In this episode you’ll hear me answer a question about how to sell your product in a competitive market.
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Transcript:
Question
Hi my name is Deb and I’m a self producing musician on the fringe circuit as each year the festivals get bigger it’s becoming harder for the smaller independent acts to cut through and compete with the big budget corporate acts in addition to this I’m aware of the massive eco footprint festivals creates so I’m trying to do my bit for the environment by cutting down on flyers and posters without the budget for a publicist aside from Facebook advertising what are some other best value for money unique ways you would use to sell your show in a competitive market.
Answer
Hello Debra this is an awesome question I really like this because I have spent a lot of time in bands and DJing emceeing and Club promoting over the years and I love this stuff so it’s really um what I’m gonna give you is hopefully super relevant to you so if I was in your shoes I’d do all of the following right so I commend you for jumping out there and doing paid Facebook ads think about Facebook Ads anything you spend I want you to be breaking even I want you to be self liquidating that so any dollar you put in I want you to be getting $1 out I don’t want you to be spending money without actually covering your cost of that ad you may be thinking or why would you want to do that you’re not making any profit all of your profits should be made on back-end for through multiple performances and getting people to come along again and again to what you’re doing and bringing their friends so if you’re gonna be doing Facebook ads make sure every dollar you put in you’re getting at least one dollar back even if you’re just covering the costs of your ads you’ll make all of your profit elsewhere and through performances because people go and see bands over and over and over again and musicians time and time again because they just love what they do in terms of getting cut through I totally agree with you the number one thing is you have to be polarizing there are going to be people that love you and if there are people that love you there are also gonna be people that hate you the only way you want to get cut through is by putting a stake in the ground and saying this is who I am and this is what I stand for and this is the type of thing that I produce now on that if you’re being polarizing it’s a really good qualifier you’re getting people to raise their hand and say yes I’m in and I mean about your music and also by default you’re disqualifying people and getting them to say they’re not a fan of what you’re doing and that is totally okay the more polarizing you can be the better agree with you with the being eco-friendly for sure and you know just beyond the environmental factors that come into that I think flies are really dumb you know we’re coming into a federal election here in Australia and I sealed the core flutes and all the core flutes are the same thing huge waste in terms of hobbies but they don’t actually do anything like no one makes a buying decision by looking at someone’s mug on a quad flute on a light pole no one makes a buying decision based on that yeah it’s a good memory reminder but that’s you know a whole other branding issue around memory reminders and why you have branding to start with so I’m not going to go into that but what I would be doing what a sir let me just go back a step with pliers most people at you know you mentioned the fringe in other festivals most people with flyers they’re just going around and everyone’s saying that they’re just handing out flyers to people in hopes that they’ll come to their show and there’s you know a little bit of a conversation that happens but not too much but people take the flour away and the users throw them out and that’s the concern that you’ve got right what with flyers what they’re trying to do is the same thing as politicians with the core foods they’re just trying to go from you know frozen or cold all the way there like boiling him you know they’re just trying to take a bit of ice and get it to 100 degrees Celsius second you try and sell someone on a bit of paper that’s a five like you have to be the best sales person in the world to be able to do that and you just don’t have the capacity through that modality or medium to do it so what I would be doing and the main concern people have is when you know you’re offering something to them is de-risk it it’s like I don’t know you I don’t like you I don’t trust you how can you do risk this buying decision for me so if I go to your show and it doesn’t pan out to be what you promised I’ve lost with this money and time and all these other opportunity costs so what I would be doing is flipping it on its head instead of giving something like a flyer to someone I would be getting something from them that I could follow up follow up with them so this is like the same thing with business cards right but I don’t carry around business cards because if I give a business card to someone it’s just going to go into the drawer into the bin and they’re just gonna totally forget about it if I take a business card from someone that means I am in control of the conversation I can follow up with that person so what I’m getting going at getting at is you to do the same thing is collect something from them cut their business card not literally collect their business card but collect their contact details in some way and I would be doing that as an incentive okay give me your contact details so I can follow up with you but in exchange for that what I’m gonna do is give you an mp3 player and some headphones with my music on it so you can go out and listen to me and you can do it in the comfort of your own home there is zero risk the other risk is you’ve given me your contact details and if you like it you will enjoy the you were welcome in the contact that I have inviting you to my show that’s gonna be a paid show or I would do the same thing is I would burn something to a CD give CDs out in exchange for contact details at these festivals same goes I know you’ve got a little bit of recorded video of the performances you do or maybe that’s an assumption but if you do a DVD or put that recorded video on a USB with you know in exchange for those contact days or so that kind of builds into the next thing is now you’ve got their contact details you’ve got their business card right and they’ve already taken zero risk and listen to your music and if you reach out to them and say I’ve got a show coming up we’d like to come along it’s paid so I’m twenty bucks the amount of conversion to get through that is far higher than anything that you’ve done with a flyer and already not you and they’re like probably like you and then it’s the buying decisions made much simpler for them what I would also be doing is looking at you so you mentioned a publicist I’m not sure if you’re doing that currently but anything to do with PR and publicity you really need to get a really strong hook or angle that makes you different and where I’m going with this is there’s a guy and I’m Rob Lee gonna give a whole bunch of examples in the hip hop rap kind of urban speakers I’m sort of into that as well as heavy metal but this guy may be slim Jesus was a kid I don’t remember how old he was about 12 years old but he was a white kid from Southern America and he call himself slim Jesus who’s doing like gangsta rap right so he’s angle and a blow up his song I remember his song was but it was just going everywhere was who’s this white kid young guy doing gangsta rap and he called himself slimming Jesus right so everything about that is unique and really interesting and meaning just jumped on it and really promoted him so I’m back just a memory on my iPhone but what I’ll be doing and I’m gonna get back to angle was just in a second but the other thing I would be doing would be turning competitors in to partners so there’s a lot of other people within festivals competing for the same attention the same sorts of people so I’ve gone back to that angle and seeing what you do as being seeing what you do that is unique or different and using that to differentiate yourselves yourself from others so yep there are other people doing you know similar musical acts then as you go how can you differentiate yourself rather than competing with other performers but turn them into partners to me that you compliment them or compliment you with and as soon as you are complimenting each other you’re not by definition competing and those partners sir those competitors them turn into partners especially promotional partners to help you get your message out to similar different cohorts like you just look at the need of theirs look at something like cooking right there people that are into cooking and they buy lots of different cooking books like I’m into books right you can see behind me like I don’t just have one book on one topic I have multiple books on multiple topics so just because someone is competing in the same sphere as you as long as you’ve got something different a different book that has different content different music it has different content people are going to go buy it they’re not actually in competition and your competition can see that you’re not directly doing the same thing as them or the same genre as then I’m providing something similar they’ll be more than happy to go out and promote for you the other thing is doing collaborations with different with different genres so we’re not even talking about competition to Ana competition to partners but different musical acts that are doing different genres and how can you actually go out and compliment each other they have access to a different certain cohort you have access to another cohort that’s quite different how can you combine what you both through into one thing and cross-promote each other that way so the example I’m thinking of is t-pain did a collaboration with tell us with like you know you’ve got that hip-hop with you know pot and they’ve got two different audiences they did a collaboration together and they opened each other’s music to different cohorts and helped promote each other in terms of that what else I would be giving away in my own music to anyone and everyone that needs music look at podcast like this right I have some intro music as mattre music I would be going to every different podcast or youtuber that has a very similar demographic of who you want to target and I’d just be giving my music away for free at the front and start or in the middle of their podcast to get your name out there same thing with tick tock if you’re not familiar with the app tick-tock this thing is blowing up and it’s super addictive it’s all music based so people are doing things to a back of backing of music so I just should be trying to get your music out there now in terms of other distribution firehoses in terms of meaning there are there are technologies out there that just already have cohorts people I would be just submitting all of my music to our YouTube SoundCloud BitTorrent who else Spotify has people I’d be submitting all of my music to those platforms I’m just getting everything out there the other thing with that is just stopping precious about how much you produce I’ve been British pretty true sorry producing so many different things that you can get out into the marketplace the thing is if no one sees sorry no one to see here’s it doesn’t really matter it’s only the big wings that matter if you are putting out a whole lot of music they example I’m trying to give here is people another urban and rap artist hey years put out he was prolific he’s put out so much stuff and a lot of the stuff wasn’t good but a lot of the stuff people didn’t hear but was only the stuff that was really good that got picked up by the mainstream and got promoted that way and he got quite a few picked up that way because it was just producing so much stuff but that quite a lot of the mainstream population don’t actually know all of the stuff that produce because not all of it was hits and just went under the radar and got kind of lost into obscurity the other thing just on this is with all this distribution firehoses those talking about like Spotify and YouTube and BitTorrent and SoundCloud is that they’re already artists out there that are producing on those platforms not sure if you really want to try this out but a guy named Soulja Boy you may have remembered him from maybe about 10 years ago so he what he used to do was um who would upload his music but with the names of other artists in his genre so he would just say whoever he knows a big ass at the time he would just you know rename his tracks the same tracks as them and then people were just going searching for those tracks and then they would come across this other track that was a soldier boy track another are this is not what I was listening for but some of them found it was a good thing others and probably the majority of them didn’t think it was a good thing and just like exited out and got all mad and so on but the ones that did like what listened to the ends and they’d be like oh this is cool and then at the very end you’d have you’d have information to go and find out more about you so even though I said a lot of people get annoyed with that Soulja Boy actually attributes a lot his initial success to that strategy so I’m not sure if you want to try that out but that’s another thing that might be um might be useful so I think that’s all I’ve got off the top of my head that you’d be worth you going out and at least considering if not trying to get your word out without having to rely on flyers not having to rely on a publicist although I did mention some of that and also not relying on Facebook but I did mention what I think you should be doing around those three things if you want to follow up with the Flyers publicists and/or Facebook but I gave you a whole bunch of other stuff that I think will help you a lot but the main thing is don’t try to sell people that don’t want to be sold take them through it my customer journey make sure they grab their contact details you can follow up because of what if your revenue will come from later purchases down the track so I’d love you to go try all of this stuff out love you too let me know how you go with it and I’m really excited to hear from you.