How to advertise a music teaching studio (or similar business)

Someone recently posted this on Facebook:
I have a music studio and I want people to find out about it on the internet. How can I ensure that people typing “<city name> piano lessons” into Google will find me?

Though I do not have a local music studio, that kind of problem happens to be one I have a lot of experience with and I know the solution. So I thought a blog post might help not only those with music studios but anybody that has a local service business.

If you live in a smaller community, you are likely to have a huge advantage because you probably won’t have any competition doing what I am about to tell you. Larger communities like mine (Atlanta) are going to be much more difficult.

First of all, the key is to advertise online but advertise locally. Many people do not realize how easy that is now. At one point, geo-targeting like that was not possible but today, it is very possible as I will describe in a second.

There are two primary kinds of advertising online: free and paid. Here is the strategy for both:

Free advertising usually consists of search engine optimization (SEO), which refers to trying to get search engines to list you on the first page when people are searching for your service. The advantage of course is that this kind of advertising is free. The disadvantage is that it is a frustrating, time-consuming and unreliable process. You will likely pull you hair out and may never see good results and that is why I want to encourage you to not rely entirely on SEO.

If you do want to do some SEO work (it is free traffic after all), there are lots of blogs and free resources to guide you but the credible ones will all tell you to do two things. First, optimize your site by including the keyword phrases that people will be searching for. For example, if you are a piano teacher in Jackson, Mississippi, you want your website to include phrases like “piano teacher in Jackson, Mississippi.”

Even though you don’t want to turn down free traffic from anywhere, as a local business owner, you have to be realistic about what traffic is actually going to help you. You really want to optimize your site for local traffic which is why you want to use references to your own city a lot. If you live in an area where you service multiple areas, make sure you list all of them out on your site so the search engines will see them. If you live in the suburbs of a big city, focus on the suburbs rather than the city. The competition will be much less in the search engines.

The second and more important SEO strategy is to find ways to get links to your website from credible, relevant websites. For example, links from business organizations in your area or piano teachers in other areas of the country will help you. There are numerous creative ways to get links if you start thinking about it.

Also, don’t ignore the local business listings that Google offers for free. You can find that service easily if you look for it.

If you go to Google and search for something like “christian pianist,” you will see that I have done a bit of SEO myself. I am pretty good at it actually but I while appreciate free traffic, I don’t put all my eggs in that basket. I actually am much more reliant on paid advertising.

Paid advertising for a local business really should start with some or all of these three sites: Google, Bing and Facebook. There are two reasons why: first, they are used by the vast majority of the people you are trying to get to and second, they allow pinpoint geo-targeting. You can isolate your ads to specific states, cities, and zip codes.

In other words, it is possible to go to Google and buy ads that show only to people looking for piano teachers that live in your area. The same is true at Bing. Those ads won’t bust your budget either.

On Facebook, you can’t quite target at that level, but you can for example target women between ages 30-45 that live in your area. In other words, you can target local parents that are quite possibly looking for piano teachers. Because you can buy on a CPC basis where you don’t pay until someone clicks on the ad, you can be pretty sure that you are getting to the right people.

This is a very important thing about Facebook advertising. Do not fall into the “Like” trap. Getting likes on your page is fool’s gold. It looks pretty but is not worth much. So do not set up your ads to generate likes for your page. Rather send them off Facebook to your own site where you can really get them interested in you.

By the way, people will tell you that Facebook ads don’t work. They will say that no one clicks on those ads because they themselves don’t click on ads. I can promise you that they are wrong. If you run good newsfeed ads, you will get action. I run Facebook ads constantly and about 5% of the people that see them click on them. That is a phenomenonal statistic compared to other kinds of advertising.

How much will all this cost you? I would think in small cities, you can probably advertise well on all three sites for less than $50/month (though you could spend as little as you want). In larger cities, you might have to spend more.

To me, that sounds like a good deal. If you get one new student a month, that acquisition costs you maybe $50 or less than one month’s tuition. I would take that.

There is a learning curve to learning how to buy ads on these sites and I am not even attempting to teach you that in this blog. The truth is that I am too busy to help outside of this blog either though if you are willing to pay a consultant, I will help you get you connected with people that will work with you. I would suspect they would charge $500-$1000 to get you going.

You don’t have to hire a consultant though. You can learn how to advertise by yourself with trial and error. There are dozens and dozens of free resources online that will walk you through it. Just don’t spend a lot of money until you know what you are doing.

If it were me, I would start advertising immediately and work on the free SEO side as I had time. But I would not delay. Literally by the end of today, people searching for “<city name> piano teachers” could be seeing your ad and contacting you. That is a beautiful thing.