We are talking business this week on the blog! If you haven’t read our kickoff blog post where we answer the most frequently asked questions about building an online business as a music therapist and music educator, I invite you to do so HERE. We’ve also been talking about having an online business and about social media marketing on the Music For Kiddos Podcast on episode 32 & episode 17 which you can listen to HERE & HERE.

Lastly, if you are working on building your social media presence, you are formulating marketing strategies or, if you are doing some online marketing for your music teaching business already but want guidance on what to focus on next, you can read our tips on this blog post.

As you’ve read on the title, on this blog post we are sharing our favorite online marketing tools we use almost every single day to create content and work on the behind the scenes of Music For Kiddos.

Why is this info important? Because truthfully, these social media tools (along with the 5 things you need to build an online business we shared on this week's podcast) are some of the key things that helped Music For Kiddos be the early childhood music resource that you know today.

So, let me share with you some of our favorite marketing tools we use to run Music For Kiddos, and a little bit of why we like them. If you like this series, perhaps we might dive in on future blog posts to tell you more about each of these tools and how you can use them in your business (send us a message on Instagram or Facebook and let us know if you’d like to see that!).

Our Favorite Marketing Tools For Our Online Business

Canva

Have you seen all of those pretty graphics on our Instagram or Facebook page? We get a lot of questions as to what we use to create our social media posts and Canva it is! It is an user-friendly, graphic design tool to not only create social media posts, but an array of projects like worksheets, email headers, presentations, and even videos (we’ve used Canva to create some of our YouTube videos).

InShot

InShot is a video editing app for iOS & android cellular devices. We primarily use InShot to edit Reels, Stories and IGTV videos for Instagram. Some of the things we like about the app are the variety of tools for personalization like multiple fonts (and the ability to add more), stickers, and music.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing tool that we use to send you free resources, any MFK news and our monthly Song-Of-The-Month emails to your inbox. You may have learned about this already if you took my Social Media Marketing course as I thoroughly talk about this there but building your email list is the most important strategy to grow your business. Educator and business owner Kayse Morris says that email list building is said to be “about 122% more effective than social media when it comes to marketing.” We find that to be true!

Pexels

Pexels is a website with a library of free stock images and videos, which we especially like to use for our blog and YouTube videos.

Pixabay

Pixabay is another website that offers free stock images. They also have a great variety of free illustrations, which can be useful for social media posts, music therapy presentations or for visuals for music classes.

Planoly

Planoly is a social media scheduling tool that helps you save time by automatically posting for you. They have a dektop version that is easy to use, but if you are on the go, Planoly also has an app for iOS & Android devices. Although we mostly use the Facebook Business Suite for scheduling our posts on Instagram and Facebook, among other features, we love that Planoly gives us the ability to see how our feed will look like (on Instagram) upon scheduling them. This is especially convenient if we are batching content ahead of time and we like our posts to look cohesive.

Descript

Descript is a newer tool we’ve been using this year to create transcripts for our courses and podcast episodes. Descript may also be used for video captioning and video editing. They have a free trial and paid memberships but iff you’re looking for a free tool for video captioning, you might also want to check out VEED, as recommended by Kerry Devlin, MMT, MT-BC (@LiberatedLearning) on Instagram, which offers free captioning of videos that are up to 10 minutes long. Thanks for sharing this resource, Kerry!

CutStory

CutStory is an editing app that allows you (like the name says) to cut or splice long videos into the perfect length for Instagram or Facebook Stories. Why is this useful? Yes, we can record ourselves directly on Instagram or Facebook and easily publish to the app, but did you know that Instagram only records 4 story slides at a time? That might not be a big deal for some, but it can be inconvenient if we are wanting to record a longer video of a song we want to share, a tutorial or if we just want to chat a bunch in our stories. We can then record ourselves with our phone’s camera and splice the video to the appropriate length for Stories.

So, which app do you already use for your business, and which ones would you like to learn more about?

It's so humbling to know that Music For Kiddos (this little business of mine!) is more than a business, it's a community and cozy place in the middle of the big "internet world" where music therapists + educators can come together to share about what we like doing most: supporting children.

It's also so wonderful to know that many of you have been inspired to pursue your business ideas after joining my course, Social Media Marketing For Music Therapists & Music Educators. If you have yet to take this course, you can learn more about it HERE.