Music School Marketing
I view both business and marketing as an art form. I call them art forms because both marketing and business is a form of expression, which would fall under the category of art. That’s great news because you are an artist. You’re a natural at art. You’re a natural at expressing yourself. Business and marketing should come naturally to you. Quite often, music school owners struggle with this because they don’t have a framework to work in. Today I’m going to share with you how to create this framework for yourself.
In order to master these two different disciplines in just a few weeks, you’re going to have to set aside maybe 30 minutes a day to do this, but trust me, if you do this, your understanding of business and marketing will be transformed in just a matter of a few weeks.
A Plan That Works
So here’s what you do. You get a nice hardcover notebook, not some flimsy spiral-bound notebook, not even one of these composition notebooks, something that feels like a book. In this book, you’re going to take notes. The notes that you’re going to write are going to come from YouTube videos. YouTube videos are a great way to learn the fundamentals of business and marketing in a relatively short amount of time.
You’re a natural at art. You’re a natural at expressing yourself. Business and marketing should come naturally to you.
Step 1: Self-Education
Write down some searches that you would do on YouTube that would help you learn more about business and marketing. A few searches might be…
- “How to market my small business”
- “Fundamentals of marketing”
- “How to market my business on social media”
- “How to market a service-based business”
- “How to get better results on social media”
- “How to write a Facebook ad”
- “How to create a website for my business”
- “How to get more leads”
- “How to build my email list”
Just think of all the different things that you struggle with within your business and come up with how-to questions.
- “How to manage my employees”
- “How to hire an employee”
- “How to interview an employee
- “How to fire an employee”
- “How to create systems for my business”
- “How to create an operations manual for my business”
These are all common things that music school owners struggle with. Just brainstorm in your notebook all the different aspects of your business that you struggle with, that you may be overwhelmed with, and come up with how-to questions.
Step 2: Get it Down on Paper
Then you’re going to go to YouTube and start throwing these questions in. What I like to do is first just throw in questions and see whose videos are popping up first. You’ll begin to notice, “Oh, wow, look at this person, she keeps popping up on different queries.” Check out how many views she’s had, how many thumbs up. Maybe even write down, start making a list of people who appear to be thought leaders, appear to know what they’re talking about when it comes to marketing and business basics.
Devote 15, 20 minutes, ideally 30 minutes a day to just watching videos and taking notes. Watch videos, video creators that are consistently ranking high with different topics. I always watch YouTube videos at maybe a time and a half or 1.25 speed. If you go to the little wheel icon on the YouTube video, you can adjust the speed. This 15-minute video that you’re going to watch, you can knock out in just a few minutes at a faster playback speed. At the top of the page, indicate who the person is that you’re watching, maybe the name of the video in case you want to go back later to reference it. After about a week or so of doing this, your knowledge of business and marketing will really begin to take off.
Step 3: Strategy
Learning all this stuff, that’s great, documenting all this stuff in your notebook’s great, but as you’re doing this, begin to devote time each day to ask yourself, “What do I do with this knowledge that I’m learning now? How can I implement it in my music school?” What I like to do after watching a video is get a highlighter out and highlight the key points where I feel like, “Wow, I could really bring this into my business.”
After you spend a few weeks watching all these videos, just devoting 15 to 30 minutes a day doing this, you’re going to have a lot of really good notes on how to improve your marketing, on how to improve your systems, how to think differently about your business. Now that you’ve had all these highlighted bullet points in your notes and begin to start formulating different strategies, different plans.
Quite often, music schools get stuck because they lack the knowledge, they lack the know-how that will help them take their business to the next level. The knowledge is out there. You don’t have to read all these books. That can seem really overwhelming. Reading books is great, but you could learn a lot from just watching these different YouTube videos. Fix your knowledge gap.
You most likely did not go to college and get an MBA. You most likely started your music school with little to no knowledge of business or marketing. The lack of business and marketing maybe doesn’t necessarily hurt you in the early stages of your music school, but if you want to scale your music school […] you need to master these skills, These skills being business and marketing.
Step 4: Action
The next step is formulating a plan. It gets a little bit more complicated since you’re moving your way towards action. Education is the first step, the action’s the last step, but strategy and planning are what bridge these two different worlds. Action allows you to actualize the knowledge you’ve obtained, but you need a strategy. You need a plan in order to do that.
Perhaps your plan could be that you watched some videos about how to get more traction on Instagram. You’re going to put together a plan that’s going to take maybe two weeks to implement, it’s going to take some trial and error, but you’ve learned some new things about this platform. You’re going to create a social media calendar. You’re going to begin to define different themes in your Instagram post. You now learn the importance of what task on social media can be effectively delegated to your team. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself with all this new information that you’ve learned, but you want to take this information and ask yourself how can you, in a systematic way, implement it into your studio.
Baby Steps
You’ll overwhelm yourself and you’ll overwhelm the systems of your music school if you try to implement too many changes, too many new processes, too many new strategies at once. Go one at a time, baby steps, small steps. Map it out. Map out the steps that you want to make and the amount of time it’s going to take to implement each step. Then once you’re done implementing this new strategy into your music school, what’s going to be the next strategy that you’re going to implement? All of a sudden what seemed impossible, what seemed overwhelming seems tangible.
Action’s Always the Hardest Part
The hardest steps are always implementation, follow-through, and management. Let’s say you come up with what appears to be an effective social media strategy. You watched all these different videos. You really feel like you’ve got a new handle, a new understanding of how to implement an effective social media strategy. You delegate some of it out. Now you have to manage people. You have to follow up with them.
If you implement this approach of searching YouTube videos based on challenges, struggles, areas of frustration, lack of knowledge that you have in your business, come up with good search queries based on these, start watching videos, taking notes, watching videos at a faster speed, devote 15 to 30 minutes a day, begin to implement a plan and implement your plan, I guarantee you in just a matter of a few weeks, maybe just a month, you could see a significant transformation in your music school. More importantly, is that your knowledge of business and your knowledge of marketing can improve dramatically by doing this.
Don’t do this for just a month. Make this an ongoing process. You most likely did not go to college and get an MBA. You most likely started your music school with little to no knowledge of business or marketing. The lack of business and marketing maybe doesn’t necessarily hurt you in the early stages of your music school, but if you want to scale your music school, if you want to build personal wealth for yourself from your music school, if you want to have a better life-work balance, you need to master these skills, these skills being business and marketing.
It’s Easier Than You Might Think
It doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t need to require hours and hours of books and studying. There are so many people out there on the internet, on YouTube specifically, who’ve condensed these ideas down into just very simple, easy-to-digest 10 to 15-minute videos. Knowledge, strategy, and action, commit to all three and your music school will have no choice but to grow.
