How to Write About Your Lessons and Instruments on Your Website
In this week’s episode, I discuss how to write about your music lessons on your website and the importance of creating landing pages.
1. Have a Landing Page for Each Product or Service
Before we get into that, I want to point out that it’s important that you have a separate landing page for each instrument that you teach in your music school. By landing page, I mean a devoted page that focuses only on a single service or product that you offer. In this case, it’s music lessons.
2. Give Your Website Visitors Quality User Experience
You want to have a separate page for each instrument. This helps your website from an SEO standpoint. What I see many music schools do is they’ll have a single page where all of their different lesson offerings are listed. From this particular layout, website visitors click on individual landing pages which makes them have to scroll through to look for the thing that they’re looking for. They’re actually sifting through content.
In his book Don’t Make Me Think, author Steve Krug talks about the importance of making the experience on your website to be as frictionless as possible for your website visitors, where they don’t have to try so hard to find that piece of information that they’re looking for.
3. Look at Your Website from Your Visitor’s Perspective
Music school is a relatively simple business model. Sure, there might be a lot of different instruments that you teach. If you’re teaching strings, brass, and woodwinds, that could become a more complex one as opposed to my music school where we just taught maybe four or five instruments. If you add group lessons into that, or group programming, that certainly complicates things even more. That’s why you need to always ask yourself, “How accessible this information is to my website visitor? How many pages do they have to click through to get to the information that they want?” It’s always crucial to look at your website from your website visitor’s perspective.
4. Create a Simple and Easy User Interface
Keep in mind that your website visitor isn’t interested in hanging out on your website for very long. People land on your website and want to get a feel. They want to get an impression of your business. Know that one of the most important functions of your website is to make the process of signing up for music lessons as simple, easy, and frictionless as possible.
Why a Separate Landing Page for Each Instrument Is Important
1. It Caters to the Unique Needs of Your Visitors
Say you teach violin, then somebody Googles “Violin lessons near me”. By having a dedicated landing page for your violin lessons, Google’s likely to direct them to your violin landing page. If somebody wants violin lessons and they’re landing on your page, most likely there’s really no need for them to go anywhere else. At least, make sure to set up everything that they need to know to sign up for your violin lessons.
2. It Can Potentially Skyrocket Your Sales
Your landing page for each instrument should be optimized to make sales. You want your every landing page to help build up your website visitors’ excitement in signing up for music lessons at your music school. What you don’t want is any distractions on your website, which is why each of your landing pages should focus on one product or one service.
Who’s Likely to Read Your Instrument Landing Pages
Say someone lands on the home page of your website. Maybe a question they have is, “Do these guys teach guitar?” If they see guitar listed under your offerings, that might be all they need to know.
Perhaps your music school has a good reputation in your community. If someone’s coming to your website on a referral, maybe from a friend who takes guitar lessons at your music school, they’re likely to read very little if anything at all. They just want to be able to contact you and get signed up for lessons.
One of the Benefits of Having a Landing Page
Clearly, the landing page is for someone doing the Google search “Violin lessons near me”. Landing pages should serve as a destination for any online advertising that you do as well.
So many music schools run ads that will direct people to their websites’ home pages. This is fine if you’re just doing a very general ad about your music school, but if it’s an ad for a specific instrument, you certainly want to direct them to a landing page.
It’s important that your landing page looks like a home page of a website because, as I said earlier, that might be the only page that they land on.
The Essential Components of Your Landing Page
1. Above-the-Fold Section
As I’ve talked about in the other episodes here, when people land on your violin lessons page, the first frame that they land on is called the above-the-fold section. In the above-the-fold section, you want it to have a single image that fills up the frame. Your above-the-fold section should really look and function like a billboard, a single image, or a headline that alerts the website visitors that they’re in the right place.
2. Headline
Here’s the transformation that they can expect by signing up for violin lessons at your music school. A headline might say “The violin lessons that kids love.” or you can simply say “Violin lessons”, but there’s no emotional component to it. Yes, the parent wants violin lessons, but what they really want is some sort of transformation for their child. Combining the name of the service and the transformation in a single headline is an effective way to engage your website visitor.
3. Call-to-Action Buttons
Also, on this page, you want to have at least two call-to-action buttons. One call-to-action button placed above the fold and, ideally, another one after your actual sales copy.
4. Copy
A lot of music schools, when writing about their lessons, take these two different approaches. Some will talk about the instrument itself—what’s so great about it and its uniqueness. Some schools talk about what’s taught in the lesson. I think there’s a time and a place to talk about these things, but I doubt the first paragraph of your sales copy should be focused on either of these topics because parents don’t care about the violin, like how beautiful this instrument is, and how it’s used in both symphonic and solo instrument settings.
The Key to Good Copy for Your Landing Page
Great marketing engages the heart. Sales are made because a person desires an outcome and believes you can provide that outcome for them.
1. Create a Message that Gets Parents to Stay Longer on Your Page
Parents don’t really care about the skill and the techniques in music theory. What they care about is what your music lessons are going to do for their child. Hence, the first paragraph for each instrument that you write about should focus on the best way to engage your website visitor. The longer people stay on your landing page, the better your SEO. Google can actually measure how long people are staying on a given page within your website. That’s called the dwell time. The longer the dwell time, the more valuable Google perceives that individual page.
2. Paint a Picture of the Future
Good copy cannot only help build the website visitors’ excitement and maybe even trust in your ability to deliver, but it can also help your ranking on Google—all the more reason you need to put in the effort to write effective copy on your website for each instrument. When you write about your instruments, the best way to hook your reader to keep reading your copy is to paint a picture of the future—a picture of the future for their child. After you paint that picture, I recommend writing about your values and what you hope for their children regarding music lessons.
3. Add Details on Your Website
Last but not least, close with the details. Details like what’s taught in the lessons or what days of the week you offer lessons. Most music schools open on the details, and it kind of makes sense because people want details when they land on a website. They want to know how much this one costs and what openings you have.
4. Engage Your Visitors Emotionally
Before you lay out the details, you want to engage your website visitor emotionally. Say you’re going to write copy for your drum lessons page. What I’d recommend you do is just brainstorm some different settings where a parent might fantasize about their child playing drums. Maybe they haven’t really thought that much about it, so you can create that fantasy for them. You can paint that image of the future for them. Take the word “imagine”. Starting with that word in your first sentence sets the stage.
“Imagine your child playing drums at the school talent show. Everyone in the school claps along as your child plays the We Will Rock You drumbeat…”
Maybe you paint a picture of their child playing the drums for the family on a Saturday night dance party or perhaps leading the marching band out into the football field for the big homecoming game. People can’t resist a story, and a story is very relatable.
5. Don’t Use Musical Jargon
Mentioning music terminology when writing about your instrument doesn’t really mean anything to the reader unless they themselves are a musician. The key with all sales copy is to write about what your client cares about. Tie it in with what you have to offer. The moment you start explaining your music lesson, you’re saying things that people don’t necessarily care about. Quite often, you’re stating the obvious which people have a pretty good sense already of what a music lesson looks like. Most adults have taken music lessons at some point in their life, so there’s no need to describe your music lesson.
6. Tell a Story That Your Visitors Never Thought About
If you can tell a story that your website visitor hasn’t necessarily told themselves yet but is appealing, that’s much more likely to form a positive feeling towards you and your music school. If your guitar lesson page opens up a scene of their child playing the guitar at a campfire, maybe they hadn’t thought about that and say, “Oh, this is what could possibly happen if my child takes guitar lessons. That’s a very attractive outcome. I would love for my child to be in a leadership role like that.” That kid with the guitar at the campfire—it’s always the cool kid. Everyone wants their kids to be cool. Not necessarily cool in a fancy way, but cool in a way of respect, status, and admiration. People admire musicians.
People want their children not to be musicians; they want them to be admired. They want them to feel confident and to be able to easily make friends. Playing an instrument is a great way to achieve that. Paint that picture for your website visitors. Many of them haven’t thought that through in terms of what these music lessons could potentially do for their child.
7. Write a Copy You Can Use in Your Sales Pitch
If someone looks at your music school and the other music school right across the street, and you paint a really attractive picture on your website, they’re that much more likely to choose your music school over your competitor. Not that you’re promising that this picture will come true, but you’re just simply illustrating for them an image of the future that they find attractive. What you write on your website, the language, and the words that you choose, you can try to incorporate them into your sales pitch in every sales phone call.
8. Use Future Pacing
You wouldn’t say, “Imagine your child playing Piano Man at the school talent show.” You wouldn’t say it like that, but you could do a more subtle version of painting a picture called future pacing. On the phone, you could say, “It’s always amazing at the end of every season watching these kids, after they’ve worked so hard in their lessons, to get up on that stage and perform.”
Each child that steps up on that stage to perform has their own unique story, their own unique struggles from being a complete beginner on the instrument to getting to a point where they’re up on the stage performing for their community. It’s a triumphant moment for every child. Just imagine how your child would feel at that moment. Perhaps they’d be nervous at first. Perhaps they’d have doubt about whether they could get up on stage and perform. Maybe they’re worried about their execution and making mistakes. They might even make a mistake when they perform, but they don’t let it throw off their balance.
9. Focus on the Emotions of Your Ideal Client
There are so many great life lessons that kids learn just through the process of learning how to play the instrument, then working towards a goal, and getting up in front of their community to perform. With both phone sales calls and copy on your website, as you write about their different instruments and really all of your marketing, the key is to focus on the emotions of your ideal client. The key is to engage them emotionally.
10. Engage the Heart
When somebody calls and asks you about your music lessons, you say “Great, let me tell you about our lessons. We offer them on these days. These are the different instruments that we offer. Here’s what they cost.” You’re not engaging their emotions, but you’re engaging their brains. You want to engage their hearts.
Great marketing engages the heart. Sales are made because a person desires an outcome and believes you can provide that outcome for them. They use their logic later to justify their purchase. “Yeah, that school? Their music lessons are pretty expensive, but I really want the outcome that they painted for me. I really want that scene of my child playing the piano at our next thanksgiving meal that they painted for me. I never thought about that before. And sure their prices are high, but they must be really good if their prices are that high.”
In Closing
This episode was really supposed to be all about how to write about your instruments on your website, but obviously, I covered some different topics. I hope you found this to be helpful.
