Proven Promotions: Host Themed Recitals

What would you say if I told you that you could bring in more customers for as little as $250? If this sounds like a good investment, you should consider hosting a themed recital.

In the past few years, we’ve hosted dozens of themed recitals, and they’ve brought us solid—and often exciting—results. These events have flooded our store with people and rapidly boosted our reputation as a local center for music. In the process, we’ve helped build lasting customer memories, and our relationships with key community leaders have been strengthened. It’s become a win-win for our customers, our community and for us.

The most successful themed recital we’ve held is Halloweekend. This event is now a highlight of our annual promotions. It started in 2009, when we spent roughly $150 for Halloween decorations and candy. We transformed our store into a spooky musical playground using inexpensive spider web, a black light and a small fog machine.

Halloweekend gave us an opportunity to have students showcase songs in an hour-long, in-store recital. We invited our partner teachers to sign their students up for the program, and the kids had a riot! When we posted the photos to our Facebook page, families from all over town began asking to be notified when we scheduled another themed recital event.

Many participants purchased songs from our special selection of Halloweekend print music and performed using store instruments. We sold more than $200 in print music and two $8,000 digital pianos to participating families that first year—all because of one event.

Since 2009, Halloweekend has continued to expand. We’ve expanded from 25 performers in the first year to an incredible 260 performers in 2013! We’re now conducting nine one-hour recitals over two days just to handle the spike in interest. Our Halloweekend Facebook costume contest consistently increases our Facebook Total Reach by 2,000–2,500 percent. That tells us we’re getting a tremendous number of views and, more importantly, that interest remains high. We were even featured on the local TV news this year. You can to visit our Halloweekend website and watch our spooky videos here.

With the success of Halloweekend, we began growing our themed recital program to include Hollywood Nights (our movie-themed event, complete with popcorn and soda), The Happiest Recital on Earth (our Disney-themed recital with Mickey’s Magic Photo Booth), Give My Regards to Broadway and Kicked Bach Summer Classics (our classical music beach party).

We now do at least two of these programs every year in each of our stores, and the response has been unbelievable. I can attribute numerous piano sales to these efforts. I can also point to a number of local teachers who decided to join our exclusive partnership program, so their students could take part in these popular events. I can’t think of any other outreach program that can generate these results for such little investment. Once you try it, you’ll be hooked!