How to Advertise Music Lessons
Advertising is the obvious tactic to implement when you want to grow your music teaching business. The more money you sink into your ads, the more rocket fuel you infuse into your effort. When you advertise music lessons, however, can be a costly endeavor and a huge disappointment.
Does this sound like you? You watched a few YouTube videos on how to create Facebook ads, you even invested in an online course but still, your ad underperformed. Check the engine (Facebook Ads Manager) Perhaps that’s the problem. Nope. You followed the expert’s recommendations but still no traction, no leads, no new business.
The issue is not technology. The issue is psychology. The better you understand your ideal customer’s hopes, dreams, and fears, the better you can communicate with them.
When Advertising Doesn’t Work
So what’s the problem here? Perhaps Facebook ads don’t work. Think again, my friend.
How to Fix Your Marketing Problems
Understanding what motivates your customer doesn’t have to be a guessing game. The best way to understand your customer’s core desires is to ask them.
Try this exercise. Call your best 3-5 customers. Customers who spend the most and refer the most. Customers who clearly align with your brand and willingly sing your praises. The more folks like this in your music school, the better. Call them and ask them the following questions.
- What do you feel is the biggest challenge with raising kids today?
- What makes you feel like you’re being a good mom?
- Did you take lessons as a child? What was that experience like?
- How do you believe music can help your child?
- What are your greatest fears or concerns about music lessons?
- What would failure in music lessons look like?
Once you have this data you can now craft a sales message that speaks directly to your ideal customer. From my experience, parents don’t really care that much about music lessons. They care about the impact it will have on their child’s life.
Focus on the Transformation
They aren’t typically so clear as to how they think music will impact their child but they believe music has the ability to lead to positive change. Parents don’t care about music lessons, they care about change and transformation. If your advertisements fail to address this desire; your advertising will fail. It’s simply not enough to say “no enrolling”.
–Show Highlights and Transcript–
Marketing Building Blocks
It’s important that you set up your marketing so that your business is in a good position to advertise. So yes, before you can advertise or before you should advertise, there are some marketing building blocks or some marketing fundamentals that should be in place in your business in order to make the most of your marketing efforts.
When you advertise you’re putting money behind your growth efforts, and you want a really good return on your investment. It’s not enough to just simply advertise. Your advertising has to rest on the shoulders of your marketing message and developing a marketing message certainly takes some soul searching and that can take some time and effort. But I want to take a look at music studio owner, Kristin Humbard’s sale copy from her website for her music school, Oconee Music located in Oconee, Georgia. Her website is oconeemusic.com.
How To Advertise Music Lessons
So in order to build a strong marketing foundation for your business, you want to have a customer avatar and some sort of mission statement or purpose statement, vision statement, some statement that describes your reason for existing. Now, a customer avatar and a mission statement, are two topics that require a lot of time to flesh out. But I want to do a quick overview of what they are and more and more specifically I want to share with you how Kristin developed her customer avatar and her mission statement, and how that led to a long-form sales statement.
Once you develop a long-form sales statement, you can use that as a foundation for all of your marketing. A great place to place your long-form sales message is in your about us section on your website. Your about us section should be about you. I mean, it is about us, but specifically, it should be about how you were inspired to help people through music. Kristin was a part of my Music Studio Mastery program. It was a group coaching program. I’ve actually broken that off now into private coaching, but this is one of the first exercises I do with all of my clients.
The Most Neglected Step To Marketing Success
So before you can advertise, before you can market, you have to identify who you’re going to market to. You have to craft a message that is going to resonate with your ideal customer. Trying to define an ideal customer or a customer avatar hands down is the most neglected, yet the most important part of building a marketing strategy. I quite often get pushback or resistance when I’m working with a studio owner on this idea of defining a customer avatar. But once you go through the exercise, you’ll see how essential, how important this is for your marketing.
How to Provide Focus and Clarity to Your Marketing
Your customer should be at the heart of all your marketing communications and using a customer avatar helps you craft and target messages that will resonate with your ideal client. It provides focus and clarity to all your marketing. It allows you to make your marketing feel more personal since it’s designed to resonate with your ideal client. The most common objection or pushback I get on this exercise is people will say, “I don’t have an ideal customer. Everyone is my ideal customer.” And that’s certainly not possible that everyone can be your ideal customer.
How to Create a Customer Avatar
Parents have different objectives when it comes to music lessons. Different objectives in terms of the outcome that they’re looking for. The way that you can create a customer avatar for your music studio is literally to pick your top three to five customers in your studio and ask them these questions I’m about to share with you. Now, your three to five top customers are the top three to five people that you enjoy working with, that bring you the most business, that refer the most, that have a certain amount of social influence in their social circles, because you perceive them as someone who’s a likable personality.
Creating Your Marketing Building Blocks
Give your avatar a name. Perhaps it’s the name of one of your customers. I created a customer avatar for my music school and I chose the name of one of the parents. I’m going to read to you now Kristin’s customer avatar. and her mission statement and how she used her mission statement and avatar to craft her main sales message, which is sitting pretty on the homepage of her website. From this, Kristin now is in a great position to start creating organic social media posts from that message. And she’s in a great position to start creating some ads that are rooted in that main sales message. She can use that main sales message or you can pull out the language from it to create some high converting ads.
When advertising doesn’t work, the problem usually lies within the message, not the platform.
Here is Kristin’s customer avatar. Her name is Jessica. She’s a 35-year-old realtor with a flexible schedule. She enjoys yoga and running. It’s important to her that she’s successful in her work. She enjoys shopping and takes pride in being an ethically responsible citizen. She enjoys sharing her life on Instagram and bragging from time to time about her kids and home life. Her favorite places include local coffee shops, target, and bookstores. She loves wearing her Lululemon workout gear as much as possible but enjoys having some trendy boutique items for dressing up at her day job.
Her success in life is defined by how she feels her children are doing. She feels successful when she’s helping her children to grow as people. She wants her kids to have a love for learning, to be independent people with critical thinking skills. And she doesn’t want them to have the same boring music lesson experience that she had growing up, which caused her to lose interest and quit her music lessons.
She wishes that as an adult she could play an instrument because she admires those who can. She makes a decent six-figure income and is willing to sacrifice to get her children into the best activities she and her husband aren’t necessarily wealthy, but they value the investment they make in music lessons. She and her husband have involved parents, but not necessarily helicopter parents.
So we really get a sense of who Jessica is. She’s fictitious, but as I’m reading this, I can just start thinking in my own mind which of my customer fit this description. It’s actually pretty spot-on for the customers in my music school.
How to Write a Mission Statement for Your Music School
Next, Kristin needs a purpose statement, a mission statement, a statement that defines her reason for existing. It’s not about music. No one’s interested in music lessons except for musicians. Jessica, her customer avatar, she’s interested in her children’s happiness. She’s interested in her children having experiences that will help them grow as people. She’s interested in her children loving learning and being independent, and being critical thinkers. That’s her motivation. If she can’t get it in music lessons, she’ll look elsewhere for it.
Kristin’s purpose or Kristin’s mission, her vision has to tie in directly to what it is that Jessica is looking for. Jessica is the avatar that Kristin has chosen to serve. In Kristin’s mission statement, sure enough, she talks about how her mission is to help kids develop a sense of independence, to feel comfortable with self-expression, and self-confidence in a loving and nurturing atmosphere. She achieves that through music. Music is secondary.
Long-Form Sales Message Example
“Confession time. I hated to practice when I was a kid. Every day, I had a battle with my mom over practice time. To me, the music was boring and I’d rather be running around and playing with my teacher. Never let me choose my own music and weekly lessons felt so slow. Did you take from the same teacher as I did? As a mom myself, I know that it’s not fun to be the bad guy with your kids 24/7. Why add an extracurricular that will create drama between the two of you? It’s the rare child that will willingly practice for 30 minutes a day by themselves, but kids love music.”
“So how do we get our children to be excited to learn to play music? I believe it comes from allowing them the independence to choose their music. And from initially focusing more on playing and less on reading notes. I started opening music after years of teaching piano lessons the traditional way. I realized that some of the most talented students quit because they were bored and were struggling to learn to read music, not because they didn’t enjoy music. When children learn to read in school, they’d been already speaking for years. Why should traditional lessons jump in with note reading?”
“Immediately from day one when a student starts lessons with us, I want them to be playing songs they enjoy. When children feel like they are playing real music, they will be more inspired to practice at home. Success nurtures more success. Our lessons and classes are designed to be flexible according to the child’s needs to foster their independence and to build confidence through successful music performance. Being able to play an instrument opens many doors in life from rock bands to band programs to community choirs to church groups, there is never a lack of social opportunities for musicians. Musicians are looked up to and admired. Being a musician means being a part of a supportive community of musical friends. I want that for your family and I hope that you’ll join us at Oconee Music.”
Why Does Your Music School Exist?
There are so many things in the sales copy that are worth noting. You can see how her long-form sales copy is a direct reflection of her customer avatar, her mission statement, and her core beliefs. The existence of her music school is very clear in what she wrote. Why does your music school exist? People want to know. It doesn’t exist so you can make money. That’s the outcome of a successful music school, but what impact does your music school have on kids’ lives? How does it make the world a better place?
Parents want to know. You got to do some deep soul searching, do the hard work as Kristin did with a customer avatar, a mission statement, which then set her up or put her in a position to write this long-form sales copy. And from here now, she can extrapolate messages and ideas to fuel her digital marketing, her social media, and then ultimately her advertising.
Today’s Guest: Jennifer Roig-Francoli is a prizewinning violinists coach for musicians and creator of the Art of Freedom Method, which helps performers and music educators enjoy healthy, balanced lives and successful careers by developing powerful mind, body skills based on the Alexander Technique. Her clients learn how to overcome pain, tension, and performance anxiety, and dramatically improve their artistic skills.
