Pull Marketing Blog

5 Lessons You Can Learn from Musicians About Generating Buzz for Your Business

I'm Sam Coren, the latest addition to the PullnotPush team. Being an active member of the Boston music scene has given me a first hand look at just how powerful the principals of inbound marketing can be for the little guy. One thing I like to emphasize to our clients is how important it is to let go of all their old school notions about marketing and interact with their target audience. For the modern musician connecting with their fan base on a regular basis is a vital part of achieving success and getting their music heard. The same is true for any business. 

You’ve heard it before:  the traditional music industry as we used to know it is a festering corpse surrounded by vultures. People just don’t discover music the way they did in the old days.  For years the internet has been hailed as the great leveler of the playing field between the recording industry titans and struggling independent musicians. So what can you learn about Cinderella stories about bands like James Yuill, OK Go, and Passion Pit? You can learn how to get creative and generate buzz about your business for next to nothing – that’s what!

1.  Constant content generation:  blog like you’ve never blogged before.

Back before every musician had a web presence we had to rely on music journalists to report their upcoming activities. Sometimes you’d go for years between albums waiting for news on your favorite band. Your entire impression of someone’s body of work relied on someone else’s opinion and if they even cared enough to report on it in the first place. 

These days a regularly updated blog can do wonders for giving the entire world an idea of who you are and what you do. Even better? You get to do it in your own words! Musicians like James Yuill keep updating their fans with what they’re working on a frequent basis. He even likes to get his readers involved in his work through unique ways such as requesting sound samples for him to use to create new tracks.  By encouraging his readers to interact with him and contribute to his projects, Mr. Yuill is doing an ace job of creating remarkable content and getting more people to be excited about his music. 

Getting into the habit of keeping people updated on what you’ve got going is great not only for your business’s identity, but also your SEO. You're simply creating more and more pages with the opportunity for you to get found.

 

2. A picture is worth a 1,000 Words…  or at least a half a dozen tags on Flickr and YouTube

So you have a blog going and you're slaving away in Wordpress or your Hubspot portal typing hundreds of words and you begin to notice something. Your entire page is a wall of text.  Not very eye catching is it? Incorporating photos and video into your regular content generation mix makes your site easier on the eyes and increases your potential to get found.

Making sure your images have file names recognizable to image search queries is also essential. Say you want to find a picture of Lady Gaga using Google image search.  A Lady Gaga image with a file name DCS89473249823324324.jpg is probably not going to rank as highly in the search results as a picture titled lady-gaga-at-the-grammys.jpg.

Creating videos is not only a great way to flex your creative muscle, but a great way to generate lucrative buzz if you end up with a runaway viral success. Think cost is a factor?

Digital videos can be made and edited fairly cheaply thanks to lower hardware and software costs.  OK Go’s video for “Here it Goes Again” was shot for next to nothing. 50 million plus views later, a GRAMMY award, and a record label deal thanks to bloggers and music fans all over the world sharing the video proves that you don’t need a ton of money to make a good video - just a good idea. 

Don’t forget to properly tag and fill out descriptions for all your media items uploaded to sites like Flickr and YouTube. Music fans rely on proper tagging to successfully find photos and videos of their favorite artists or genres of music. The same goes for any business willing to share their unique content on these sites. Be sure to read over their terms of service on different sites about hosting videos or photos for commercial uses.

3.  Give (some) of your work away for free

Sure some people might tell you you're crazy for just giving away your hard work for free, but what better way to give a potential customer a taste of what you're capable of than with a sample? Before releasing the Here Lies Love album with Fatboy Slim, David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, offered a free track for download on his website.  The catch? You had to just offer up your e-mail address to get the download link.

Because so much buzz was generated before offering the free track on David Byrne’s own blog (and the help of other music bloggers) he was able to gather the contact info for thousands of people interested in his music. What valuable offerings can you give out for free that people would be willing to share their contact information with you for?

4.  Become a master of the Twittersphere

Who thought that millions of people posting 140 character updates could be a major means of communication? A lot of businesses still question the value of investing time in tweeting. Maintaining an active Twitter presence is free, quick, and easy. Musicians will use it as a way to get feedback, quickly get news out, or find creative ways to promote themselves. 

One problem with Twitter is that many still view it as a one-way broadcasting tool.  If your tweet history contains nothing but links to your own pages you’re missing out and turning people off. Boston's rising super group Passion Pit (@passionpit) frequently ask their followers at different tour stops where to grab the best grub on the road. By asking your followers questions and establishing a dialogue you can entice them to communicate directly with you and show that you value what they have to say.

  

 5.  Fan Club? Meet Fan Page

Fan clubs have existed long before the days of the internet but they have always been an excellent lead nurturing tool and customer retention in the music marketing world. Now with Facebook pages, organizing an online fan base can be done quickly and, best of all, for free. 

When Dr. Dog was getting ready to release their new album Shame, Shame their label, Anti-, decided to beef up their Facebook presence by creating a simple benchmark:  once Dr. Dog reached 20,000 fans on they would give their Facebook fans access to the first single before anyone else. Similar "reward" benchmarks have been used by bands to quickly gain twitter followers.

So now you have accumulated a large number of connections - what are you going to do? You have to keep up the content, that's what! Since launching the Dr. Dog Facebook page became regularly updated with the band's latest TV appearances, interviews, and tour dates.

Need some conversions to go with those leads? The great thing about Facebook pages is that you have a wealth of information about your fans and you can tailor specific messages to different groups. Say Dr. Dog was going to play a secret show in their hometown of Philadelphia - they could target all their fans in the Philadelphia area with an invite to the show. Sounds like a pretty powerful offering to a group of qualified leads, right?

So this weekend turn on the tunes and get creative. What are some ways you can create buzz about your company and what it has to offer? A silly video? A retweet contest? A Facebook page benchmark? If your company has already used some of these tactics successfully we'd love to hear about it.