Do you have a hard time finding more guitar students? Do your
guitar teaching ads and website not seem to really work like you want
them to? Are you tired of constantly pouring massive efforts into
promotion and not getting enough students from it? Does it seem next
to impossible to keep your teaching schedule full?
If you are like most guitar teachers, you probably really struggle to
market your guitar teaching effectively. There are many reasons why
this happens, but there are two main problems that apply to almost all
guitar teachers who struggle with attracting a lot of new students.
First, most guitar teachers lack the necessary marketing knowledge to
write really good ads, create websites that work or use innovative
methods to attract a lot of new guitar students.
Second, they have a deep misunderstanding about how the process of
attracting new guitar students works. What makes things even worse is
that this misconception causes even those very few teachers who DO
know how to create a decent website or write a good ad to fail. They too
don’t get as many students as they could be getting and therefore
struggle.
I’m going to show you in this article why this misunderstanding has
such damaging consequences and how you can easily solve the problem,
start to attract a LOT of new students and finally fill up your teaching
schedule.
So, what is the problem?
Most Guitar Teaching Promotional Tools Are Built And Used In Isolation
What does this mean? Ads, websites or other promotional tools alone
aren’t strong enough to bring you a LOT of new students on a consistent
basis, because they are only single pieces of a big puzzle. The huge
mistake most guitar teachers make is to think that the ad or website
will ‘do everything’ for them. In order to make your promotional
efforts work effectively, you need to have (and ‘complete’ the
missing pieces of) a whole strategy of attracting new students.
Let's look at two good guitar teachers who use same ad, in the same
location. For one guitar teacher the ad works very well and he gets 12
new students in 2 weeks. For the second guitar teacher the ad results
in only 1 new student. How is it possible that one good guitar teacher
gets 12 times as many students as the other? With the exact same
ad!?…
The answer is simple: teacher 1 is using a ‘strategy’ whilte teacher 2 is using an isolated 'tactic'.
The second teacher (the one who only got 1 new student from his ad)
used the same ‘good’ ad that the first teacher used… BUT he never
understood how all the pieces of the marketing puzzle should fit
together to not only attract a lot of new students, but finally to build
a successful guitar teaching business. So without a real strategy,
his ‘good ad’ produced ‘poor results’.
What is very likely to happen after the ad produced disappointing
results for teacher 2 is that he falsely believes that the ad he used
was not a ‘good ad’ (since it brought him poor results). This is a very
common mistake guitar teachers make. They then either change the ad
(often making it worse), they start to look for different places to
display the ad, or they stop using the ad and give up. Too often people
throw away the ‘good pieces’ of a strategy without realizing that
something else was really to blame and needed to change in order to get
the results they were hoping for.
…Or, and this is another very common mistake, they start to copy
another teacher’s ad or website (because they still think their original
ad or website was the problem). They are looking at what other
teachers do. So teacher A is struggling and he may look at teacher B's
website and think, ‘Oh I'll copy what this teacher is doing and I'll
have good results too.’ But that rarely works well, because the part
that they are copying may not be the piece that teacher A needs to
change.
This whole idea is exactly the same as what separates great teachers
from mediocre teachers. A mediocre teacher sometimes teaches students
some good stuff or interesting things that the student wants to learn,
but those students may not turn out to be good guitar players, reach
their goals or their true potential. Teacher B, the great teacher,
isn't thinking about ‘I'll teach the student that little piece or I'll
teach him this little piece’, instead there is a whole plan, system
or strategy to take a student from where they are to where they
ultimately want to go. So it doesn't really matter if we are talking
about teaching people skills or talk about guitar teaching business
and the process of attracting new students ... the philosophy is
always the same. You need to have a really good strategy.
Before I go into more detail about the process of attracting new
guitar students and what you need to do to make your ads and websites
produce the results you want them to, test yourself now to find out how
effective your methods of attracting new students really are. Test
yourself on this page about attracting new guitar students.
Put Yourself In The Position Of a Prospective Guitar Student Looking For a New Teacher
In order to create an effective strategy to attract new students, you
need to understand how the process of attracting students really
works. You need to think about what happens when a prospective student
sees your ad, video or website and what happens after. Think about
the flow of things and how the whole process works (from the
perspective of the student, not from a teacher’s perspective).
As I mentioned before, prospective students don’t simply see an ad
(or website) and then instantly become your new students in the next
second. There is much more happening in between. It’s a step-by-step
process. When the pieces of this process are not working together in a
congruent way, then people don’t go all the way through to the finish
line. That means they will never become your student.
Normally this is the place in an article where I offer some final
piece of advice for you to implement. However, in this specific case
'general advice' is probably not what you need... What you want is
specific advice based on your unique problems, challenges and goals.
The most effective way I can help you is to know much more about where
you are now and what challenges you face. I strongly encourage you to
test your promotional methods now by taking the assessment on How To Get More Guitar Students You will then get much more personalized and detailed advice on your unique situation and challenges.
Tom Hess is a professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He
teaches, trains and mentors musicians from around the world how to teach guitar. Visit http://tomhess.net to get 15 free guitar teaching tips.