Guest Host
Sara Campbell is a Business Strategist, Marketing, and Mindset Coach for music studio owners and online experts. She’s helped hundreds of teachers create branding, business, marketing, and social media strategies. Follow her for weekly advice and inspiration at @savvymusicstudio and savvymusicstudio.com
Transcript
Welcome to episode number 37 of the Piano Pantry Podcast. As I announced last week, episodes numbers 36 through 39 will feature four special surprise guest hosts while I’m away on vacation. As I was prepping this episode, I was thinking that if the roles were reversed, I would love hearing a little peek into what you were doing while you were away.
So, if all goes as planned, we are currently driving the romantic road through Bavaria in Southern Germany, headed to see Neuschwanstein Castle. If you promise to listen in the next two weeks, I promise to continue to share more snippets. Today’s guest host is someone I’ve been following since she made her debut online appearance back in 2013 as part of the Original Upbeat Piano Teachers, which was acquired earlier this year by Top Music Pro.
To hear a little more fun history on the world of online content creators in our profession, check us, check out episode number 12, Share Your Stuff. I’ll go first. Sara Campbell crosses worlds a bit as both a piano and a voice teacher. You may have seen her shine online and on social media through her Savvy Music Studio Business, where she works with music studio owners and online experts as a business strategist, marketing, and mindset coach.
As independent music teachers, it can be easy to feel confident when it comes to teaching, but not always when it comes to the business and especially the marketing and social media side of things. In true Sara fashion, she’s going to help us feel like pros with three ways to market our studios.
Welcome to the Piano Pantry Podcast, where together we live life as independent music teachers. I’m your host, Amy Chaplin. In this space, we talk about all things teacher life-related, from organizing our studios to getting dinner on the table and all that comes between. You’ll get loads of easily actionable tips on organizing and managing your studio while balancing life and home.
Welcome Sara.
Hey there, music teacher friend. The topic of the day, we are going to be digging into marketing your music studio because marketing is something that a lot of people come to me with questions about and today what I thought we would do is we would look at three specific ways that you can learn to market your studio like a pro so that you don’t have to be freaked out about all of the marketing advice out there, because there’s a lot.
Right? There’s a lot of marketing advice out there. You might find blogs or step-by-step advice about how to use a specific platform to market your music studio or your music school, or maybe how to nine ways to leverage your marketing on LinkedIn or 13 marketing avenues that your business needs to use.
We see all these titles and some of it can be helpful. But sometimes, those tutorials can feel really overwhelming. And so what I thought we would do here is we’re going to break things down, and we’re going to look at specific ways that you can market your studio and not feel overwhelmed because I want you to repeat after me, marketing does not have to be complicated.
So let’s dive into these solutions. I have three of them. The first one that I’d like to go over today is A really important step. And a lot of people omit this step when they’re trying to figure out what should my marketing plans look like. The first step is this. Identify your business goals. We don’t know how to market our studio or our business or our music course unless we actually have goals in mind.
If you skip this step and you jump immediately into thinking, okay, I need to put some stuff out on social media, or I need to drop some stuff out to my email list, then the marketing message gets a little wishy-washy, and people don’t quite understand what you’re trying to do. So here’s what we’re going to do first.
I want you to ask yourself the question, What are you trying to accomplish in your studio? Over the next month, or if you’d like to think out a little bit longer term, what are you trying to accomplish in your studio over the next quarter? This is something that I do like to do for my own business on a quarterly basis. I’ll sit down at the end of one quarter, look ahead to the next quarter, and think to myself.
Okay, what are the goals for Savvy Music Studio in quarter four? I’ll make a list of those goals. Once you make a list of those goals, then I want you, if, side note, if that list has a dozen things on it, you may need to cross a bunch off. What we’re really focused What are the marketing goals?
Is there a specific number of new students that you’re trying to bring in? Is the goal to keep a higher student retention rate? Are you launching a new group class? Really get specific about what your goal is first because that’s going to allow you to get strategic with that goal. Because when we can identify a goal, then we can take that and ask ourselves.
Okay, what strategies can I use? To get those three clients. Maybe it looks okay. I need to revisit my Google business listing or I need to start making sure that I am emailing that waiting list. We can get specific about our strategies, and then we can break them down into tiny steps, which we like to call tactics, that way you suddenly have this beautiful to-do list that doesn’t feel overwhelming and it’s really easy to follow.
The second step that I want you to consider when marketing your studio is to put yourself in your client’s shoes. What does a parent or student need to know about you or your music school in order to choose you and not somebody else in town. Now, the answer to this question actually might surprise you.
Because when we ask ourselves that question, what do they need to know about me? The thing that we automatically jump to is often Oh, they need to understand that I’m an expert. So we grab all of the letters that go behind our name, our certifications, and our degrees, and that’s what we market ourselves with.
But really What parents and clients want to know is about you as a human being. They want to know about your teaching style. They want to know about your personality. They want to know about your studio culture and your community. Those letters that are behind our names, I know, we worked hard for them, I get it.
But truly, that’s not what a parent or student is looking for when they’re researching who they want to work with. They are looking for somebody that makes them feel seen and makes them feel heard. So we need to ask ourselves questions like, what does that piano student need to believe about themselves.
Maybe they’re high schoolers and have had a hard time. They quit piano lessons. What do they need to believe about themselves in order to restart with a new teacher? What do they need to believe about our studio, and why would our studio be a good fit for them? And what do they need to believe about the timing?
Why and how will they know that now is the time? For me to take that step. Putting yourself in the client’s shoes is such a powerful way to start thinking about your marketing in a new and unique way. It gets us away from making posts about, hey, I have open lesson spots, to considering what that potential client really needs to know about themselves, the studio, or me in order to trust me.
And take that first step. For the third step here, I know, a lot of that stuff that I already went over, it might have had you going, Sara; this sounds a little bit scary, and you said marketing wasn’t going to be complicated. Here is where I’m going to encourage you to grab your brave pants. Now let me explain what that means.
Brave pants came along I’ve been doing live videos for years, we do broadcasts every week. And you can watch those, by the way, if you’d like; if you follow Savvy Music Studio on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram, you can join us on those broadcasts. Brave pants came up from the listeners there.
When we were talking about doing big, brave, hard things, and I can’t remember the exact circumstance, but now hashtag brave pants is a thing at Savvy Music Studio. So I want you to grab your brave pants because marketing can sometimes make us feel vulnerable. And why is this? Because people might say no, and that’s okay.
So put on your brave pants and embrace the no. Because when you do that, you are going to feel more empowered to network with your local community. You’re going to feel empowered to allow yourself to be an imperfect marketer. And you’re going to give yourself permission. to focus on celebrating the awesomeness that you bring into your studio.
So let me give you an example of this. When we put on our brave pants, it might look like this. You’re thinking about making some announcements about a new workshop that you’re putting out there. And you might want to feel like, okay, I’m just going to put a graphic up that says hey, join us on this date.
Okay, there’s open spots. Here’s a link. Okay, fine. That involves brave pants. But really. In order to tap into professional marketing for something like this, that is when you may need to think about showing them behind-the-scenes footage. You may need to jump on and do a quick video and tell people why you’ve created this workshop.
You may need to dig in deep and look for those client testimonials and case studies that you can share that show the transformations that you’re making in the studio. All of those things can make us feel a little bit vulnerable because it feels like we’re tooting our own horn. But let me just give you a little permission slip right today.
Go ahead and toot that horn because you are an amazing teacher, and there’s no one in the world quite like you. And I think you are pretty dang awesome. And I know that if you grab your brave prance, you can totally. Market, like a pro. Thank you so much, Amy, for having me be a part of your podcast. I appreciate you letting me talk about marketing to your audience.
And I hope to see some of you over at Savvy Music Studio.
Thank you so much to Sara for taking the time to be with us today. If you’d like to follow Sara online, you can find her at SavvyMusicStudio.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Savvy Music Studio. Don’t forget the two V’s in Savvy. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to jump over to Apple Podcast.
To leave a rating and review, visit piano pantry.com/podcast for more details. Stay tuned for next week’s episode number 38, which will be brought to you by Intermediate Teaching Guru YouTube star Janna Williamson.
