Teacher REfresh - Melody Dean (Piano Discovery)

I am SUPER excited about this new feature to The Studio Challenge. This group, more than any other that I have been part of, has been encouraging and helping people to solve problems and move forward with their business. What we are going to do now is take all of that energy and focus it on ONE person each month. Imagine how much more we can achieve and how much faster those results can happen if we are all spending a little time and brainstorming power to help one teacher each month. 

​Meet our February REfresh Teacher, Melody Dean, owner of Piano Discovery in Shelby Township, Michigan, an affluent suburb of Detroit. 

Instrument: Piano

Setup: Two afternoons per week from home studio. One afternoon per week as an independent teacher in a church building/private school. 
​

Niche: 7-12 year old kids. Includes board games in every lesson to make learning fun. Offers group lessons 4-6 times each year in place of private lessons to build community. Fairly traditional lessons but includes improv, composing, and lead sheets. Most students are overscheduled and in it for fun. 

Recently moved to the other side of town near Utica, MI but hasn't advertised there yet. Several schools are nearby but hasn't reached out yet. 

Current Methods of Advertising: business cards, car magnet, take home flyers to kids in private school where she teaches. Posts in local FB community groups but there are only 5 local groups in the area. 

Specific Areas where she requests help: Creating a Facebook Ad that points back to a landing page on her website. Using Facebook Pixels to collect and use information from people that visit website. 

GOAL:
​Grow from 10 students
to 23 students by April. 

​To reach her goal of 23 students would mean that Melody could breathe a sigh of relief and not have to worry about taking on a second job to provide for her toddler daughter. 

Our goal, as The Studio Challenge community, is to help her to reach her goal. Some of us are strong in certain areas like graphics while others excel in SEO. You are doing something awesome in your studio that you can share with Melody and the rest of our group. 

Remember that as we help her we'll be helping other members that face similar problems. Maybe YOU struggle with how to reach out to schools, Facebook ads, or improving your online presence. As we help her studio to grow, we should all be trying to implement the parts of advice that would work best for our studios too. 

All of our suggestions and comments need to follow a simple style:
WE ARE NOT HERE TO TELL HER WHAT TO DO
BUT SHOW HER HOW TO DO IT. 

Most of us are in the same spot. We know that we should advertise on Facebook, reach out to schools, something about Facebook pixels and SEO...but it's overwhelming and sometimes just the terminology can throw us off if it's new to us. Simply saying, "You should do Facebook Ads!" isn't very helpful. What kind of Facebook ad should she do? How long should she run it? Should she boost a post or run an ad campaign? Should the post have a picture, text, video, or graphic? What kind of graphic or picture should it have? What should the budget be? What demographics should she target?

You can see why people get frozen into inaction. Obviously, what works in one studio may not work in the next but let's try to give actionable advice that is as specific as possible. 

Be prepared to spend a few extra minutes to really help to lay out an actionable plan for your suggestions. What seems obvious to you, isn't obvious to other teachers. That's what makes this group so strong and unique. 

Most of our suggestions should be FREE. Obviously, if all of us has a $10,000 advertising budget we could make huge steps towards our goal but most of us aren't there. 

I have prepared an Online Studio Analysis for Piano Discovery that I will be sharing parts of in a new blog. It is a comprehensive analysis of the online presence for her studio with actionable tips to improve. But that isn't enough. As a group, we are stronger than me. You will notice things that I did not and have suggestions and examples that I didn't even consider. 

We will focus on Melody and Piano Discovery for the next two weeks until the end of February and select a new teacher for REfresh that will start on the 15th of March. 

If you want to familiarize yourself with Melody and her studio you can check out her website and studio Facebook page. You can also search her name in our group to see what she has been trying and where she has been asking for help. 

She only needs 13 more students to reach her goal. We can do this!

- shane