Microphone Marketing

This is a blurb from my marketing blog, simontam.biz, that I’m re-posting here because I believe it directly correlates to independent music marketing.

A microphone is actually a miniature speaker. It works like the human ear; it “listens” for sound waves, then translates and reproduces the signal to send it to the brain (or sound system). Until it a microphone is used to magnify a person’s voice, it is just a speaker. A microphone is great for certain applications: events where a speaker or singer need to be heard or for grabbing someone’s attention. The problem is that unless it is a message that a person is listening for or wants to hear (such as a concert that the person has paid for), the  message can get tuned out just like all of the other noise in our lives.

Think for a moment about the messages you hear when you fly somewhere. Every two minutes in the airport terminal, a voice interrupts the music playing overhead to announce a “high priority security alert,” only to tell you that it is important to watch you bags. These messages tend to get ignored. When you board the plane,  flight attendants ask for everyone’s full attention while they go through life-dependent emergency procedures (they even ask for you to follow along in the safety guide). However, if you look around the plane, you’ll see that hardly anyone is listening – people are reading, listening to music, or distracting themselves with little games. Even though the our  life may depend on knowing these procedures, our eyes tend to glaze over and we think “I’ve heard it all before.” Yet  we marketers kid ourselves into thinking that certain ads will be given the attention we hope simply because it’s being broadcasted.

Now, think about your social media contacts.  In the endless array of messages, whose do you pay attention to, look for? Chances are it’s someone that you interact with on a regular basis, a friend who has earned your attention not someone who is just blathering on about themselves in the background who you just tune out.

So stop,  listen, then speak to what they want to hear…and allow your fanbase to be the microphone, to spead your message.

Tags: advice for bands, marketing, music advice, music marketing, musicians, pr

5 Non-traditional Ways to Promote Your Music

Artists tend to be creative people. We write music, create dazzling visions of art, and express sentiments in the most unique ways. However, when it comes to promoting our art, something else happens. For one reason or the other, most artists fail to express any creativity in their business endeavors.

Here are five easy (non-internet) ways that you could promote your band. I hope that more than anything else, they get your brain going and inspire you to create ideas that work with specifically for your art.

1. Teaming Up with Local Food: Do you frequent a local restaurant or know someone in the restaurant business? Offer to come up with a new recipe. On the menu, it write “created by ______” (or however you want it phrased). In return, you’ll help promote the restaurant by encouraging fans to order the dish: through social media, on the back of your business cards, maybe a flyer or coupon. What restaurant wouldn’t want a local band promoting their food for free all over town?  You could do the same thing with a bar as well (designing a signature drink).
2. Coast with the Local Watering Hole: Speaking of bars, you many of them also need coasters (they’re often supplied for free by beer or spirits distributors). Why not design some coasters and drop them off at your favorite place? You could design a cool logo, offer a free download, and link with a QR code to your music right there. Coasters are only a few cents to custom imprint, why not? Maybe your fans would want some too.
3. At the Car Wash: I drive by an intersection that has car washes nearly every weekend. I’ve seen sports teams, church groups, and rehab centers, but I’ve never seen a band out there raising money for an album or tour van. Why not? Car washes are actually a great way to make money fairly easily. You could get friends and fans to help out, have a performance or sell CD’s, etc. In fact, you could even offer a free CD with a $10 donation or more for the car wash. You’d probably make more money in one afternoon than your typical dive bar gig.
4. Consignment: Consider selling your music or merchandise via consignment at places outside the normal record store. For instance, my band (The Slants) has a strong connection with the anime/comic book world so I set up displays and sell music at comic book stores around the country. We often offer to come in and do a performance, help promote the store, and only ask for a percentage of each sale in exchange for having the store feature our music. Music can be bought/sold anywhere, just look at Starbucks creating their own record label. What kinds of stores do you have a connection to?
5. Charity Fundraisers: There are many fundraisers that are looking for live entertainment. You might have even played some yourself. But have you also participated as a fundraising team for a cause that is important to you? Most of fundraisers use a website system called Convio where participants can set up a personalized fundraising page and the top fundraisers are featured.  If you also participate as an active fundraiser, you’ll have much greater support (and recognition) from the organization, its staff, and volunteers. You can also give away free music in exchange for donations (makes a great tax write off) as well.

These are just some initial thoughts. I hope that they inspire you to think outside the box with all areas of your music career and how you can inject your own creativity into the process. What’re some interesting things that you have done?

 

Tags: anime, band, bands, bars, car wash, comic, distribution, endorsement, food, marketing, music career, music marketing, partnerships, promotion, small business, sponsorship

How to Get Sponsored: Rethinking Sponsorships

From my book, How to Get Sponsorships and Endorsements:

When most people who want sponsorships think about their ultimate goal, it involves money. They’re looking for someone to fund their event, to pay for their tour, to raise money for their charity, and so on. When many business think about sponsoring someone, it ultimately involves money as well: even if it is an incredible cause, at the end of the day, they want to know how sponsoring will help them get more customers. Each party treats the sponsorship as a transaction. However, I believe it is important to shift the definition from “a cash and/or in-kind fee paid to a property (typically sports entertainment, non-profit event, or organization) in return for access to the exploitable, commercial potential associated with that property” (IEG, 2000) to something more equitable: a partnership.

Sponsorship as a Partnership

A sponsorship insinuates something more akin to a one-sided relationship: the sponsor gives money in the hope for more customers or being associated with a positive cause. A partnership denotes an agreement where both parties share the risks, responsibilities, and rewards. By approaching the relationship as a partnership, it also implies a long term agreement.

By examining how we approach sponsorships more closely, we can also identify a few other important factors that should be considered:

• Who do we want associated with our brand, event, or organization? You hear about companies dropping their advertising dollars or sponsorships of athletes all the time because they don’t want to be affiliated with improper behavior. Recently, talk show host Rush Limbaugh lost multiple major advertisers due to some of his controversial statements. However, sometimes as an artist or non-profit event, we don’t think deeply about who we are getting our money from and how our customers’ perception of us might change as a result.
• What kind of people do we want to work with? If you are planning a cross-promotional marketing campaign where you work closely with a brand, you’ll want to know their customers, their work-flow, communication processes, and their approach. Does it make sense for what you are doing?
• Is everyone getting fair value for their work? If you are getting a $20,000 sponsorship, are you providing at least $20,000 worth of deliverable returns back to the investor? Conversely, is the amount of work you’re doing worth the money/partnership or are there other ways you can get the same resources more easily?
• What are some creative ways that this partnership can be highlighted? You should be able to do more than simply trade logos on websites and your printed materials. How can you use your respective brands to drive customers towards one another? Is there a way that you can involve the employees of a sponsoring business?

Sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer puts it best: “All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things being not so equal, people still want to do business with their friends.” By elevating the value of sponsorship to an established, friendly partnership, you’ll instill loyalty, and get more in return than a simple check could ever provide.

Tags: endrosements, how to get sponsored, how to get sponsors, partner, partnerships, sponsor, sponsored, sponsorship

How to Get Sponsorships and Endorsements now available

I’m happy to announce that the digital version of my book, How to Get Sponsorships and Endorsements, is now available for only $3.99. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Y6SCOO

If you’ve found the writings on this site helpful (especially the sponsorship articles), I hope you’ll consider spending the $4 for the complete book. The printed version will be available in a few weeks.

Here’s the Amazon.com description:

Building a relationship with a corporate sponsor is one of the most important things an organization needs to do in order to achieve its mission. Sponsors can not only provide a source of income, but also increased brand awareness, volunteers, and other valuable resources. However, marketing guru Simon Tam argues that the relationship can be so much more.How to Get Sponsorships and Endorsements provides step-by-step, practical advice on how to build sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships that can help your organization succeed. Whether you are representing a non-profit organization, a musician in a band, or an athlete looking for product and cash support, this book will become a resource that you can turn to over and over again.

Get specific advice on how to:

• Find the right sponsor for your organization
• Get information for the right contact at a company
• Approach potential sponsors
• Create an effective sponsorship proposal
• Follow up the right way

Tags: branding, donations, endorsements, fundraising, how to get band sponsored, how to get sponsored, how to get sponsors, music advice, music industry, music marketing, nonprofits, products, sponsorship, support

GnR’s Duff McKagan: appetite for investment

Duff McKagen of Guns n’ Roses talks about musicians going to business school. It’s not a bad idea, I did the same thing myself.

How to Use Internet Trends to Market Your Band

If you use the internet frequently, chances are that you’ve been noticing a few things on the rise: meme images or animated .gif’s, certain types of videos, infographics, etc.

Why not use these viral trends and put your own spin on it to create fun, engaging, easy-to-share content with your fans?

• Memes: Meme images have exploded online, especially in geek culture. These images have spread to billions, each with their own take of the images, from “Y U NO” guy to the ever so lovable Nyan cat. You can create your own memes for free using generator sites like weknowmemes.com and memegenerator.net. You can make it more personal fans by talking about specific points in your band’s history, favorite songs or themes, and also inviting them to create some of their own. Most meme websites also provide multiple examples of each image in case you don’t understand the logic behind that type of meme. Read a few, then create your own. Here are some that I made for my band, The Slants, that generated some great buzz from our fans:
     Two of these are played off of some reoccurring themes in the band: our guitarist Johnny always being asleep (then being victim to pranks) and our van breaking down frequently when on tour (we’re always on tour).
• Animated .gif’s: When the world wide web first came to rise about fifteen years ago, animated .gif images were all the rage (probably because XHTML, Flash, and Javascript weren’t around yet). They quickly died out but in recent years, they made a huge resurgence on the social media site, Tumblr. Many of them play off of internet meme’s but you could also create an animated .gif of your band playing, a video blog with the text typed below, or something memorable.
• Trending videos: Sometimes certain types of videos gather huge momentum and dozens of spin offs are then created. For a few short months, it seemed liked “Shit ____ Says” were the only videos being made online. Most of them played off of general stereotypes (it started with with a group of Canadians that amassed a huge following after the release of their first few videos). Only a handful of bands jumped on this but the first few each got several hundred thousand views on their videos.  For example, the band High Society only a few thousand views on their music videos but had almost 240,000 views on their “Shit Band Guys Say” video. Other examples include Nyan Cat, dub step or dub step remixes, or parody videos of popular songs.
  
• Infographics: Infographics spread quickly because they can take complex data, statistics, or trends and disseminate the information in a quick, easy to read manner. Why not make infographics with interesting data about your band to share with fans? You can also use sites like visual.ly to generate infographics that take information straight from your social media sites. For example, you can compare your Twitter account with anyone else’s account: a rival band, the president, your hero, your friends, etc. Why not go the extra step and create an infographic to use as an EPK? Instead of a text heavy one-sheet, have one that highlights important data (such as number of fans, social media reach, online traffic, number of albums sold, etc.).

Have some fun with your fans by being a part of the new internet culture but also be aware of things that are special to your target audience. For instance, my band released a music video a few months ago that was targeting a very niche audience: the anime convention world. Because we often play at conventions and many of our fans enjoy Cosplay, we wanted to have some fun with it so we invited them to dress up and be a part of the video. Since its release, the video has been shared by other anime fans, magazines, tv shows, and websites. The quick rise in popularity led to the video being picked up by an international tv show who will be debuting this month in over 80 countries around the world.

Pay attention to the world around you and see how you can put your own spin on it for your music. If the content gets shared, you might be able to reach a new audience. If anything, you’ll be able to enjoy some additional lighthearted engagement with the people that support you most.

How to Choose the Best Songs for Your Album

If you’re heading into the studio to record an album, you should go in with plenty of songs to spare. Sometimes, things don’t work as well in recorded format, sometimes your tastes/ideas change. At any rate, going in with more ideas allows you to choose the very best songs for your album. Besides, it’s always better to have too many songs to choose from than not enough. But how do you decide which songs should stay and which should go?

This is what I recommend that you do: Treat it like a songwriting contest.

Create a score card for every song with all of the most important features to you. For example, areas could include: composition, arrangement, vocal melody, lyrics, catchy, dance-able, harmonic progression, execution/performance, artist merit/uniqueness, commercial viability, and so on. Pick the top five or six areas of importance to you and create a numerical ranking system. From there, sit down with your band mates, manager, producer, etc. and score every single song. At the end, the songs with the best scores stay. The ones that don’t can be used for giveaways, b-sides, fan incentives, etc.  This is an objective process to an otherwise subjective art.

You could also make this an opportunity to engage with fans as well by creating a “focus group” of your most enthusiastic listeners and allowing them to get a “sneak peak” of your new album. You could have several rounds of listening as well, since some songs to “grow” on you over time. Either way, this would help reduce the any disagreements/dissapointments among band members since it allows everyone to have an equal say over the project. Of course, if you have a producer or manager calling the shots, then this could end up very differently.