Marketing guitar lessons is by far the most difficult part of being a guitar teacher. We are trained musicians and most of us are pretty bad at marketing, I know I was.
Over the years I’ve really focused on marketing and now have a system that always brings in new students.
Before I go through that I need to explain a couple of marketing concepts.
Passive Marketing
Passive marketing is how the vast majority of guitar teachers market their lessons and it includes putting up posters, having a website, sending out unpaid posts on social media etc. These are not bad things to do but they are not that effective and you have little control over them.
For example, if you put up posters around your town someone who is thinking about guitar has to walk by and notice it, they have to take down your contact details and then they have to contact you to make a booking. There’s so many things that can happen between them seeing your poster and their first lesson that can stop them. For example, losing your number, getting distracted and work and forgetting to call etc. And worst of all, you have no control over any of it.
When I used to go to parties or family events and someone found out I was a guitar teacher there was always someone who wanted lessons or knew someone who wanted lessons. Every time I would hand out a business card to them and they would say they’d definitely call me. Guess what, most of the time I would never hear from them again.
Something got in the way and stopped them booking a lesson.
So, I changed my approach and stopped giving out business cards, instead I would take their details. This made all the difference because now I was in control and could contact them to book a lesson.
This is active marketing.
With passive marketing we put stuff out and wait for someone else to take action and with active marketing we are in control and can target potential customers.
I decided to apply this approach to all of my guitar lesson marketing. This is how I developed my system to always bring in new students.
Active Marketing Funnel For Guitar Lessons
I’ve used this marketing funnel for one to one classes, group classes and online and it always works.
- Identify exactly who your target market is and how you can help them.
- Send out a paid ad to your target market and offer them a reward to opt in. Here you collect their contact details, including phone number.
- Ring your potential student and offer them a free trial lesson.
- Impress your student on their free trial lesson and book them for more paid lessons.
- Take the money your new student has given you and reinvest in more paid ads.
- Repeat the process until your business is full.
It is actually a pretty simple marketing funnel and when it’s done right it is very effective.
Target Market
One of the biggest mistakes guitar teachers make when marketing guitar lessons is not knowing their target market. How can you produce appealing marketing materials if you don’t know who you are appealing to?
The typical marketing approach of for guitar teachers is to advertise themselves as “Teaching All Styles To All Ages”. By trying to appeal to everyone you end up appealing to no one.
There are lots of ways you can make your teaching business more focused but the easiest way is by age. This is quite controversial for most music teachers but I think you should decide if you want to teach children or adults and base your entire business just around one group. For a lot of people this sounds like you are just cutting down your potential customers but actually you are just making marketing message much stronger and it will be more effective.
How you would market to a middle aged man that wants to learn to strum a few songs would be completely different to how you would market to a parent that wants their child to start learning grades.
You could also narrow down your target market by ability level, style of music etc but try and find your niche as a guitar teacher.
Once you have decide who you are going to teach you can really start to think about your target market and what special interests and demographics they have.
Consider things such as
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interests
- Social Media Use
- Musical Taste
- Why they want to learn guitar
The more information you can get about your target market the more focused you can make your advertising.
Advertise Guitar Lessons Using Paid Ads
Social media is a great tool for building a following and marketing guitar lessons. But the reality is that the social media companies want you paying for ads and make it harder to market your business without paying. If you post through your Facebook Business Page as little as 5% of your likes will see it.
There’s also the issue that your post don’t really get out to new people, just the people that already know about your business.
The good news is that social media paid ads when done well are incredibly effective. You can choose the people who you want to see your ad based on…
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interest
All of the things you should have identified in your target market. This way we are not wasting money on advertising to people they are never going to be interested in your guitar lessons. With Facebook you can even advertise just to parents with different ages of children. This tool really helped me grow my business.
Offer Your Target Market A Reward (In Return For Their Contact Details)
Most people will not pay for a guitar lesson straightaway from just seeing a ad. You are going to have to work a bit harder to build up that relationship. Through your ad you need to offer them something free that they can download instantly and in return they will give your contact details.
Facebook Ads have an option where you can set this up on directly on your ad. Or another option is to get your ad to send them to your website where they can opt in and download the reward.
So, what should be offering as the opt in reward? This depends completely on your target market.
I teach children so I advertise to their parents. I create an ad with a little bit of information about my classes for children. If they opt in they can download a brochure with the full details and voucher for a free trial lesson.
If you teach intermediate guitarist that want to improve their soloing you could offer an ebook with example licks and solos to play over backing tracks.
Whatever it is, you need to make sure that it appeals to your target market
Contact Your Lead
When you collect the details from your potential lead you need to collect their name, email and phone number. Once I’ve collected a lead I will immediately send them an email with my details and invite them for a free trial lesson. Contacting someone by email is the easiest way to do it, I even have a template email set up and ready to go.
But most people, even if they have asked for a free lesson, won’t respond to an email from a business. It’s not that they’ve changed their mind it is because they forget or they’re busy or any other reason. This is why it is so important you collect their number.
If they don’t respond to the email I will ring them and speak to them directly. Making sales calls can be daunting but remember it’s not a cold call, they have given you their number and permission to ring. When I first started doing them I was really nervous and expected to get abused but most people are really friendly and the vast majority of my new students are booked this way.
However, more and more people won’t answer a call from a number they don’t know. Here’s what you should do. When you ring someone and they don’t pick up, leave a short voicemail explaining who you are, how you got their number, what you are ringing for and the time and day that you will ring back. This way you are preparing them for your next call and they will be more likely to pick up. Some people don’t listen to their voicemail so I always send a similar message via text as well. You want to give someone as many opportunities to respond to you.
If I’ve tried to ring someone two or three times and they don’t respond I stop trying to contact them.
Free Trial Lesson
Most people won’t hand over money to someone they don’t really know or trust, this is why it’s so important to offer a free trial lesson. You are also much likely to convince someone who was thinking about learning guitar to come for a free trial lesson then to ask them to pay upfront.
All of my students have been with me for years so giving up 30mins for free at the start has been a very worthwhile investment.
This is your one chance to really impress them and turn them into a paying student. You need make sure you’ve planned a really good first lesson. I have a whole guide on teaching your first guitar lesson but I’ll give you a few pointers here.
– Make sure you know their level.
Not everyone is a complete beginner and if they are not you need to find out what level guitarist they are and what they want to achieve. Once you know this you can tailor your free trial lesson around it.
– Don’t give them too much information
It’s easy to forget that not everyone knows what you know and if you go into too much detail about a certain aspect of the guitar you will just confuse your student and make them feel stupid. It is better to give them just enough information for the first lesson and if they sign up you can build on this knowledge later.
– Make sure they achieve something
Whatever you decide to teach you need to make sure that it is a recognisable song that they will be able to learn and play within the lesson. A lot of guitar teachers start teaching chords, I think this is a mistake. It is much better teaching simple riffs that they can play on one string like Smoke On The Water.
Reinvest In Marketing Your Guitar Lessons
Hopefully you’ve impressed your student and they are now paying for lessons. The real trick is to take this money and reinvest it back into paid advertisement. If you keep doing this, you will soon start to see a snowball effect. The money from one student allows you to get another, the money two students gets you up to four students, the money from four students gets you eight and so on and so on.
Conclusion
There are lots a different approaches to marketing guitar lessons. Whichever way you decide to do it make sure that you use active marketing and you have someway of measuring it’s effectiveness.
I have a Guitar Teacher’s Resource and Marketing Pack available which will save you time and make your marketing much easier.