How To Write Facebook Ads For Music Lessons | Ep 97

How to Get More Music Students with Facebook 

There are 3 things you should consider when creating Facebook ads for music lessons. Whether you’re advertising piano lessons,  guitar, or drums, the following steps apply.

1. Persuasive sales copy in your ad
2. Targeting and serving your ad to your ideal audience
3. Creating a landing page for your ad.

In this episode, I focus solely on writing Facebook ads that will motivate customers to take action. You can apply most of these concepts to any effort to advertise your music lessons. 

 

– – Show Transcript – –

 

Facebook Won’t Fix Your Marketing Problems

Music studios have a tendency to want to focus on tactical marketing, whether it be email, advertising, or social media. All these things are important, but what you need is a marketing strategy and a marketing message that’s going to support that tactic.

 

Facebook ads are not going to fix your marketing problems. If you aren’t pleased with your current enrollment and your results from marketing efforts; the problem is often in your messaging.  Facebook ads and advertising, in general, should only enhance your marketing.

 

Facebook Ads For Music Lessons

A solid marketing strategy would entail a website that’s communicating well and a phone sales effort that is focused and effective. Then Facebook ads would come into play, but we don’t live in a perfect world, especially in 2020.  A  lot of people approach their ads as if they are writing a business card.

• This is who we are
• This is what we offer
• This is how much it costs

 

That’s not going to be the most effective type of Facebook ad for music lessons. It’s going to maybe help with brand awareness-getting your name in front of more eyes.

 

Think of your Facebook ad as a partnership with your website. When people see your Facebook ad, an impression is made.  They click on the ad and they go to your website. Your website should be a continuation of what they experienced in that Facebook ad. Your Facebook ad and website’s landing page look and feel like the same place.

 

All Facebook Traffic Should Go To a Landing Page

It’s important to have some basic marketing components in place before you dive into Facebook ads. I’ll address those fundamentals as well as dig in a little deeper into actually creating Facebook ads.

 

But first; a little bit of background with the Facebook ads.  Your Facebook ads should be going to a landing page. They should not be directing traffic to your homepage. A landing page is a website page designed specifically for a specific service or product. In our case; guitar, drums, or piano lessons.

 

Piano Lessons and Facebook Ads

Let’s say you have a landing page just for piano lessons. If you’re running a Facebook ad, that’s sending people to your homepage. They land there and they have to find these piano lessons.  They start clicking around for stuff-you’re making them search for information.

 

 

Ideally, you want to have a specific landing page that you’re sending them to. What can even be more effective, is to have a landing page designed specifically for your Facebook ad.

 

 

Perhaps you take your regular piano landing page and you copy it, give it a different name. Perhaps you have the same contact form, but you rename it. This way you know that when somebody lands on that landing page and they fill out the form that the lead is coming from the Facebook ad.  This will help you track the success of your Facebook ad.

 

It’s Not About How Many Clicks You Get

It’s easy to look at your analytics and your Facebook ads and think, Oh, wow, look, look, how many people clicked on my ad. Isn’t that great? What’s more important is, how many leads you got from the ad.  That can get murky or hard to identify if those Facebook leads aren’t going to a specific page and form just for your Facebook ads for music lessons.

 

Use the Facebook Pixel

You need to have a Facebook pixel on every page of your website. You can use the data that Facebook pixel is collecting to build Facebook audiences. Now, I don’t want to get sidetracked and talk too much about Ads Manager and the back end of Facebook. I encourage you to hop on over to YouTube for a greater understanding of Ads Manager.

 

Test, Test, Test

I’ll touch on it lightly, but the Facebook pixel collects data to identify where a lead is coming from. You can serve ads back to that visitor on your website. Now, the important thing you want to consider with your Facebook ads is A/B testing your ads. So let’s say, for example, you’re going to do an ad for your piano lessons. You create an ad, copy it, and change the headline, or maybe you experiment with two different pictures and then you run the ads and the ad that’s performing better, is the ad that you want to go with. Let’s say you’re comparing two ads and ad B is getting much more traction and turn off ad A. Maybe put a little bit more money into your B ad. The more testing you do with advertising, the better results that you’re going to have.

 

How To Get Your Ads in Front of The Right People

So Ads Manager is managing the back end. That’s where you get to do all your targeting, where you can really decide and determine who is going to receive your ad; who is it going to be served to. You can create a custom audience where you say, okay, I want my ad to be served to these people, this age group and they’re female and they make this amount of money and these are the interests they have. And that’s great. That’s one type of audience you can create.

 

Another thing you can do is you can take your emails from your email list and upload it into Facebook and then create a lookalike audience. Facebook will look at all these emails that you uploaded and start looking at some common characteristics between these different people. Now, these emails should be associated with a Facebook account.

 

Lookalike Audiences 

Let’s say you upload 2000 emails, but only 1200 are connected with Facebook accounts. Facebook will begin to identify that the common traits between all these email users are X, Y, and Z. You can then create a lookalike audience which allows Facebook to build a larger audience based on other people that have these attributes. And you can do the same with your pixel. Your pixel on your website has been capturing all this data, and you can tell Ads Manager, Hey, create a lookalike audience based on the data that you’ve captured from your pixel.

 

At the end of the day, what will make your Facebook ad successful is the exact same thing that will make your website successful, that will make your email marketing successful. That is one word is words. Words is what will make your marketing work. Words are used to convey emotions, to build interest, to build trust, to communicate ideas. How do you craft the language in your ads, in all of your marketing collateral, defines the success or the failure of your ads. So we’ll talk a little bit about that today, but I want to talk about the one, two, three punch of a Facebook ad.

 

3 Points of Consideration

There are three things that you should consider when you’re putting a Facebook ad together. Those three things are

1. An image or video
2. Your headline
3. Your lead or  opening statement in your sales copy

 

Facebook Ads That Grab Attention

You want your image or video to grab people’s attention, to be an emotional trigger, to send the right message to your ideal customer. So if you’re some 19-year-old college student and you’re scrolling through Facebook and you see a picture of a kid smiling, playing the guitar, you’re likely to keep scrolling. That type of image doesn’t really speak to you. But if you’re a 33-year-old mom and you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed and you see that same image; now that might catch your attention.

 

Choosing that image is super important. And I strongly encourage you to use a real photo as opposed to a stock image. If you don’t have a great photo of your students, just bring a professional photographer out to your studio. One day, $200 or $300, just to come in for an hour or two and get some nice photos.

 

Video vs Photos

If you really want to make an impact on the image, I encourage you to consider video. People love consuming video. Videos tend to perform better on Facebook. I use short videos anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds. Think about it when you’re watching a commercial on TV, the shorter, the better, but the video can bring your brand to life in a way that a photo can’t. So that’s the first thing to really consider is do you want to go with the photo or do you want to go with a video.

 

This is What Parents Want

More important; what is going to capture the attention of your ideal customer. What’s going to have the most impact.  I saw a Facebook ad the other day, where the image was the back of the students’ heads.  Show the customer engaged with your product. Nothing says more than an image of a child smiling. That’s what parents want; they want happy kids. They want them to experience that happiness through your service, through music.

 

Facebook Headlines

One of the things that really threw me off when I started doing Facebook ads is that the headline was below the image. I’m so used to the headline, like in a newspaper where it’s at the top, then there’s some text, or maybe there’s an image below the headline. Facebook is a little bit different. So you need to really take that into consideration depending on the ad type that you’re using in Facebook, you have 25 to 45 characters to create your headline.

 

In a study conducted by Ad Espresso, It was revealed that a five-word headline is ideal for Facebook. Sometimes you’re going to have to go with the six or seven-word headline to make your point. With email, the ideal headline length is six words. Also, headlines with a number are really effective. “40% off” “10 reasons why…”

 

Best Facebook Headlines

I looked up the best Facebook headlines for 2019 and here are a few that I found that could apply to our industry. Keep in mind that I filtered the headlines through the perspective of a music studio.

• Limited: save 40% off music lessons
• 40% off. We make playing music easy.
• Sale: Up to 50% Off
• Now: 30% off lessons.

These weren’t actual headlines in the list that I found, but I looked at the list and then applied it to our industry. Let’s talk about the actual copy in your Facebook ad. More importantly, your opening statement, your hook, think of your hook as the chorus to your song. That’s where the listener in a song decides whether the song is for them or not in the hook or the lead in your sales copy is what is going to make the reader decide whether they want to read on or not.

 

How To Write Your Hook

So up to this point, a person’s scrolling through their Facebook feed. They see this appealing picture of this cute kid, playing the guitar and laughing. They read a headline that says now 50% off music lessons, and then they decide to read the copy.

 

The first sentence says, “Did you hate music lessons as a kid? Or “Have you ever wondered if your child is musically gifted?” or “Playing an instrument is hard to do…right? These are all three peculiar questions. Questions that you wouldn’t think a music studio would ask, but these are questions that are going to grab the reader’s attention. Wow. Why are they saying this? I did hate music lessons as a kid. Why would a music school say that you would think they would try to conceal that? If you ask a question, you have to make sure that that question is something that you know, that a parent is really thinking about it.

 

 

How To Spark Your Readers Curiosity

The last thing you want to do is ask a question that makes the reader think, ‘nope, haven’t really thought about that.’ Then they’re going to keep scrolling. But if you can ask a question, that’s going to engage your reader. You’re on to having a good Facebook ad. Also, that question will weed out the people that you know aren’t an ideal customer. That question will send a signal to the people who are ideal customers. If you ask a question, you want to know how your audience is going to answer it, or you at least want to know it’s going to spark their curiosity. You’re going to have to answer the question in your copy.

 

What’s Your X-Factor

So let’s say, for example, your leading question is “Learning to play an instrument is hard to do …right? WRONG! We make learning to play music fun and easy by focusing on X” You have to figure out what that X factor is going to be. Okay? So that’s your lead. That’s your hook. That’s really where you have to be putting all of your energy in terms of your sales copy. So you see on a Facebook ad, you see the copy, and then all of a sudden it says, I think it’s “read more” or “learn more”. You click on it and then you read the whole copy.

 

Build Intrigue

But what you want to do as you’re crafting your ad, you know, you’re doing it in ads manager, and you can see on the right side, how your ad is going to look. It’s giving you this preview of it. Everything you write right up to the read more section should be everything that you need or that the customer needs to be intrigued. Intrigued enough to potentially click the call to action button. You have to make your case before the “read more” button. Don’t count on people ever clicking that, read more button to see the whole ad.

 

Let’s say you got a really nice compact two-sentence idea that has initiated the reader’s curiosity. Then you can lay out more of the details below the read more, and there are different opinions as to how long should your ad be. And I think the answer really is it should be as long as it needs to be for you to convey the benefits of taking music lessons at your studio and the features at the end.

 

Know What Your Reader is Thinking

I would be very limited or very minimal with the features in your ads. The whole purpose of your ad is to get them onto your website. I wouldn’t start listing your phone number or your pricing. You ideally want your reader to be thinking as they read, “wow, I really like how these guys communicate their ideas. They really seem to understand me” Every sentence you write, you should ask yourself, why is my reader going to care about this?

 

If you come out and say, did you hate music lessons as a child? Well, your reader is going to care about that because most likely they did hate music lessons as a child. If you come out and say, playing an instrument is hard to do, right. Well, a lot of parents really feel that way. And they’re really concerned that their child will perceive it that way.

 

It’s Not About You; It’s All About Your Customer

You’re bringing the reader into the sales copy. All of your sales copy should be focused on the reader. Anytime you use the word “I”, or “we”, or “our lessons”.  Ask yourself, can you change those words to “you” or “your child?” “Your child will experience…” “You’ll be thrilled when your child…” Try to make your ad copy read like a conversation, where you’re talking directly to the customer. Don’t treat your ad as a resume “Our highly skilled music instructors…” Don’t talk about you, talk about your customer and how you’re going to help them. This applies to all sales copy. Using emojis in your sales copy can help bring it to life. Okay?

 

In Summary

So you’ve got your killer headline. You’ve got this great little short video that you put together. Perhaps with a voice-over. Maybe you did the voiceover talking about how you change kids’ lives through music. You have a very provocative opening question and then some sales copy that reflects the language and the tone of the video. And then you have your call to action button. Don’t list a call to action in your sales copy.

 

Don’t put your phone number there. You want them to click that call to action button. When they click that button, it should go to your landing page and the landing page, the language of it, and the look of it should be harmonious with your ad. They should be working as a team and there is the form and the form has the name, name, phone number, and email. You want to make this as simple, as easy and inviting for them to engage.

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