Minute for Marketing: Review of Philip Johnston's Promoting Your Teaching Studio

Minute for Marketing is a weekly series on advertising the independent teaching studio. Click here for all Minute for Marketing posts.

No series on marketing the independent teaching studio would be complete without a review of Philip Johnston's book The PracticeSpot Guide To Promoting Your Teaching Studio.

In general, I think this book's a worthwhile read. It will help you launch and maintain a full-fledged advertising campaign, as opposed to utilizing a few isolated marketing efforts here and there. Especially since most of us have spent more time learning how to play and teach well than how to advertise effectively, it provides a valuable education in how to think like a marketer. It's one of the only books about marketing geared specifically for piano teachers. The ideas range from yellow pages ads to community involvement.

Most reviews of this book praise it for the many ideas it presents for advertising the teaching studio. I think the book's greatest strength is not in the individual tips, but in the marketing theory which is woven throughout the book and which you'll assimilate without even realizing it as you read. Most of us could think up those practical marketing ideas - we see other businesses using those techniques all the time! But, I think we fail to realize that we can do the same things, or even need to do those things. By the time you finish Johnston's book, you'll be thinking of your teaching studio as a business that needs a marketing plan just like any other business, and you'll some good practical ideas for how to put your plan to work.

I do have a couple of criticisms. First, the book fails to address how to prioritize marketing efforts according to cost-effectiveness. Most of us have very limited advertising budgets. I think this should have been a major point, and it will be the subject of my next Minute for Marketing post.

My second criticism is that, even when it was copyrighted in 2006, the book was limited in its discussion of online advertising. The last chapter of the book, Using the Power of the Internet, is an advertisement for Johnston's own web service for teachers, PracticeSpot's webvertisements. While I don't blame him a bit for doing this (he's a savvy marketer and after all, the book's title is The PracticeSpot Guide to...), it does prevent the book from being complete as a guide to marketing the teaching studio. Even in 2006, the power of the internet for music teachers was certainly not limited to PracticeSpot. For instance, there's no mention of blogging, a medium alive and healthy in '06. By now, the book is sorely outdated where internet marketing is concerned as social networking, social bookmarking, and other dynamic applications are changing the game in a big way.

In short, I like the book and would recommend it to anyone looking for ways to grow a teaching studio, especially new teachers and especially those who are opening a large community facility. Just keep in mind that it's incomplete.