Leave No Stone Unturned

Do you examine the marketing tactics used by your favourite artists?

If you don’t, you should start immediately; I guarantee that you will learn a lot. It’s something that I’ve made of point of doing since I began studying the music industry, and I would like to take this opportunity to analyze a great Facebook tactic used by the management team of Jason Reeves (www.jason-reeves.com) to create awareness for his recent tour.

They used Facebook to hold a contest related to the tour. To enter, fans had to create their own Facebook event page for the show in their area and then proceed to invite all of their friends to the concert. The fan whose event page had the most confirmed guests at the end of the contest won their choice of either…

Prize A: Two tickets to the show and a M&G with Jason.

Prize B: A free t-shirt, an autographed CD, and a M&G with Jason.

This idea was effective for a number of reasons. It helped to strengthen the artist/fan relationship by keeping fans engaged (much more so than the average contest does). But more importantly, because viral, word-of-mouth marketing elements were incorporated into the contest, it also served as a fantastic promotional tool both for the shows and for Jason himself (more on this later). Furthermore, it should be noted that this is an excellent example of an artist doing “The Straddle”, a topic that we’ve been discussing a lot lately at ArtistsHouse. You see, similar to artists like Colbie Caillat and OneRepublic, Jason is an artist who was able to make a huge online splash prior to getting signed; he was the #1 artist on MySpace’s Unsigned Folk Chart and attracted many millions of views and plays on the site. However, as we know, simply creating an impressive online presence is not enough to build a sustainable career. The Facebook contest is one way that Jason’s online presence was leveraged to grow his offline presence.

The only way this contest could have been more effective, in my opinion, is if the two prize options were combined into one and, rather than only selecting a single contest winner, the fans whose event pages got the most confirmed guests for each of the tour stops were deemed winners. This would have created more incentive for people to get involved.

Now, despite what you may be thinking, the purpose of this blog entry is not to tell you that you should copy this contest idea the next time you have a tour or ad hoc show to promote (although, that certainly wouldn’t be a bad idea). Rather, I want to dig a bit deeper and highlight an underlying principle that can be taken away from this anecdote and applied to your future marketing efforts: you must leave no stone unturned. While this principle can and should be applied to all of your career activities, I’ll be focusing on social media marketing for now.

Think about it. How do artists typically go about promoting a tour on Facebook? Well, they usually create an event page for the tour and then invite their friends. Maybe they’ll also send out a Facebook notice to their fans that informs them of the tour and encourages them to visit the event page for more info and to RSVP.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach… It’s just very elementary. And if it’s all you do to promote a tour on Facebook, you will essentially just be preaching to the choir; your Facebook friends already know who you are. If they’re serious fans, and if you announce the tour elsewhere prior to promoting it on Facebook, they will also probably already know about your touring plans. Of course, your pre-existing fan base is comprised of the people who are the most likely to spend money on attending your shows. Therefore, you definitely should strive to drive the message home with them; repetition is key with marketing. But even so, you would not be doing much to get your message heard by potential new fans (which is also vital) in this hypothetical situation.

What Reeves’ management team did took things to another level and combined the best of both worlds; the contest created awareness for the tour among people who were already fans and among a host of new people. Importantly, the fact that word of mouth marketing techniques were used to create awareness among new people made it likely that there would be value alignment between Reeves and the new recipients of his marketing message. In other words, friends tend to share similar musical tastes. The new people being targeted were being turned on to Jason by their friends (who were already fans and were trying to win the contest). Thus, the possibility that these new people might actually be inclined to enjoy Jason’s work and attend his shows increased.

Reeves’ management team didn’t just create an event page. They didn’t just send out a Facebook notice to his fans. They used Facebook to promote the tour in a way that went well beyond the obvious (and was much more effective than solely using the obvious methods would have been). By infusing a dose of creativity into the application of event pages, they turned an otherwise basic Facebook feature into a potent marketing tool. And THAT is the point of this entry.

I hope that this example makes it unequivocally clear that merely using the basic features a site offers in an uninspired way is not enough. Do not limit yourself by only using a site’s features in the manner which they are “supposed” to be used. While this may be an easier approach to take, you would be doing yourself and your career a disservice by leaving potentially great marketing methods undiscovered. You must think beyond the obvious and grab opportunities that most never take the time to uncover. Thoroughly examine each feature a site offers and challenge yourself to find innovative ways to integrate them into your marketing efforts. And remember, marketing is just as much about retaining fans as it is about attracting them (this is especially true with social media marketing).

With the emergence of Twitter and uStream, now is the perfect time to start thinking outside the box. These sites haven’t fully exploded in the artist world yet. It is much easier to become a trailblazer in the application of new technology than it is to become one in the application of technology that has been used for years by [what seems like] every other artist. You better hurry as far as Twitter is concerned, though!

Regardless of which sites you choose to utilize, the only way that you will come up with innovative ways to apply their otherwise basic features to your situation is if you sit down and force yourself to. Make a commitment to yourself that, from this point on, you will leave no stone unturned with regards to how the features of social media sites can be integrated into your marketing efforts.