7 Steps To Developing Your 2014 Music Marketing Plan

We're just about at Christmas, and most of the serious music business for the year is over. That means it's a great time to start planning your 2014 marketing campaign so you can hit the ground running on January 2nd. Here are 7 things to consider.

1. Does your website need an update in its look and feel? Do you have a press page or a easy to find contact page? Do you have a page with info just for promoters and club owners? Does your site have an easy to find mailing list subscription section?

2. Do you have a music release schedule for next year? Do you know when you'll have new music available? Do you have a production schedule? Do you know when you're going on the road? Now's the time to plan.

3. Do you have a video release schedule? Do you know what videos you'll need to create in order to support your music? Do you have a schedule for production? Make sure you plan for lyric videos as well as produced music videos, as they get viewed almost as much.

4. Do you have a mailing list schedule? Do you know when you'll be sending out emails to support your music and video releases? Do you know what you'll be sending out when you don't have products to announce? Now's the time to work up those ideas and create an editorial calendar so you'll always have something useful to send in order to keep in touch with your fans or clients.

5. Do plan on supporting your releases or gigs with paid advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Google Adwords, or bookmarking sites? If not, it's time to look into it as you can get a big return from a relatively small investment.

6. Do you Tweet? If not, nows the time to learn how. If you do, do you have a list of hashtags that you normally use? If not, go to search.twitter.com and create one. Do you know the best times in the day for you to tweet in order to garner the highest engagement?

7. Have you monetized your videos? You do have a YouTube channel, right? If not, create one right now. If you have one, be sure to set it up to monetize your videos. Do you get over a million views a month? Now's the time to look into a Multichannel Network like Omnia or Full Screen for a larger cut of the revenue.

If you're confused by any of the above, you can find out everything you need to know about promoting yourself, your music or your band by reading Social Media Promotion For Musicians. It's a guide that shows you how to use your website, mailing list, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and bookmarking sites to your best advantage when it comes to making your music more visible, and growing your audience. It makes a great Christmas gift for yourself or an engineer or musician in your life.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Social Media Courses On Lynda.com

If your not hip to lynda.com yet, you should be, since it's one of the best learning resources out there for any software or app you can think of. The production standards are incredibly high, and they really hold their authors to a high standard, which is immediately evident in the video courses. As a result, you can learn a lot about almost any subject, and learn it fast.

I've been a part of the lynda family for a few years now with a number of courses on the audio side of things (recording, mixing, mastering, mastering for iTunes, acoustics), but now I'm pleased to announce a new series of social media video courses, specially designed for musicians, artists, bands, engineers, producers, songwriters, music execs, and anyone in the music industry.

These video courses are based around the Social Media Promotion For Musicians book, and give you an insight to everything that you need to market yourself, your band and your music online. The courses include:

Social Media Basics for Musicians and Bands 

Facebook for Musicians and Bands 

Twitter for Musicians and Bands 

YouTube for Musicians and Bands  

Website Management for Musicians and Bands (A sample video is below) 

Mailing List Management for Musicians and Bands 

Blogging Strategies for Musicians and Bands 

Google+  for Musicians and Bands 

Bookmarking Sites for Musicians and Bands 

Pinterest for Musicians and Bands

There's a lot to learn in each course, but you can click here to get 7 days of free unlimited access to lynda.com. Check the courses, and lynda.com out. You'll be glad you did.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The Social Media Promotion For Musicians Book Is Here

Bobby Owsinski's Social Media Promotion For Musicians, the manual for marketing yourself, your band and your music online, is finally available.

The book shows you how to stop just using social media and learn how to promote with it, as you’ll find a host of online insider tips and tricks that that will help you gain more fans and followers, increase your views, and grow your ticket and merch sales.

Social Media Promotion For Musicians shows artists, bands, engineers and producers the latest techniques and strategies to increase your online presence more effectively and efficiently than you ever thought possible. Best of all, anyone can do it!

In the book you’ll discover:

• How to increase your online exposure to increase your fan base
• How to have more time for creating by saving at least an hour every day on common social media operations
• Exclusive promotional tips that boost your views and followers
• How to uncover and develop your brand
• The secret behind successful tweets and posts
• Why a mailing list is the key to your ticket and merch sales
• 10 ways to make sure that fans, music critics and bloggers, bookers and promoters, and agents and managers always have your latest information
• Ways to optimize your YouTube channel and videos to maximize your views

and so much more.

Social Media Promotion For Musicians covers all aspects of a musician’s online presence on the most widely used platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, blogs, Pinterest, bookmarking sites, as well as personal and band websites and newsletters.

Check out the bobbyowsinski.com website, where can see the table of contents and read excerpts. The printed book is available from Amazon, as is the Kindle version.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

8 Best Email Practices

I've advocated email lists here many times before for marketing so there's no need to belabor that (you can subscribe to mine here, if you're interested). Jed Carlson, who's a co-founder and COO of Reverbnation, posted a great article on Email 101 For Artists on Music Think Tank that's essential for every artist with a mailing list to read.

Below is an excerpt, but there's a lot more, so be sure to check out the entire article.
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Specifically, here are some ‘best practice’ tenants to consider when it comes to email marketing to a fan base:

Always…

1. Always respect a person’s desire to unsubscribe to your list. IMMEDIATELY UNSUBSCRIBE THEM IF YOUR EMAIL SERVICE DOESN’T DO IT FOR YOU.
2. Always give before you get.  Give the fans something special before you ask them to do something like vote for you in a contest.
3. Always talk to them without swearing.  It may be part of your ‘persona’ as a band, but some people don’t like that language.  The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Yahoo mail, hotmail, AOL, etc don’t like it either, and your message will go directly to the junk box.  You wouldn’t talk to your grandma that way, would you?
4. Always avoid ‘scam’ words in the subject line.  Words like ‘Free’ and ‘Help’ will land your message in the junk box 100% of the time. 
5. Always message them no more than 4 times per month.  Ideally it would be less than 3 times.  Fans want to be kept up to date, but they don’t want to feel like they are your only fan.  Messaging them all the time gives the impression that you don’t have anything more important to do.
6. Always target them with messages that are RELEVANT to them.  If you have a show in Seattle, don’t message your fans in Miami.  Keep your powder dry for a message to them later about something else.
7. Always give them the basics about the information you are conveying.  Reporters call this the ‘who, what, why, when, where, how’ model.  If you have a show coming up, do your fans (and yourself) the service of providing dates, times, locations, ticket links, and lineup of the show.  Over 75% of Artists miss this essential piece when they email.  If you want someone to respond and come to your show, for goodness sake, go so far as to give them driving directions if you can.  Each ticket sold is money in your pocket.
8. Always link them to some place to find out more info about the band.  This could be ReverbNation or MySpace or a homepage or blog.  But ALWAYS give them a way to find out more.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

5 Tips For Building Your Email List

Your email list is a major component for marketing to your fanbase. It's widely overlooked since most artists believe that their Facebook friends and Twitter followers are enough, but you email list allows you to reach out and personally connect with the fans and control you message while you're doing it.

A well thought out email blast allows you to do the following:

1) Engage your fan on a more 1 to 1 basis
2) Design the communication without the constraints of a social network
3) Add a call-to-action

This makes it easier to inform, market and sell to your fan in a manner that the true fan (superfan, uberfan, Tribal member - whatever you want to call them) enjoys, if you do it well.

Here's a short video about the best way to harvest those valuable email addresses.

4 Reasons Why Your Email List Is Still Important

While the popular trend is to think that email is so "last year" for communicating with friends, fans and business partners as social networks like Facebook rise in popularity, it's a lot more important than you think in the grand scheme of Music 3.0.

In fact, your email list is one of the most powerful tools you can have because you control the message, and if done well, it can feel a lot more personal than communicating via Facebook or Linkedin or any of the other popular networks. Those two factors are important, but being able to control the consistency of your message is even more so.

For most artists and businesses today, the problem becomes how to effectively communicate with all of your "friends" and contacts, because social networks are a closed environment by nature. That means that you have a set of friends on MySpace and another set on Facebook and yet another on Twitter, and maybe even another set on an email list that you might already have, so your workload reaching them all has not only quadrupled, but the look and feel is inconsistent because of the nature of the network. If you're not consistent in your presentation, you're not controlling the message.

Those are already three points in favor of having an email list, but perhaps the biggest problem with social network communication is measurement. One thing that email can provide that social networks can't is sophisticated measurement of when the mail was opened, if it was opened more than once (even if it's reopened again a year later), how long it was read, and if it was passed along, among many other measurements. Obviously your personal email client on your computer can't do these things, but it can't easily reach out to thousands of people as well. That's why you need a service like Constant Contact, WhatCounts, or iContact, all of which also have the added convenience of constantly cleaning the list of bounces and outdated addresses (we'll discuss email service providers in a future post).

So now you can see why it's so important to capture any friend or contact info from those social network where you have a presence onto a master mailing list:

1 - communication control

2 - consistency of the message

3 - a more personal feel

4 - measurement

So if that makes sense, the next question becomes, "How do I get social network contacts on to a master email list?"

It's easy but takes a little work. When someone friends you on a social network, communicate with them and ask them to please sign on to your mailing list. Promise that you'll only send something of value to them when you email them and be emphatic that you won't spam them, then stay true to your word.

In a future post we'll look at some of the upcoming new email features that can help your click-through rates, as well as take a look at suggested email frequency and the ideal content.