It's hard work managing a teaching studio. In the third video in a four-part series about automating your studio and leveling up your marketing, we'll go over how to laser-focus your student marketing and learn how to charge more for your lessons.
Are you a working musician, or know any working musicians? Then you might be interested in our article about why you don't need an invoice template for musicians!
Hi, welcome to this special bonus video all about positioning and pricing. If you’re here, it means that you went above and beyond to help spread the good word to your fellow music teachers. So, thank you so much for doing that.
In the main series of videos, we go over some tools and strategies for automating your teaching studio, but that’s obviously only one side of the equation. This only covers how to manage schedules for, and collect payments from, the students who you are already teaching. At the prices, that you are already charging. So in this video, I’m going to share some strategies to help empower you to think critically about the way that you find customers, and the way that you price your services.
Now this is an absolutely huge topic, but I’m going to do my best to distill it down a bit.
This video is going to be somewhat “interactive” in that I’m going to be asking you to think about the ways that you approach your business, so go ahead and grab a paper and pencil – or just get your notes app ready – so that you can jot down some ideas during our brainstorming moments. (or just be prepared to think a little bit)
First off, take a moment and think about the ways that you market yourself. And think about who, exactly, you are trying to reach with this marketing. Don’t worry too much about how long or short this list is – you’re the only one who’s going to see it – I just want you to have all of these ideas organized in a single place as we move forward. Go ahead and pause this video for just a sec while you write these things down.
Alright, now I’m going to guess that your list of marketing strategies looks something like:
And I’m going to guess that, when you think about who you are trying to reach with this marketing, the answer is probably something like “anybody who might want piano lessons,” or “beginner violinists.”
The trouble is, that if you have these shotgun marketing strategies, and you’re trying to market to everybody who could possibly want piano lessons, you’re casting way too wide of a net, and you’re competing with every other piano teacher on the face of the planet. You don’t really know who you are trying to reach, so you don’t know how to reach them, and they don’t know how to find you. We can address this by exploring the concept of positioning.
To take the definition from Cambridge dictionary: positioning is “the way that customers think about, or the way that a company wants customers to think about, a product in relation to similar products or to competitors' products”
So, to apply this to being a music teacher, your positioning will help make it clearer to you, who your ideal students – aka your target customers – actually are. And if you know what your ideal student looks like, then that makes it easier to figure out how to reach them. And it helps them to know that you are a good fit for them compared to another teacher.
Going through this process of defining a specific ideal target market is sometimes called niching down, meaning that you are targeting a specific niche, or segment, of people. Now, there are all sorts of ways that you can niche down, and the more specific you get, the easier it gets to figure out how to reach folks.
You can niche down on anything, really. Do you have a specific teaching method? Teach specific people? Are they a particular age range, or have certain interests?
So, for example, here’s what it might look like to progressively niche down on an ideal set of students. You could go from:
Do you see how each progressive step makes it more and more clear who, exactly, you want to teach?
Or, here’s another one
Now, I don’t know if 12 year old baseball players are a viable market for teaching piano improvisation to, but you get the idea, right? You can almost imagine in your head what this person looks like, and where they hang out, and how you might speak to them.
That’s the value of positioning. Instead of posting on craiglist that you teach piano, alongside a dozen other piano teachers, you can connect with the people who manage your local little leagues and use them as a jumping off point for marketing. Or post fliers with targetted language at baseball fields. Or hand out business cards on Saturday to parents who are watching their kids’ games. Or give special discounts to the team who finished first (or last) this season. You could find out where they do their pizza parties and create a special for folks with a domino’s receipt.
The point is that you can be laser focused.
So, just as an exercise, pause this video, and come up with a very targeted niche or two of potential students that you could reach. The more specific, the better. It really doesn’t matter if these are people that you want to teach or not, it’s just to practice what this process might look like.
Okay, so now that you’ve got this list, can you imagine what one of these people looks like? Where they hang out? Well, let’s explore that a little bit more.
The next step to this is to develop what’s called an “avatar.” Now, I don’t mean an avatar like you’d use for a profile picture. What I mean is to create a specific imaginary person who is in the niche that you just described.
Give them a name. How do they dress? Do they have a good sense of humor, or are they more serious? Where do they work, or live? What hobbies do they have? If you wanted to market to this person, how and where would you reach them?
Now, once you have an avatar, you have a specific person that you can speak to in your marketing materials, and that you can target with your marketing strategies. So if we take our positioning example of “I teach irish fiddle to adult beginners, between 30 and 50 years old, who work in software, have children, and who used to play music when they were younger”.
This avatar might be a 40 year old woman named Jessica who does web development for Nike in Portland, OR and has 2 kids – a 12 year or old son who takes ballet and a 17 year old daughter who plays soccer. She played classical music when she was younger and would love to start playing again. She ahs a decent sense of humor and loves coffee.
Now the next time I design a marketing flier or a facebook ad, I can craft it in a way that would resonate with Jessia. I can design it specifically for Jessica. Now, Jessica isn’t a real person, but there are people in the world who are like Jessica, and that is the point. You go from trying to reach everybody in your city, to trying to reach Jessica.
I’m going to leave a link in the description to a blog post by somebody named Jonathan Stark, from whom I’ve learned a ton about pricing and positioning, about how to create what he calls a Laser Focused Positioning Statement, which may help you to dial this all in even further.
Now, this leads us into the topic of pricing. And like positioning and marketing in general, this is a huge topic all on its own, so I’m just going to touch on it briefly so that this video doesn’t become seven hours long. But something I do want to introduce to you is the idea of value pricing. Value pricing, at its core, is all about pricing products and services based on the value that they bring to the customer, and not based on the amount of time that you spend delivering them, or how much other people charge for them. Now, in teaching, this is a bit tricky because lessons by definition exist as a set amount of time, but thinking about pricing from the perspective of value can help to empower us to charge more for our services.
So, how did you decide on your current prices? You probably set them years ago and that’s just what they are, or that’s what friends were charging, or something to that effect. So what would happen if, tomorrow, you doubled your rate for all new customers? Not for existing students, necessarily, but for new students.
But Matthew, that’s way too expensive! I charge $30 for 30 minutes, $60 for 30 minutes is just way too much. But…why? Why is it way too much? Is a 30 minute lesson from a high school student worth as much as one from somebody who has been playing for 20 years? What about a lesson from somebody with touring and performing experience, compared to somebody who has never toured or performed professionally? Would you pay more for a thirty minute lesson from Jacob Collier or Jake from state farm?
What about as a student – who is going to be more likely to pay $60 for a 30 minute lesson? The average person who finds your post on Craigstlist, or Jessica, the software engineer who wants to get back into playing music? Probably Jessica, right?
Plus, there’s the consideration that somebody like Jessica might be less likely to cancel their lessons over summer than a younger student might be. Or maybe even somebody like Jessica, but without kids.
Don’t price your services as a commodity. You are an expert. You might have imposter syndrome – but who doesn’t? Ignore it. Just pretend you believe it. Imagine that your services are worth more than you are pricing them right now, because they are, and then market yourself as though that’s the case.
I actually just remembered an exercise that my high school orchestra teacher did with us that has always stuck with me. It was, profound, actually. We sat down with a passage that we were learning, it may have been Adagio for Strings or something, and he said “Okay, we are going to play through this passage while pretending that we are orchestras at different skill levels.”
First we played it like we were fifth graders – and the results were obviously comical. Then middle schoolers – a bit better. Then we played it as though we were high schoolers, which is where things got interesting. Because we were high schoolers. We played at roughly the level that we normally did. Then we played as college students, and then played as though we were the San Diego Symphony (which is where I grew up). And you know what happened? When we were asked to play as though we were the San Diego Symphony, we sounded incredible.
We were the same class, playing the same passage, but the result was a performance that was so much better than what we would have normally produced. More melodic, more dynamic, cleaner intonation and bow control. It was honestly an incredible experience, and I’d actually recommend giving it a try with your students. You might see some interesting results.
But looping back, and applying this to teaching – price yourself, and position yourself – like you are the San Diego Symphony, not like you are the high school orchestra. Because, generally speaking, folks who pay you more will be less a pain in the but., And when you charge twice as much for the same service, it means that your marketing efforts only need to convert half as many customers – and you need to work half as much – in order to make the same amount of money.
Now, maybe it isn’t viable to straight up double your price. Maybe only 30% is viable. But give it a try! You might be pleasantly surprised, and it could literally change your life. At least for me, some of the greatest milestones in how I lived my life came at the times that I increased my prices. The people who saw my value stuck with me, the people who didn’t dropped off.
So, that’s it for this video on positioning and pricing. I hope that you found it helpful, and if you have any questions for me or thoughts that you’d like to share, feel free to let me know. If you haven’t already watched all of the videos in the main series about studio automation, please jump back over there and check them out, because I’ve got more to share with y’all over there. And again, if you’re finding these videos valuable and know anybody else who might find them valuable, please share your unique referral link with them so that they can check out all of this, too. Thanks so much, I hope you have a good one.