but hashtags have a life of their own since anyone can use any hashtag.

They are a great way of getting eyes on your posts from people who aren’t already following your page; however, you want to make sure what you’re tagging aligns with your brand. Since hashtags are case agnostic, make sure what you’re tagging can’t be broken up into other words that may be offensive. For example, the Chester Literary Festival in the UK used #CLitFest to promote their event, however, if we take out the capitalization, it can easily be read as “clit fest” instead. #whoops

It’s also important to know the history of hashtags that have been in use. For example #notastripper was popular on Instagram several years back. The hashtag was used in a negative manner, essentially sl*t-shaming the originators of pole dance. If you were thinking of using this hashtag as a way to say “I haven’t progressed enough in pole dance to try dancing at a club or stripping yet” it’s probably not going to be received that way, and a reclamation of the hashtag as deferential to strippers is probably not going to happen any time soon.

During our research for the article, we came across the views4you blog, which has an alphabetical list of hashtags that may be banned or shadowbanned.

Webpages

Once you’ve done your research, determined your brand name, hashtags, and how you want to show up in the world, It’s time to go out there and do it!

Ashley recommends purchasing your domain name (so no one else can take it) but you don’t necessarily need to host the website right away. You can purchase the domain and have it redirect to a Dropbox or Google drive of promotional material, or to your social media website—however you choose to show up on the web. Website hosting can be a big expense, especially for those just starting out. If you’re not planning on driving traffic to your website, save those funds for something more applicable, like advertising and high quality photos.

Wrap Up

The bottom line is: branding is how you show up, in person and online.

Once you’ve decided on your brand, keep showing up authentically. So as long as your brand is aligned with who you are, your people will find you.