Take The Extra Step in Promoting Your Art

Debbie Cavalier, Artists House contributor, wrote a great article here about how musicians can leverage a social media site like Flickr as part of their viral marketing.

In the same way that artists shouldn’t see themselves to be “above” business cards as Brandbits talked about in our last post, artists shouldn’t be scared away by the idea of having a marketing plan. Your “plan” doesn’t have to be contrived and convoluted; it doesn’t have to be elaborate or verbose; really, it just means having a plan. A plan by definition has reasoning behind it.

Our most precious resource is time, so you especially don’t want to waste any of it when you are trying to promote something you are passionate about: your own work. So make your work count; dont’ shoot into the dark.

For example, thousands of bands post a couple of live show pictures online after a gig. If you post a couple performance pictures to your Flickr account after a gig, what has that really accomplished? Who are you trying to attract, and what is the ultimate purpose?

Most of your fans probably took their own pictures during the show, which will mean more to them than the ones you took.

Go just a step or two further and make it worth your while by creating a ripple. As Debbie suggested, take pictures of your audience, the sound guy, the club owner, etc. By taking pictures of your audience throughout the performance, you’ve just created a reason for a fan to visit your website. Honestly, who doesn’t love to see pictures of themselves socializing? This is what drives Facebook, case in point. You also need to inform your fans of what you are doing:

• A plug at the end of the gig
• A link on your website
• An e-mail to everyone who attended the concert with a link to your Flickr page
• A tweet from your twitter account

Fans are most psyched about your music usually directly after seeing you play live, so take advantage of it. If it was a good show, they want to know where to find pictures, videos, etc. as memorabilia. So not only create these things for them, but make it easy for them to find. These people are your evangelizers. They are the ones that will spread the word. Generally, you can’t create word of mouth for your own product (people see through this, you are biased), so the best thing you can do is give great tools to the people who are already spreading the word.

And let’s be realistic. What are your fans doing with the pictures? Not all of them are sending e-mail blasts to their friends with links to your Flickr account. They are probably downloading the pictures to their computers and posting them on their own personal Facebook, MySpace, etc. So instead of having tons of people see a more or less generic gig picture, you could use a simple photo editor and add a watermark or title to each of the pictures you post. EX:

This gig picture is now a truly effective marketing tool.

Of course, you can use your far superior design skills to make it look cooler. But the point is, adding this title to the picture took me an extra 15 seconds, and now I know that whenever the sing-a-long girl’s 300 facebook friends see this pic on her page, they will also see Fatter Than Albert’s name and know that their friend had a clearly awesome time at a Fatter Than Albert show. As opposed to knowing their friend had an awesome time at some show.

This is of course just one example of how to shift what would be a basically impotent marketing idea and giving it some purpose. There are an infinite number of ways to take small steps to improve what you are already doing to promote your art. The take-away here is to think through how your promotions are actually used by your fans. Then figure out how you can tweak what you are doing to make it more effective (increase its viral nature) and ultimately increase your exposure.