Content Strategy (Brand Development & Sales Strategies)
Basis:
G4E is designed to be an inclusive, engaging guitar lessons program that offers functional, long-term value to beginner and intermediate guitar players. This content strategy will outline key brand ideas to focus on, how said ideas can factor into content topics, keywords, and sales campaigns to boost sales of the G4E product line.
Brand Characteristics
Inclusivity:
G4E (Guitar is 4 Everyone) is a brand built on making people feel comfortable, confident, and capable in their ability to learn guitar and develop as a musician. This brand targets people who’ve said things such as:
“I’ll never be able to learn guitar, it’s too complicated!”
“I tried to learn a time or two, but didn’t feel like I was making progress.”
“I never took band in school, I don’t know enough about music to learn an instrument.”
By making inclusivity a core quality, we also open up the brand to a wide variety of skilled beginner and intermediate players. These are the people who may desire to expand their playing with flashier techniques, or learn about the theory behind the fretboard, songwriting, soloing, improvisation, etc.
Foundational:
While the G4E program covers an extensive amount of techniques and theory, it’s designed and positioned as a body of knowledge guitarists can build on. It’s meant to encourage them to continue along their musical.
This appeals to those who see mastery of the guitar as a lifelong passion they could draw joy from, rather than just a wanting to learn a few songs. This ties into the goal of inclusivity by reinforcing strong beginner techniques and basics that draw from a wide variety of genres and styles.
In addition, this broad approach to the core fundamentals opens us up to players of all musical tastes and backgrounds. It also allows us to market continuous lessons and future series via our digital and physical channels.
Functional:
While any salesperson would argue that every aspect of their product is functional, this term is meant to indicate results that the customers can see clearly, or results that show fast, clear evidence of the product’s value.
In other words, while this package focuses heavily on the proper mechanics of techniques, or the theory behind musical concepts, we always back a lesson with some type of actual riff, chord progression, or song the user can learn and play.
This serves to make the content more engaging, by always teaching something that sounds like actual music, rather than standalone scales, chord progressions without a backing track, solos with no harmony, etc.
This reinforces our commitment to inclusivity in two ways. It will always give our customer something they can play, whether alone in their bedroom or to someone else, to show they’re making progress. It also outperforms other guitar lessons, by teaching more “functional” musical ideas a person can play and show off, while also making sure they understand the mechanics behind each.
For those who have tried multiple times to learn guitar with various products, their success with ours will make for great testimonials and ratings. It will also make our customers more confident and excited to purchase future lessons through our digital and physical channels.
Content Insights and Direction
Keywords
The topic of guitar lessons turns up some fantastic keywords. Many of these have a high search volume, but the variety is so dispersed we can also find some gems with low competition, meaning we can use them before our competition does. There is also some overlap, making it easy to use two keywords as one in many instances.
Examples include:
- Guitar lessons for beginners
- beginner guitar lessons
- intermediate guitar lessons
- guitar lessons near me
- best guitar lessons online
Some keywords appeal to the beginner market, but don’t match our brand values. “Guitar lessons for dummies” may be referencing a familiar line of beginner-focused content, but we don’t want to use that term toward our audience.
One area where we could really dig in with our digital products is “best guitar lessons online.” With that as our focus, we could get a list of supporting keywords including:
- best guitar learning websites
- online guitar teacher
- free online guitar lessons
- best free online guitar lessons
This also gives us a chance to combine some keywords from various lists, helping us to pursue more options that offer both high volume when used separately and low competition when combined.
General Topics (3rd Party)
Famous guitar player birthdays – link to stylized lessons
Throwback to famous songs/solos/riffs – link to stylized lessons
Guitar manufacturer news – link to guitar accessories via affiliate program
Music industry news – link to newsletter, social profiles
Specific Topics (Promo)
These 3 Habits Stop Guitar Players from Progressing
The Psychology of Inclusivity When Learning an Instrument
How Guitar Players Get Stuck in Ruts (and How to Get Out)
Digital Transformation in Guitar Lessons, Gigs, and Songwriting
Product Specific Campaigns
While our blog, email, and social platforms will drive a great deal of our success, we’ve chosen to focus largely on the paid ad market to generate some easy interest quick. Here’s a summary of our pitch for each product.
Beginners lesson: “Start a Guitar Journey That Just Keeps Rocking“
This simple pitch emphasizes a long-term guitar experience, and also appeals to learning functional music, or simple, fun things to play that sound good.
Intermediate lesson: “Dive Deeper into the Fretboard and Improve Your Guitar Game”
This pitch appeals to those with some type of guitar playing foundation, and hints at lessons on both music theory and technique.
Theory lesson: “Learn the Fretboard, Plus Fundamentals for Soloing and Songwriting”
This holistic pitch covers the broad and connected aspects of the theory product, while also emphasizing it as a foundational type of building block for guitarists.
Advanced phrasing lesson: “These Small Guitar Secrets Have a BIG Impact on Your Sound”
This pitch hints at the simple techniques and subtle touches that separate a beginner guitar sound from a more developed one. This makes for a great tagline that we can back up in the product.
Tone lesson: “Learn the Foundations of Guitar Amps and Effects to Hone the Perfect Tone”
This pitch emphasizes the basics of guitar amplifiers and effects, with the ultimate goal of helping our customer understand them enough so they can dial in the appropriate tone for their style.
Long-Term Plan
Our long-term plan with our content strategy can be summarized as follows.
- Lesson Sales: Our primary goal is to sell our physical and digital guitar lessons bundle, which consists of 10 fundamental beginner/intermediate products covering technique, theory, tone, and more.
- Website Subscriptions: Our secondary goal is to drive sign-ups to our website, which offers continued lessons and discounts on music gear for our subscribers. We believe accomplishing our primary goal can help enable this one.
- Brand Development: Our last goal supports the other two and opens us up to future opportunities. Here we aim to use an ongoing blog, email newsletter, search engine ads, social media, and paid social media ads to promote the G4E approach and community.
Based on the data we’ve gathered, which can be discussed on our call, this strategy can be optimized to help us accomplish our goals and truly make G4E a brand that’s for everyone.