The Studio Business Pt 9 – Advertising and Marketing your Studio Business

Once you’ve gone ahead and got yourself a nice studio setup, the next goal is to get a constant flow of Musicians, Producers, and Composers to keep working out of your space. We spoke briefly in the last blog about building long-lasting business connections and how to go about actually getting and building new clientele.
In this series of the Blog, we will discuss the ideas of Advertising and Market your Studio Business so that you can get more and more clientele as you grow and how to set up a passive way to start getting new clients over to your business.

Put yourself on the Map:
I mean this literally, get yourself registered on Google Maps. This is the easiest way to get yourself some release for when people search for a “Recording Studio“.
The process to acquire a Google My Business listing is pretty simple, there are a thousand other blogs that will explain how to do this, so I won’t go into those details here.
There are 3 main aspects to building and maintaining a good GMB listing
1. Reviews
2. Photos
3. Regular Google Posts
Once you have a GMB listing up and running you will start getting calls and inquiries from people in your area who are looking for a recording or a studio-related service, to whome you can Market your Studio Business to.
Keep in mind that these are all passive leads, by which I mean you don’t have to go and look for someone who needs your service, they are getting in touch with you. Prepare a basic call script as to how you want to deal with these leads and genuinely try to help the customer and you will be off to a good start.

Website:
Once you have a basic listing, it helps if you have a website that is attached to this listing. A lot of people want to visit a website and take a look for themselves about the authenticity and the quality of the studio’s services. The best way for them to do this is by taking a look at your past projects and the kind of quality the studio can deliver.
If you don’t have the money to bring on a proper website designer, you could just DIY the website yourself using a simple website building tool like “Elementor” or use any of the themes that you get with WordPress nowadays.
The website helps with not just what we discussed above, but it will also help with generating new leads in the long run. Once the website is optimized for Search Engines, the website will show up on the first few searches in your local area and will drive an audience that will eventually convert as clients of your service in the long run.

Site Design Considerations
1. Don’t get carried away with elements that will slow down how fast the site loads for
those without high-speed connections.
2. Keep navigation around the site simple and straightforward.
3. Use good graphic design principles—there’s nothing worse than having to read
through page after page of small white type on a black background.
4. Keep the site current with regular updates and re-designs.
5. Make sure your contact information is right up-front and visible

Social Media:
We all know how much time people spend on different SM channels, be it Instagram or Facebook, or Twitter. Create a business profile for these platforms and start putting a small chunk of content here to gather an audience in the beginning. Once you’ve developed a basic audience you can use this audience to Market your Studio Business to or target ads to an audience that will be similar to this audience. Simply put, if a lot of musicians are on your profile, using the SM algorithm you can design and target ads that will be specifically directed towards other musicians.

Running Ads:
There are various Ads that you can run on digital platforms the 3 main beings:
1. Google Ads (This will drive traffic and leads to your website)
2. Facebook /Instagram Ads (This will drive traffic to your FB/Insta Business Page)
You can also use a simpler format of Google Ads, which is called Adwords Express which will deliver ads even to your Google Map listings. Adwords Express is a simple Ad creation tool and helps you drive newer customers to your business.
Instagram and FB Ad tools are also quite comprehensive and can be used extensively to target specific audiences which can fetch good results.

There are other ways to run ads other than digital, you can try running ads on a website where you think your audience spends a lot of time or you could just try to put an ad out in a Music Magazines. These are all great ways to put the word out about your business, but you’ll have to decide which medium to use based on the USP of your Studio and the Audience you aim to target.

Here are a few things to write a good Advert:
1. Keep the content succinct and concise
2. Mention your USPs
3. Include something that will be of use to the customer (Discounts/Free Consultations etc)