Category Archives: Best of the Blog

Prime cuts of new media marketing advice from the Above The Static archives.

Best of the Blog, Marketing

Manning Your Virtual Merch Table: Translating the 4 Ps to Music Marketing

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Marketing Mix Sign Post
We can put all of these together and get your music to its correct destination.

Undertake any marketing-related course and you’ll come across the infamous 4 Ps of the marketing mix. It is to business degrees as drummers are to rock bands, ever-present yet disconcertingly easy to lose track of.

These four elements – product, price, place and promotion – are as crucial to music marketing as they are to any other product or service. 

Though the words are easy to understand, the difficulty for artists often lies in translating the underlying concepts to your own creations. You may get one or two right but overlook the remainder. Even factoring all of these elements into your interactions with fans, if they’re not pulling in the same direction then your efforts are diluted at best, pulling each other apart at worst.

This is why I want you to visualize the marketing mix in more familiar terms, by framing them as manning your virtual merch table.

 

Translating the 4 Ps to Your Music Marketing Mix

Picture a merch table at a live music event.

Broadly-speaking, the following three elements are are in play:

  • Concert attendees flooding in and out of the venue. More often than not they will have to pass by the merch table as they do so, providing a place for fans to gather. So this is a place where people gather… ideally your people. Your fans.
  • The merch table itself is the physical attraction, providing a reason to linger and items to consider. There are other distractions around, but the table content is a constant representing both the product and price elements of the marketing mix. Both can be directly translated to what is available for purchase and how much it costs.
  • Finally, there are those manning the merch table. This could be anyone from a disinterested venue employee to a hardcore fan of yours or, even better, you yourself. In this way, those who man the merch table represent the promotion aspect (or lack thereof). Without this element, no one is pushing your products and no sales will result (although some light thievery is may replace them).

There are several fundamentals of marketing that sticks in the memory, and specifically if any of these elements above are missing or not paid sufficient attention, either the fan experience suffers or sales do. In many cases, both will take a hit.

Fail to position the table in the correct place and you could miss a large portion of your potential audience. Offer insufficient product diversity or excessive pricing and you can miss or alienate those whom you do manage to attract. And without a passionate advocate to engage those with an interest, potential fans could easily wander off, never to be heard from again.

Your online marketing is like a virtual merch table, affected by many of the same dynamics and negatively impacting your relationships with fans if a particular area is neglected.

But how to set up and man a successful virtual merch table?

 

Music Fans Concert Celebration
Image Credit: Denise (Flickr)

The Month Ahead…

Each Monday in February I will be elaborating on each one of the three elements mentioned above, offering a deeper explanation of how it translates to your online music marketing and practical steps that you can take to develop that area of your web presence.

The goal is to provide a clear analogy and a variety of takeaways from each article in the series, some quick wins that you can apply immediately, others exercises that you can roll out over several months. As such, there will be companion content, further reading, and insider extras available via the e-mail newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

I intend to commit plenty of time to the conversation and follow up that I hope this series will generate, so comment below,  join me on Facebook or say hi on Twitter with anything you have to . You can also track the #ManYourMerch hashtag on Twitter for daily tips & updates on the subjects we cover here.

So there you have it… all that remains is to get involved!

Best of the Blog, Case Studies, Marketing, Success Stories

Creative Music Marketing (On a Shoestring Budget)

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Music marketing matters. Hopefully we established that in the mini-series of the same name earlier this year.

What keep on coming, though, are the examples of independent artists getting creative with their music marketing.

From 10,000 hours of practice to getting social across many media, there are plenty of theories on how you should be behaving as a musician seeking to break out. But what are your peers doing, down in the trenches of small clubs and minimal budgets? How are inspired artists communicating what they do and what fuels their passion?

Most importantly, what can you take away from the examples of others and use in your own marketing efforts?


Leading by Example

Music marketing inspiration

To continue the spirit of the MMM series, every week I’ll be posting a few brief examples of smart, affordable marketing from musicians at your level. Not artists with major label backing. Not those who have hit it rich with a lucrative licensing arrangement. Just those taking an alternative or interesting tack towards spreading their music and winning new fans. Each example will have a more general marketing takeaway, that you can then apply to your own situation.  

Continue reading Creative Music Marketing (On a Shoestring Budget) →

Best of the Blog, Marketing

Music Marketing Matters: How to Win Data & Influence People

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In broaching the subject of data gathering and marketing for musicians last week, I quickly realized that this was going to be bigger than one post would allow. Unless one is talented enough to compose enormous articles that remain fresh and coherent throughout – as can Judy Gombita, for example – one should make like a dubstepper and Break. It. Down.
 

As luck would have it, this is also the approach that you should take with your data gathering.

Break down the walls of your fan data
Image Credit: Ross

Bite Size Data

Unless you’ve been diligently collecting and organizing your fan data for years, which I imagine is akin to the 1%, it’s likely you have one large block of unsorted data, knocking around with several other scraps. Taken as a whole, these form your overall audience database.

And take them as a whole is exactly what we’ll do first, before going on to break it all down again. This time, however, we’ll be doing so in a more productive manner.

 

Building Your Audience Database

Follow these steps to build your initial database. If you already have this in good order, please move on to the next section, ‘Music Marketing Segmentation’.

 
1. Gather every piece of fan data that you’ve collected on one place, in an easy to read format.

 

2. Start a spreadsheet in Excel (or a free equivalent, like Open Office‘s Calc or Google Docs) and type out each relevant category across the top row of this sheet. For every recurring piece of data you have, e.g. First name, last name, E-mail, location etc, you should have a category for it on your sheet. Discard any infrequently occurring data like nicknames or feedback. If it’s pertinent, we can record it later in a general ‘Notes’ column.

 

3. Transfer all the data, once you have all the column headings you need, over to your new spreadsheet. Yes, this is the particularly tedious part… don’t worry, I can wait….

 

4. Done? Congratulations! Have a cup of tea to celebrate and come back in half an hour.

 

5. Now begins the fun… data gathering and filling in the blanks. Add any ‘would like to have’ pieces of information to your column headings. Examples might be income, job title or industry, type of relationship (friend, family, or some more complex measure of acquaintance that we can work on). Don’t stress too much on these, as we can add more later, but DO think about the type of information that you’d like to know about your fans. What would help you connect to them more effectively?

 

6. Once you’re happy with the skeleton of your database, it’s time to add as much flesh to the bones as possible. Thankfully we live in an age of seemingly constant sharing, so stalking… researching your fans to fill in any data blanks is more viable than ever before. Start with a basic Google search of names, focusing on social networks to begin with as they have more standardized information layouts. If you’re still drawing some blanks, delve into blogs they frequent, pseudonyms that they use for online handles, or combination searches involving other data that you already have.
 

Once you’ve exhausted as many avenues as you can think of to complete your data set, accept any omissions and save the sheet in a couple of safe places, one hard drive and one accessible remotely, if possible.

Et voila, your information foundation is set! 

Remember to use the header categories that you’ve laid out here for all future data that you collect from people. This keeps everything complete and aligned with what you have identified as important things to learn about your fan base.

 

Music Marketing Segmentation

 

Types of segmentation
A preferable form of segmentation

As I mentioned earlier, we only built this up so that you can break it back down again. This time we’ll do it in an orderly fashion, however, by segmenting the market for your music.

Having gathered all this data about your existing fans, you can use it to make your communications to each of them more targeted. This benefits you because you can offer more clear and relevant news and offers to each segment of fans. It benefits the fans as well, as you aren’t just blasting out general announcements to your entire list, hoping that some of of will stick.

 

Segment Suggestions

You can slice and dice your database into segments in many ways, subject to your targets and the data that you managed to gather.

Here I’ll offer up five segmentation suggestions to get you started. If you start to play around with these, you should find that you begin to understand your data set and develop your own segments.

 

1. LOCATION: Where people live is one of the easiest and readily available pieces of data that you’ll have to hand. It is also one of the most potentially valuable, allowing you to identify clusters of fans for tour plans, geographical trends, and areas for potential street teams or fan meet ups (if coupled with number three on this list). Location is a solid place to start to feel out your data and get comfortable manipulating it into groups. If you need to add broader categories such as East coast, Midwest etc, feel free to create another column and segment in this way as well. 

 

2. AGE: How old your audience is can help you to infer many follow on points, such as their spending power, media preference, musical tastes, and much more. Although some of this will be an educated guess, it also gives you a platform from which to ask these questions the next time you engage them. You can also combine with other data, such as location, to identify audience diversity in various regions. This can help with anything from merchandise choices to venue decisions e.g. if much of your audience in Detroit is under 18, you’ll know you need to find a venue without drinking age restrictions. 

 

3. FAN STATUS: You can add an extra nuance to your data by assigning your own ranking of fan level. This can be based on any number of factors, including number of gigs attended, purchases made, length of relationship, feedback received, or some combination thereof. Digging this deep will allow you to tailor communications to the appropriate sections of your fan base. For example, to crowd fund a limited edition vinyl release you will probably only approach ‘super-fans’, where as sending brand new fans only a special offer for your older material will avoid a pointless communication to long term fans who already have those releases. 

4. PREFERRED GENRE: Understanding the types of music that individual fans enjoy gives you the chance to hyper-target new material, right down to releasing an individual song especially for that group. It can also help to refine set lists when combined with location and age related data, target recommendations of similar artists when you try to help out other artists, and perhaps even influence the way you write your next material. I know, I know, you write what’s in your heart. But it can’t hurt to have an insight into what your fans like as well, can it?

 

5. INFLUENCE LEVEL: This may require further research, or you may simply have a good feel for those of your fans who are influential over the tastes of others, but either way, knowing who to approach to spread your music is a valuable piece of data to have available. Though there are sites like Kred that can help you to ferret out influencers in a certain field online, your most likely route to segmenting in this way is to assign a simple rank for each person, based on recommendation behavior you see online (or lack thereof… perhaps you use a null value, in cases where you simply cannot tell). Does the person regularly share music, post YouTube videos that get likes on Facebook, or write about their tastes online? All are indicators that they should be added to a segmented group that you can go to when your hot new tune needs that extra push.

Over To You!

Have you already worked on something similar to this? How did you segment your data and what results did you see?

For those of you just starting out, does this seem like a valuable exercise? What questions are lingering for you?

Best of the Blog, Concepts

Artist Answers: What Turns Music Fans Off?

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Question Mark Graffiti
Photo Credit: Gizella

One of the main reasons for this site’s existence is to assist you, the artist and creator, in developing a more effective online platform from which to showcase your art.

So, what better way to do so than to ask some like-minded creative types for their most burning new media questions, then provide as best an answer as I can muster?

This is where new series ‘Artist Answers’ comes into play; a weekly feature that will help to deliver one of my three guide words for this year: Serve.

To kick us off, good friend and songwriter extraordinaire Khaled helped me out with the first query. Khaled is a hard working and social media savvy independent musician (and aspiring chef!) based in NJ/NY. He is in the process of recording his sophomore album, an effort partially funded online by his dedicated fan base, following a successful Kickstarter project.

Khaled

Khaled asks: “We see plenty of advice on how to engage fans. But what about the opposite? What disengages an audience?”

It’s a good point and important to consider, as a lot of good work can be undone – particularly online – by just one or to behaviors that really bug people. Avoid these off putting habits to maximize the connections you’re building with your audience:

 

  • Add nothing new to a platform. If your Twitter stream is simply a feed from Facebook, why would anyone follow it? If all your blog offers is a rehash of your news page, why bother reading it? Try not to phone in any of your social media efforts in this way.
  • Devoid of personality. A formal tone or purely business content leaves out the one factor that can most distinguish you: your unique personality. Fill your posts and content full of what makes you you.
  • Lack of incentives. Okay, your hardcore fans will follow you through Hellfire, but the rest of us need a little sugar to sweeten the deal of connecting with you, then staying put. It’s so easy to offer a free track, piece of merch, or something small as a reward for that connection. And it’s human nature to seek them out.
  • Fail to involve others. In the rush to push out communications to fans, many artists forget to also pull them in. Social media are intended to aid interaction, so a good portion of your posts and content should be designed to involve your fans. Most platforms reward such activity with increased visibility of what you post to followers and friends, so the pay off goes further than you may think.

At the heart of connecting with your fans online is empathy; understanding just what they’re expecting from you via social media. Tailor your activities to meet and exceed these expectations, at the same time as avoiding the various self-serving approaches covered herein, for noticeable improvement of your audience size and participation.

Over to you….

What did I glaringly overlook?

What obnoxious social media habits have you seen in yourself or others?