A while back I had a student tell me that they were havingtrouble getting piano tunings.They had not finished the course yet but wanted to get a few piano tunings under their belt (at a very discounted) price but nobody was calling them after they put a few flyers up at a local Starbucks. Like I said in my previous post, owning a piano tuning business requires a lot more than knowing how to tune a piano. We as piano tuners need to know how to market our services in an effective way if we expect to get any piano tuning clients. This means knowing our target audience – the piano owners in our city. Before we go on, please be aware that lesson ten in our piano tuning course covers this topic in more detail and provides links and resources to help you get started.
Target Audience- The Piano Owners in Our City
Most piano owners these days are families with children taking lessons, or life long piano players. They typically are “computer savvy” and search for service professionals online. Over the last 4 years, Yellow Pages has gone from printing 13 billion directories a year to 8 billion a year and one of their main “partners” filed for Chapter 11 just a couple years ago… This change is very important for us to note. While Yellow Pages does have an online directory (and a pretty good one), most people use major search engines to find their service professionals. While Yellow Pages results also come up in google searches, they are often lower on the list. For this reason it is very important to get on the top of googles search results. This involves following googles requirements and creating a google plus account. Like I said above, this information is covered in out piano tuning course.
Referrals- The Piano Tuners “life blood”
Another thing most piano owners do when they notice their piano is out of tune, is they ask their friends and family who they use. Referrals are one of the most important part of our marketing plan. Ask any piano tuner and they will tell you, pleasing everybody is almost impossible but making an attempt is always important.
One time I had a client who insisted there was some sort of “ringing” after one of our tuners tuned her piano. The tuner who did the work was unable to return to her house to figure out the problem so the responsibility fell to me. Given that the house was about 45 minutes from our shop, I was to excited to make the journey but I could tell she was very upset and I knew it was best to at least try to make it right. After getting there I noticed that the pedal was jammed up (from a bad moving job) so I was able to fix the problem right away. The client was extremely pleased and very grateful that I came out free of charge to fix something she broke. The next week, I got two referrals from her and have since been back to her house many times. Her and her referrals are now part of my rotation and it was all because I made an attempt to fix her problem and make her happy!
Well thats enough for today. If you have any questions about our piano tuning school, please feel free to contact me at the email below. As always, “stay tuned” for more posts from The Piano Technician Academy!
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