Recording - November 2014 - 22

The biggest reason is that the more data
you have about your fans and customers,
the more you can take advantage of it for
promotion as a result. That's because
we're moving into a new era of marketing
and promotion, where everything is built
around micro-targeting.
The more you know about your fans, the
easier it is to send them only the information
that they care about. Why inform a fan in St.
Louis that you're playing a gig in Boston?
What if you have a piece of merch that's
aimed at your female fans in cold weather
territories? Do you think the dudes care much
about it? Do you think your female fans in
Florida and Texas care much about it?
Micro-targeting allows you to adjust your
promotional campaign accordingly, which
is why you should never ignore the fan data
you collect, even if you can't utilize it at the
moment. The time will come soon enough
that you'll be happy you have it.
4. Having an online strategy makes
your life easier
Most artists or bands use social media
totally randomly. They create a Facebook
page because that's what everyone does.
They tweet because they heard Lady Gaga
or Coldplay does that too. They create a
Tumblr blog or join Pinterest because
they've been told it's the latest thing. The
problem is that because there's no overall
strategy for dealing with social media, it
takes a lot of time to keep up with everything, and the more time you have to
spend online, the less time you have for the
fun things... like creating music.
A good online strategy includes determining the most important platforms for you to be on (poll your
fans), determining when and how you'll
post, determining how to gather your fans'
email addresses, and determining how
you're going to market to them. This sounds
like a lot of work, but once you have it figured out, you'll be back to writing songs in
no time, because you'll be spending a lot
less time online, and what time you do
spend won't be wasted.
5. You've got to have a brand
One of the things that an artist or band
hears a lot of these days is the need to
promote "your brand" in order to get
ahead in the current era of the music business. That's all well and good, but you
can't promote your brand unless you
know the definition of a brand in the first
place. So what exactly is a brand?
A brand is a promise of quality and
consistency.
For McDonalds, that means that a Big
Mac tastes the same anywhere in the
world, but for an artist, a brand means a
consistency of persona, and usually a consistency of sound. There's a look and feel
that's unmistakable and consistent no matter where you see or hear that artist.
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RECORDING November 2014

Discovering and developing a brand
takes some time and thought, but an easy
way to begin is to start small. Select the color
and the font that feels good and is representative of your style, and use that across everything you use in front of the public. This
includes your website, social media, business cards, flyers, and anything else that you
consider promotional. Just this tiny move
goes a long way to creating a brand that
can be easily developed as you go along.
6. Having a website is crucial
Unfortunately, a website gets overlooked
many times as an integral piece of your digital promotional life, because there are so
many other places that you can use as your
online focal point. Having a Facebook
page or Tumblr blog, or relying on another
social network as your online central focus
has a number of potential flaws, not the
least is control of your message.
For one thing, you have very little control of the look and feel of your social
media profile page as compared to your
website. For another, a social media platform could perform an "upgrade" and

delete your followers (it happened with
MySpace). Yet a third thing is that a social
platform might suddenly begin charging
you to reach your followers. Sound farfetched? That's what's happening with
Facebook right now.
Your website is the only place online that
you can totally control. You never have to
worry about it being bought, changing its
terms of service, changing its features, or
just plain closing down, as can happen
with any social platform. A website also
allows you to provide much more fanoriented content that better suits your audience than just about any other platform
available online right now.
7. Your mailing list is your immediate
link to your fans
Many think that email is on the decline
when it comes to communicating with
friends, fans, clients, and business associates, as social networks rise in popularity.
When it comes to promotion, though,
email's a lot more important than you think.

For one thing, you control the message. If
done well, it can feel a lot more personal
than communicating via Facebook or Twitter
or any of the other popular networks. You
control the information, the look, the marketing, and the promotion in a way that's
not possible in any social network, since
each social network has its own look and
feel as well as a terms-of-service agreement
that can limit what you can say and do.
It's also a memory prompt in that it
reminds fans or former clients who you
are. If a person hasn't been following you
on a social network and therefore hasn't
seen any of your regular posts, that
newsletter in their email box jogs their
memory and reminds them you're
around. It doesn't take long to drift from
the public consciousness, and an email
prevents that from ever happening.
Finally, one thing that email can provide,
that social networks don't do nearly as well,
is sophisticated measurement. With email
we know when a newsletter was opened, if
it was opened more than once (even if it's
reopened again a year later), how long it
was read, if any of the links were clicked,
and if it was passed along to anyone else,
among many other measurements.
8. There are two easy keys to social
media posts
If you want more engagement with
your social media posts (who doesn't?),
there are two simple steps. First, always
include a link to additional information,
pictures, video, mailing list, or your website. If you have someone's attention
enough for them to read your post, it's
likely they'll take another action if given
the chance. In his November 2013 interview in these pages, Kristian Bush of
Sugarland underlined the importance of
always having a button labeled "Find Out
More." He's right.
Second, include a photo when you can.
Posts with photos receive 39 percent more
interaction than ones without. On the other
hand, posts with embedded videos receive
fewer likes and views, mostly because people don't want to commit the time it takes to
watch an entire video. That's not to say that
you should stay completely away from posting videos. Just remember that in this case,
less is more.
9. Your video description is more
important than you think
YouTube is the primary way that people
discover new music online, and the
younger the demographic, the more they
listen to it. Because of that, it's more important than ever to optimize your videos.
One of the most overlooked portions of a
video is the description. Not only can this
be loaded with pertinent information for the
viewer to read, but search engines love it.
Each description should contain a full
"who, what, when, where and how" that

Recording - November 2014

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