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Music Marketing Matters: 6 Secrets To Gathering Fan Data

Last week’s near essay took you through the significant process of setting up your fan database. With that being the crucial foundation of your renewed focus on getting the most from your data, I thought I’d take it easier this week.

As a useful redux to that piece, today we’ll run through some brief places that you can use to seek out previously uncovered fans (and the accompanying data that they bring… do you think I’m obsessed yet?)

Where the Wild Fans Are

Chances are you gather most of your new fan data from e-mail addresses, either taken at live shows or those that you’ve managed to tempt into sign up online. In most cases, you’re missing out an important portion of building out, and connecting with, your fan base.

Granted, they’re not necessarily all that wild, but they are out there in the wilds of Internet listening, often taking in your music but not connected to your artist-to-fan channels. Sometimes this will be by choice, other times a result of simply not having linked up to them… yet.

The former we will leave in peace. But the latter?

These are the folks that we want to target, with laser-like precision, and bring into the comforting fold of your warm and fuzzy artist updates.

But how to find them?

6 Steps to Gathering New Fan Data

As I said, we’ll get straight to the point today. Following are six steps that you can take to search out and identify disconnected listeners, with the objective of recording their data and requesting their permission to e-mail them from time to time.

(Note that some of these pointers will also be useful in filling any blanks in your fan data, as we discussed in How To Win Data & Influence People.)

1. Target Twitter

With its public data flow and two way communication, Twitter is an ideal place to scout out new fans and listeners you haven’t yet found. The search function gives you a simple place to search for your name or artists with whom you’ve recently played. Beyond that, look at the possibilities of mentions of local towns AND a related musical genre. Obviously if the individual is not listening to your music specifically, you have more work to do in building the relationship and connecting the dots to your tunes. Pursue that as far as you wish but, as a minimum, use a Twitter manager such as Hootsuite and set up a search tab on your own name and your artist moniker, if different. Alternatively, obtain the RSS feed for the search and have it delivered to your inbox daily (tweet me @AboveTheStatic or leave a comment, if you need to know how to do so).

2. Go Facebook Foraging

Despite being a closed network, you can gain access to a lot of potential fan data from information that people choose to share and that glimpsed from connections to your existing network of friends and fans. Open groups related to your genre, Spotify playlists that friends listen to and are shared through Facebook’s ticker, fan pages of artists with whom you’ve recently played, and pages of blogs who have featured your music or that similar to it, are all spaces that you should explore, from time to time, to note down any names of those name checking you or subjects related to you. Once you have a name – and this is something you can simply do one person at a time, as you have a few spare minutes – drill down to their page for any further information. If none is available, any common friends you have may provide an introduction. Failing that, you can Google them to see if there are any other web platforms available that offer an easier opportunity to connect than the generally more private realm of Facebook.

3. Look Over Last.FM

Although it has been around for years, Last.FM is often overlooked by artists as a forum to connect with fans. Despite the limited number of users, it has the benefits of almost a decade’s worth of fan listening habits stored up in its wealthy data banks. Obviously start with your own fan page and anyone mentioning your music, following the same process of drilling down to their individual user page to note down more information, but spread out that search to the similar artists, areas, and common musical interests, if you have the chance, in case people are looking for recommendations or an opportunity exists to strike up conversation with a fan around matching musical tastes.

4. Bottom Of Blogs

Way down below the articles of your favorite music blogs, a comments section holds the real buried treasure in the form of individual music fans offering their opinions. If you’re on Brooklyn Vegan, this will, admittedly, be largely comprised of moronic h8r hipsters and related in jokes. Elsewhere, however, you can unearth fans of both your own and similar styles of music. Start with blogs that you know have previously covered you (double check on Google’s blog search, Hype Machine, and elbo.ws, if you haven’t done so in a while) to track back and check the comments sections. Answer any questions and, again, click through to see if you can obtain more information on those commenting. You can also think laterally on this one, branching out to blogs and websites that cover subjects close to those that your songs address and building relationships with like-minded folks in those environments.

5. Ask Fellow Artists

Put simply, ask similar artists – preferably those with whom you’ve played or previously connected – to connect you with fans of theirs who they think will enjoy your music. Reciprocate for them with your own audience, as and when the opportunity arises. You can, of course, review the active fans of other artists on the platforms that we’ve already mentioned, but that recommendation from a trusted source will go a long way to adding authority and interest to your approach.

6. E-mail Individuals

Take every individual that you’ve gathered via the preceding steps and send them a personalized e-mail introduction. If you haven’t been able to gather an e-mail, it’s preferable to make a subtle ask for it via another platform, if the relationship has been established. If not, hold off and look for further opportunities to connect until it reaches that level. Make your intro more about them and their musical tastes than your own work. Keep it short, friendly but to the point, and add a note that they won’t hear anything more from you on the e-mail front, unless you hear from them and obtain permission.

That’s it!

Obviously some of this is more speculative than simply finding someone listening to your music and will take longer to develop, but don’t view that as a barrier. As Stan Stewart pointed out in a recent commentary, you have limited time available as an independent musician and you’d rather be creating for much of it. I understand this and would just advise you to carve out up to an hour for these data building activities every week or so.

Allocate just a little regular attention to setting your fan data foundation, then consistent data gathering and relationship building, and you’ll soon find that you have a lot of information to work with. Be it for your next tour plans, music release, or even polling fans for more information, this data will be invaluable to you when the time comes for your next big music move.

Over To You…

What stage are you up to with your data collection? How could it be improved?

Where could you gather more information about those who are listening to your music but aren’t on your radar?

August 6, 2012 by Steve 2 Comments

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: bloggers, blogs, data, data gathering, email marketing, Facebook, hootsuite, last fm, marketing, MMM, music, music marketing, music marketing matters, musicians, new fans, search, social networks, twitter

Music Marketing Matters: How to Win Data & Influence People

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.

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

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?

July 30, 2012 by Steve 9 Comments

Filed Under: Best of the Blog, Marketing Tagged With: age, big data, data, data gathering, data segmentation, database, demographics, fan data, geography, income, information, market segmentation, marketing, MMM, music fans, music marketing, music marketing matters, musical preference, popular, super fans, tour data, touring, true fans

Music Marketing Matters: Small Audience, Big Data

Music Marketing Matters is a weekly feature that delivers ideas, case studies, and actionable advice for artists to market their music more creatively. For more on its inception, click here.

Big Data is upon us!

Before you grab the nearest pitchfork and medieval torch to hand, fear not.

Far from being some hideously mutated Star Trek character gone Frankenstein’s monster – although that probably happened at some point, didn’t it TrekHeads? – Big Data is merely the moniker given to the flood of information that has poured forth from the digital era. It is often a catch-all phrase, used to refer to the oncoming storm of making sense of more data than we can realistically hope to deal with.

On second thoughts, you might want to keep that pitchfork handy…

Facts About Fans

As an artist, if the previous talk of marketing in these pages has irked you, the presentation of data gathering and analysis is likely to be akin to the red rag to (a particularly talented) bull. Hopefully, disarming flattery will calm your creative soul. If not, how about this:

There are dollars floating in that data.

Or at least key information about your fans that will lead you to dollars. Does that quell some of your apprehension?

The reality is, as I’ve highlighted often in this series, that the music industry is rapidly moving on from tried and trusted ways of making money. For many artists they didn’t prove so trustworthy, but at least they were the devil you know, right? Well the devil you don’t know may actually turn out to be the guardian angel of your music career, if you can put in the time to set up some smart incentive and reward mechanisms to capture core information about your fans.

Image Credit: Anirudh Koul

Data can help you to make better decisions about where you play, what you play, what you release and how you release it.

It is increasingly becoming the currency of everything we do online, as consumers and not just fans of music, and it can help you play the long game of forging a slow but steady growth for your artistic career.

Getting Started With Data Gathering

As this is such a huge topic – and one that must certainly be taken in bit-sized chunks – I’ll be publishing an additional Music Marketing Matters later this week on specific mechanisms that you can install to crank up your data gathering efforts. These will be aligned with specific targets for several levels of artist, so that nobody gets left behind in getting at least some starter info bubbling away.

In preparation for these more detailed action posts, ask yourself the following questions about your current web presence:

Do you have an e-mail list that you could segment by various criteria, such as age, location, musical preference?

Do you have a handle on who are your biggest fans? What they’ve bought, when they’ve seen you, their favorite songs?

Can you pinpoint communities in which your most active fans participate?

Are you gathering information about your audience via multiple channels i.e. more than just your website?

Do you understand how to approach different sections of your fan base in different ways, subject to the point above?

If you answered no to even one of these questions, there will be something for you in these forthcoming articles on data gathering for musicians. If not, I probably want to pick your brains for content!

Stay tuned, we’re about to go deep, deep into that devilish detail.

July 23, 2012 by Steve Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: artists, audience, big data, data, data analysis, data gathering, fans, marketing, music, music industry, music marketing matters, numbers, stats