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Episode Summary
Seven ways you can connect with and tap into your local community to promote awareness and, in turn, grow your business.
Items Mentioned
How One $0 Marketing Effort Yielded Over $5,000 Tuition
More Parks and Recreation Classes
School Music Teachers: A Marketing Gem
Episode 013 – How to Make Music Teacher Friends
Parades: a Double-Marketing Whammy
Transcript
As we move into the final weeks of the school term, this is the time of year when many of us start thinking about recruiting and onboarding. The first step is usually confirming and locking in which of our current students are continuing for the next school term so that we then know how many spots we need to fill.
Today, we’ll consider seven ways you can connect with and tap into your local community to promote awareness of your studio and, hopefully, in turn, quickly fill empty spots either now or in the future.
Whether you’re an established teacher without a waiting list, a new teacher just getting started, or an established teacher who would simply like to make more connections in the community, this episode is for you.
If you’re new around here, I’m Amy Chaplin, and you’re listening to episode 119 of The Piano Pantry Podcast – Tap & Grow: Free Community-Based Marketing. This podcast is brought to you by friends of the podcast over on Patreon. If you enjoy and benefit from this podcast, please consider joining today for as little as $4 a month.
When I opened my studio in 2011, I did everything possible to get my name out. While my husband and I were somewhat established in the community – we had lived there from 2004-2006, when I had my first teaching job at the local middle school and high school – life took us elsewhere for a few years.
Having a good base of old friends from church and acquaintances established from my choir job certainly was a great way to kick-start the business, but I knew it would take some work to onboard a full studio quickly.
Today I’m going to share with you all the ways I tapped into my community to grow my business quickly. My hope is that even if your community doesn’t have the exact same opportunities, this episode will spark ideas for avenues you may not have considered exploring.
The biggest piece of advice is you have to be proactive. You cannot just sit back and let Google and your current clients do the work.
While word of mouth was ultimately the most effective—a statement I made confidently as I tracked and analyzed the data from all of my inquiries in the first few years—you have to get people in the door to start reaping the benefits of word of mouth.
In fact, the informal field research I conducted through my own experiences was the topic of my first national session, The Wild West of Marketing: How Do You Know What Really Works, which was given at the 2016 MTNA Conference in San Antonio.
Building a business requires effort from various sources. Yes, word of mouth is still highly effective, but small little bits and efforts here and there will also add up and eventually become the word-of-mouth funnels outside of current students.
The first of the seven I want to feature today is your local Chamber of Commerce. If you are starting a new business, connect with your chamber and see if they conduct ribbon-cutting ceremonies. These are usually published throughout the community and are a great way to kick things off. Chamber of Commerce members are there because they’re passionate about helping local businesses thrive, so connect with those people.
Next up is your local community arts center. This might be a place that offers dance lessons, music lessons, community theater, and so forth. If they offer lessons in the same instrument as you do, don’t feel you have to hide or present yourself as a competitor. Just go and introduce yourself to the director and say you have an independent music studio in the community, and you just want to get to know others in the area who do art-based work. You might even inquire as to if they have advertising opportunities in dance recitals or theater programs. I did this several times in the early days. Have you ever been to a dance recital?! There are a LOT of people with school-age children that attend those dance recitals!
The third group to consider is any kind of community programming. Our city has a parks and recreation department that provides all kinds of great opportunities throughout the year, especially in the summer. I partnered with them for two or three summers to provide free one-off classes for the community.
I did four different classes. A 40-minute “Tot Music Time” for 3-4-year-olds, a 50-minute “Piano Play & Discovery” time for 5-6-year-olds, and a 50-minute “Meet the Piano” time for 7-8-year-olds and 9-10-year-olds.
I was able to do these, mainly because I had four digital keyboards, but you could still get creative with just one piano. If you teach from your home, I can see how you may not want to bring people in for a one-off class. Perhaps you could teach a music and movement class that has nothing to do with piano using things from Dalcroze.
The fourth place you might consider connecting with is a council on aging. ****In my early days, when I was trying to get Recreational Music-Making classes for adults going, I reached out to our council on aging and set up a booth at an exhibition they held for adults in the community.
The fifth group to connect with is your school music teachers. I find it shocking how many teachers never take the time to seek out and introduce themselves to the local school music teachers. Do it! All of them. Elementary music, band and choir teachers, and maybe even theater teachers. These are the people customers go to when looking for lessons. I know some of you might be uncomfortable making cold connections like this, so if you’re interested, there is a post on the Piano Pantry blog called “School Music Teachers: A Marketing Gem” that includes some verbiage to get you started.
Along those same lines, don’t be afraid to connect with teachers of the same and other instruments in your area. I talked about this in episode #13, How to Make Music Teacher Friends. Maybe you could seek permission from and put together a list of everyone who gives private lessons in the community. You could offer the list to all the school music teachers they can refer to when someone asks.
My local piano teacher community and I all share a Google Doc that everyone has editing access to. It has our contact information, instruments and levels we prefer to teach, and so forth. It’s been super handy to give out when I am not taking students.
My sixth idea is in reaction to questions I received from at least two teachers in the past few weeks. How did you get homeschooled students? Mostly, for me, it ended up being a coincidence. In my early days, I did reach out to a local homeschool association and place an ad in their newsletter a couple of times but nothing came of it. Even though that connection didn’t result directly in new students for me, I would still recommend making an effort to connect with any local homeschool groups and see what options might be available. Once again, it still cycles back to word of mouth. Once you get one homeschooler, the connections will start opening up.
The last item to offer today is not a group or an organization per se but is more of an activity, and that is parades. Our city has a long history of a Street Fair held in September. Traffic is diverted and city streets are full of typical fair things like food, rides, and games. This was an interesting change of pace for my husband and me as I came from a community that has high-quality fairgrounds that host the 4-H Fair at the same time as the games and rides summer fair. Here, the 4-H fair is separate from the Street Fair. Every community is different!
They do parades 2 or 3 different parades over the course of several days. I think Wednesday night is the opening parade, which hosts all the fun floats; Thursday evening is the industrial parade, and Friday is the marching band parade.
For at least five years, I participated in the Thursday night industrial parade, where businesses walk and toss candy. People drive anything from cars to tractors and wagons to ATVs, and some just walk. It was a fun time not only for getting my face out in the community but also to bring the kids together. Elementary students especially love opportunities to be part of something like this. If you want to see some photos of our get-up, there is a post on the Piano Pantry blog I have linked in the show notes.
Speaking of the show notes, everything you heard about today can be found at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode119. There are four related blog posts and one other podcast episode that talk about a lot of the things I’ve shared here today.
I hope these seven ideas have sparked some brainstorming as you look toward growing your studio and making a name for your business in the community.
Even if you’re not looking to grow your studio, I think it’s important for us to make efforts to connect with our communities and others who are in the same line we are. Let’s focus on knowing and supporting each other and, in turn, advocating for the arts and our profession.
If you enjoyed this episode, you might be interested in tomorrow’s quarterly special session I’m presenting for my Patreon Insider community called “Evolutionary Entrepreneurialism: Grow Your Studio One Yes at a Time.”
This session will help you cultivate a business mindset to grow a thriving and sustainable studio. You’ll learn how to tap into your community, diversify by saying “yes” to the unexpected, and perhaps most importantly, foster effective cultural change with current clients. If you would like to get in on this session, be sure and join at the $7 level at PianoPantry.com/patreon.
Thanks for being here, everyone! Other easy ways to support this podcast include hitting that subscribe button so new episodes download automatically, sharing your favorite episodes on social media, and leaving a rating and review.
I don’t know about you, but boy, am I looking forward to summer. I had my recital the last Sunday of April this year instead of the 3rd Sunday of May. I told my husband I’m excited to see how much mental space it’s going to free for me in May.
It’s my hope that having May be a letdown rather than a ramp-up to the recital will make it feel like I get a head start on summer so it doesn’t disappear so quickly!
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