Connect With Your Music Students
Abbi Perets’ story is both inspirational and motivational. Her interview is a marketing treasure chest. Learn what your customers really think and want. Write your sales copy in a language they understand. Take your musician hat off and join your customer on their side of the table. See your business from their perspective.
[Interview Highlights]
What is Sales Copywriting?
Writing words that are designed to get someone to take a specific action usually to buy something but not always. The idea behind it is that it has a purpose generally to get someone to buy something from you. Ultimately at the end of the day.
What is Good Sales Copy Writing?
I’m really about connecting with copy. Here’s my philosophy. I wouldn’t walk up to somebody I cared about and say, “Hey, buy this cool thing.” Even if it is a really cool thing and they really should buy it, that’s not how I approach people. I feel like I don’t want to do that in writing either. Even when I am trying to sell something for myself or for clients, I want to connect.
Sales Copy and Connection
The writing should always be about making that connection. If you can do that, the sales will follow. If you’re selling something to an audience, you should really genuinely care about that audience and it should really matter to you. You’re selling them something that they can use, that will improve their lives somehow. That caring for them, that relationship should come through in the writing. If you keep that at the forefront as you’re putting together your writing and let’s say right from the heart and let that drive things, I think you’re going to have a much better end result than you would if your entire goal is, give me your money.
Connection and trust I think are almost intertwined and I think it would be really hard to separate them out from each other. I really don’t see how you have one without the other.
Sales Copy For Music Lessons
I’m hiring a music teacher and I assume that they have some standard of music skills, right? But it was much more about my connection with the person and I think that that’s really going to carry over to almost any industry. If you connect with people on that very human level, they’ll choose to work with you, for you, and it’s less about your guitar or piano skills.
Music Lessons and Trust
Not every musician is a phenomenal teacher. I’m not even going to give you the chance to show me what kind of teacher you are if I haven’t felt some sort of connection with you and if I don’t feel like I can trust you. One of the easiest ways to do this, particularly if you’re marketing yourself through writing on a website, you want to talk much less about yourself and much more about the people you’re trying to serve.
When you go to anyone’s website because you’re interested in working with that person, it’s not so much about, I studied at Julliard or I have these degrees or I’ve won these awards and it’s much more about your kid will be playing music in three weeks or whatever it is.
Keep the Focus on “YOU”
Your story comes out in pieces absolutely but the focus needs to be on what you’re giving to people on what they’re getting from you. One of the biggest guidelines I give people when you’re writing your website is take the word “I” out of it as much as possible. Keep the focus on “you”, the reader, the customer who is coming in and wanting this help.
Write How You Talk
If you were at a party and somebody called you up and said, oh, I want you to meet so and so because she’s looking to start piano lessons or whatever it is. The kinds of things that you would say out loud to a person when you were talking about what they could expect.
What can your child learn? What’s the right age to start music lessons? What environment do you want … The things that you would talk about very naturally, those same things should carry over to your writing and it should be focused on, well here’s how I can help your child. It’s not so much about me, but it’s how I can help. Also, I guess adults take music lessons. But yes, for me, I talk naturally about kids because I have a lot of them and I think about them a lot.
How Do You Help Your Music Students?
Talk about how you’re helping this person, if it’s whether you’re serving your kids or you’re serving them. Talk about that rather than about how many years you’ve studied music and how many … I don’t know, concertos, you know how to play. That’s less relevant to me when I’m looking for somebody to work with.
If I’m a consumer and I’m looking to buy something from you, there’s a need that I have and I need you to clearly articulate the problem that I’m facing and not gloss over it. Some of this you want to do in a sales pitch, some of this you might do over the course of an email sequence as you’re talking to people and getting to know them better, but you want to make it clear that you understand the problem they are facing.
Show Empathy
Maybe they have kids who, they really like their kids to take music lessons but the kids are not so into it or how do you get your kids to practice? We harp on the problems that they’re facing and let them know that you are aware of the problem and how you can solve that problem.
What Moms Want
My daughter really wanted to take guitar lessons and we had just moved back to Israel and she was 12 and she was extremely unhappy with us and was certain that we had planned and orchestrated this entire international moves solely to make her unhappy, which as a mom is basically how I spend my time seeing how I can make my children unhappy.
She really wanted guitar lessons and I really wanted her to stop whining about it but I also had all these other issues in that she’s the oldest and I had four other kids who needed a lot of help and support and I could not go anywhere that was going to require me to drive more than about 10 minutes each way. I wanted it to be convenient, I wanted somebody close by and really … To me, the person who was recommended in the community was a man.
Then I wanted to make sure am I leaving my child with this man? What is the situation like? Are they in a closed room together? I don’t know how … Those were the things that when I met him and I met his daughter who was my daughter’s age and I saw the space where this would be happening in, this open space that anybody could walk by. These were things that were very reassuring to me as a parent. I was much less concerned with how much music he knew, which is maybe to my detriment, but these were the things that I was concerned about in the beginning.
Music Lessons and Status
Whenever my kids are involved in something, I certainly feel that it elevates my status as their mother. It was exciting to me when she was putting in the time in the music lessons and even when my kids were smaller and they took piano lessons, at age five, six, seven, eight. It definitely … It made me feel like a good parent. Like I was doing a thing that parents are supposed to do, getting their kids music lessons. I think that they liked it to an extent and they definitely enjoyed talking about it let’s say significantly more than they liked to actually doing it.
Ask Your Customers
I’m also a huge fan of talking to your people. Literally having a conversation with them where you ask them, well, hey, what matters most to you? Especially if you can talk to people who have already hired you as a music teacher. Ask them what made you say yes? What made it easy for you to make this decision? Even also ask them what hesitations did you have? Hear them talk about that and I’m a huge fan of recording these conversations and getting that information in their own words is so critical because then you can use that language when you’re writing your copy and half the work is done for you.
How Your Customers Can Help You
When putting my course together I spent the first 15 minutes asking them, what do you hope to cover in this course? What are you most looking forward to learning? They literally fed me everything that they wanted to see in the course.
Then I wrote the content and then I delivered the course and all of the people who enrolled in it said to me, “Oh my God, this is amazing. This is exactly what I wanted.” I was like, yes, I know because you told me. I do that with every client I work with to. Literally every time I sit down to write anything, I’m like, okay, what do you most want to see covered in this? They’ll tell me, okay, well it has to talk about this task, this and that, and I’ll write that up and give it to them. They’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, you hit on all the important points.” Yes, because I listened when you told me what they were.
Show You Care
If you care about the people, and you care about the thing and you believe that the thing can help the people that’s going to come out. The other side of that I would say is that there are a lot of ways to communicate. If you really feel like I can’t do it in writing, then don’t do it in writing, make a video.
Find What Works For You
There are so many ways that you can communicate with people. It doesn’t all have to be the written word. For me, I prefer to write than to do anything else. As much as I love conversations and podcasts and videos, when I can write the stuff down and organize my thoughts, I feel much better. But that’s me. I would never try to express myself through graphic design, for example, because that would be terrible. I don’t know how to do it at all and I would be a wreck. But words, that’s my thing. I like words.
Featured Websites
Show Credits
Intro music: Dusted by Fojimoto
Transition music: Levi Simon
Outro music: Rain and Revolution by City Breathing
