A student was sitting on his front steps crying. It was summer, and I was on my way in for a lesson. His parents were standing around, getting ready to take him to the ER. He had a splinter in his foot, a big one. The lesson was off. He was inconsolable.
Over the next twenty or thirty minutes, I talked him into letting me pull it out. I did. He gave me a hug. We played a little guitar. I went on my way and thought nothing of it.
That moment cemented our relationship. The story went around the local country club, the local community, the school he went to. Over the next few months, my studio grew, directly tied to that afternoon. It wasn’t the splinter that did it. It was the story that came out of it. And the care behind that story became basically all of my marketing.
If you don’t feel wonderful about traditional marketing, if daily posting or the local parents’ Facebook group or asking your students for referrals doesn’t feel like you, there are other paths to consider.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing puts you on stage. It requires daily commitment with no finish line. It’s hard not to feel smarmy doing it. And there are so many surfaces to choose from! Instagram or Facebook or email or referral asks, it can feel daunting before you’ve even started.
I don’t think that version is required. I think there’s a deeper one.
Something Small
Early in my career, doing in-home lessons, I started paying attention to what shoes my students wore. Shoes matter to teenagers. So I started wearing the shoes they’d wear too, since I was taking mine off at their front door anyway.
I hate to call that marketing, because I didn’t know it was marketing. But it absolutely was. I was building an identity as someone who cared about students, who could communicate with them, who noticed what other adults didn’t. That’s the brand I built as a guitar teacher. It was never a flyer. It was never an ad. It was almost always just doing something awesome, outrageous, or creative.
Ten Years of Barbeque
For a decade, my only real marketing was an annual recital I call the Guitarbecue. I’d cook pork for a couple hundred people. Students would perform, families would eat, and parents would post pictures afterward. That was my entire marketing budget, and I surely didn’t realize it was marketing when I started it… It was simply a way to bring people together and have fun sharing music.
Deeper Than Referrals
Most established business owners will tell you referrals are how they sustain their work. True, and there is also a deeper step. Referrals are the outcome. Care is the root. If you chase referrals directly, you’re still marketing. If you care first, referrals occur naturally.
We’re not creating a referral strategy. We’re crafting a new intention for how we run our business.
What Three Books Taught Me
Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing has a line that’s stuck with me for years: marketing at its best is generous. It’s making change on behalf of the people you serve. It’s not about you.
Lisa Earle McLeod’s Selling With Noble Purpose makes a similar case from the sales side. Salespeople who genuinely understand how they make a difference for their customers consistently outsell the ones chasing quotas. The same is true for enrollment. This isn’t sales in the pushy sense. It’s sharing your noble purpose, and that feels good for everyone.
Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game introduced the idea of a “Just Cause,” a vision of the future so appealing that people are willing to sacrifice to help build it. It has to be for something, not against something. Affirmative. Inclusive. Built to serve others, not the organization. That’s exactly what caring for your students, done on purpose, actually is.
None of these three were writing about music teachers. They were writing about tech companies and sales floors and Fortune 500 leadership. I think these ideas apply beautifully to running a music studio!
Watching Someone Who Believes It
I recently attended a lecture by Suzuki guitar teacher Mary Lou Roberts on how she teaches young students. What struck me most was her confidence and conviction. You could feel how much she believed in the power of the medium itself. This kind of conviction is its own form of care, care for the tradition, for the music, for how it helps a person develop over time.
What Your Community Already Knows
I posted a short version of this idea to the Fons Family Facebook group, and the replies told me I wasn’t alone in this. Stephanie Wirzburger hosts a monthly Piano Happy Hour for her adult students. Current students bring friends, and some of those friends become new students. As she put it, she didn’t realize before that this was an on-purpose strategy, “because I don’t consider myself a marketer.” But that’s where her new students come from.
Michael Richey said it plainly too: parents can Google their way to a long list of teachers, but what they actually want is to know what it feels like to be your student, from someone who’s lived it.
Be The Story
So here’s what I’d leave you with. Be the story that people want to share at the dinner table with their friends. Figure that out, and you’ll never have to worry about marketing again.
Awesome, Eric 🌊