How To Get New Piano Students Without Paying For Marketing

If you’re a new piano teacher, you might be looking for students to fill your roster. Or, maybe you’re an experienced teacher who has a dip in enrollment due to lifestyle and scheduling changes after the pandemic. Or, maybe you just moved to a new area and are starting over.

It can be stressful to be looking for new piano students. It means your schedule isn’t operating efficiently at its capacity and it means you might be taking a financial hit from not having enough students.

Paying to run ads online is an obvious way to attract new students, but if you’re short on students and have a lower income, it might not make sense to pour a lot of money into marketing.

It can take time to build up a solid teaching schedule. For many teachers, it might take several years to hit their maximum teaching capacity.

Different marketing approaches will work for different people. Maybe you’ve tried a certain strategy and it’s not working. Here are a few different approaches you could take to finding new piano students for free.

Word of mouth

Word of mouth will always be a tried and true marketing approach. This one is a bit out of your control, as you can’t force your students to chat about your excellent teaching with their friends.

However, focus on what you do have control over. You can make every effort to deliver a high-quality, personalized lesson to every student. Help your students be successful and shine. Your students will notice that you go above and beyond. Naturally, they will tell their friends about their experience with an awesome piano teacher.

Create a reputation for yourself, whether it’s because you produce students with outstanding performance skills, you bring a special level of creativity to your lessons or you provide really engaging or fun activities for your students to participate in.

You could let your current students know that you have openings and welcome them to invite friends to inquire. Some teachers might offer an incentive for this, but if you are providing an excellent service, your students will be happy to spread the word for free.

Find a niche

Sometimes it can feel hard to stand out in the crowd. When potential students come across a number of different teachers, they might just start at the top of the list without making their way to your name or website.

Having a specialized teaching niche will help you stand out so that exactly the right students will find you. Maybe you have a gift for teaching a certain age group, such as adults, teens, or preschoolers. Or, maybe you are a master of a certain style of music, such as jazz, classics or popular music. Maybe you have extra experience teaching students with special needs or only offer online lessons, which are convenient to people anywhere around the world.

No matter what your niche is, it will be important to make it easy for those students to find you. Associate your name with that niche so that it will come up in search or so that you will be the first person people think of when asked about that niche.

Branch out

If you don’t have a distinct teaching niche, you could always go the opposite route and branch out to teach more types of students. Teaching school-aged students boxes you into a very specific schedule, but teaching other demographics opens your schedule to reach students who are available other times besides after school hours. Retired or stay-at-home adults, homeschoolers or preschoolers often have daytime availability to help you fill your schedule before the afternoon rush.

Social media

Social media is a complicated topic. People take a number of different strategies on social media and sometimes it involves feeding the platform hundreds or thousands of dollars in ads in order to get your posts seen.

If you’re looking for a simple approach to social media that doesn’t require you to become a social media expert or to fall into the ad trap, think of your social media account as a brochure for your studio.

Here is a super simple social media strategy:

• Create an account specific to your studio, name or teaching niche.
• Post photos, educational or entertaining material in an organic way. You could choose to post daily, a few times a week or anytime you have something interesting to share
• Include information in your bio or in your posts that is easy to search, such as your location, relevant hashtags and what you are offering.
• Ask your students to tag you in relevant posts, such as a video of them playing something you taught them or pictures from a recital or other event.
  

Keep in mind that some people use social media as a search engine. Even if you don’t create tons of trending content, if you use keywords and hashtags that people are looking for, they will be able to find you. Just having a relevant presence on social media can help your potential students know about you. When people come across your account, you want it to be obvious what you offer, and you want to appear to be up-to-date. An account that hasn’t posted anything in many years doesn’t seem inviting to new students.

Website

Having a website is another really important strategy for getting new students. This can be a really daunting task to take on and you might need to ask someone to help you create a website. Having a well-established website will help your site perform better in searches. The sooner you can get your information online, the better it will start to perform over time.

Don’t feel like you need to have something really fancy. Just like with social media, it’s important to use relevant keywords such as your location and what you are offering. At the least, include a few photos, some brief information about you and your lessons and the best way to contact you or sign up.

There are many other features you could add to a website, but honestly, a bare-bones site with the most relevant information that you can get online as soon as possible is better than a really fancy site that might take months to build.

Networking

Networking is another approach to finding new students. There are a number of formal ways to go about networking, such as joining networking groups specifically for small businesses. If your area has groups like this, it might be worth looking into.

Joining music teacher associations is another great way to get connected. This will put you in touch with other teachers who might be willing to share their leads with you. If another teacher already has a full schedule, they will want to have names of other teachers who have openings for their inquiries. You might also get connected with teachers who are retiring or moving away and need to refer all of their students to someone new.

However, getting involved in your community in genuine, organic ways is just as valuable as joining a professional organization. Joining a gym, getting involved in community projects, attending a church, meeting people at your kids’ school, taking special interest classes or volunteering are all great ways to meet new people who will be curious about what you do. People love to learn about interesting professions such as teaching piano. Broadening your circle will help more people know about what you have to offer.

As you get involved with networking, keep in mind that you don’t have to do it with the direct purpose of recruiting new students. You can just show up and be your genuine self. People who come to trust you or enjoy your company will naturally think of you when looking for a piano teacher.

All of these strategies for finding new students definitely take time and commitment. None of them will land you a full teaching roster overnight. But, trying several strategies to gain new students is a great way to start growing.

This post was written by Megan, piano teacher and author of Pianissimo: A Very Piano Blog. Visit her website for more piano related blogs for teachers, parents, students, and all things piano.