Promoting Your BandPage Experiences: Part 5 – Word of Mouth

Hi Musicians,

We’ve covered a number of different ways for you to promote your BandPage Experiences over the past week – the main takeaway is that there are many different ways and mediums to promote on. Take a look at your own fan base and think about where your most engaged fans are concentrated, then focus your energy there. Today we’ll be covering in-person / word of mouth promotion and what you can do when you’re with your fans in real life.

Part 1: Facebook | Part 2: Twitter | Part 3: YouTube | Part 4: Mailing List

Promote your BandPage Experiences at your live shows or whenever you’re in front of your fans. It’s an opportunity to reach a group of passionate fans who will be your evangelists and help spread the word.

Example: “Hey guys! I’m so glad you came out tonight to see me – it really means a lot. If you’re hungry for more, I have some XXXX up on my BandPage Experiences store. There are only a few left so you should grab them while they’re still up! Tell all your friends!”

Now you have a sense of all the things you can do to promote your Experiences after you set them up. We recommend posting where you have the highest concentration of fans who are likely to buy your Experiences. This often times means posting on your social networks first, in order of ones with the most fan count. The main point to remember is to make a compelling offer and take the time to promote your BandPage Experiences once you set them up!

Well, that’s it for our BandPage Experiences blog series on promoting your offers! Stay tuned for a post soon about how to structure a great offer – we’ll cover pricing, quantity, descriptions, and all that good stuff.

Promoting Your BandPage Experiences: Part 4 – Mailing List

Hey Musicians,

In this post we’ll cover how to promote your BandPage Experiences to your Superfans through your mailing list. To recap, we’ve been publishing a series of posts on different channels you can promote your Experiences through, and showcasing examples of how other successful musicians have done it. We are now approving submissions to join our BandPage Experiences closed beta – just log into your BandPage editor, choose the artist you want to submit and navigate to the BandPage Experiences tab on the left hand navigation.

Part 1: Facebook | Part 2: Twitter | Part 3: YouTube | Part 5: Word of Mouth

Your mailing list houses your most passionate fans – these are fans who want to hear from you and interact with you. Email your mailing list to tell them that they now have a chance to engage more deeply with you through BandPage Experiences.

Best Practices:

• Keep it short: People’s attention spans are short. Keep your email text short and sweet, and more fans will read through the whole thing.
• Give clear action steps: Tell your readers what to do next. If you’re promoting your BandPage Experiences, then action steps like “Buy them before they run out!” or “Check them out now” will point fans towards your goal of getting them to look at your Experiences page and buying an Experience.
• Track your emails: Use trackable links like bit.ly or shortURL so you can track and measure the amount of traffic you are generating with your post, and optimize your message based on performance.

An example from Ryan from Sleeping at Last is below. He keeps his tone genuine and lighthearted throughout his whole email to his fans. He describes each experience in detail, and gives the context behind them.

After he sent this email to his mailing list, his Experiences sold out and he had to add more. The takeaway is that as a musician, you should know where your strongest group of fans are – and it will differ for each artist.  In general, if you have a mailing list then it should contain your strongest fans who want to hear from you and deepen their relationship with you.

Thanks for reading this installment about promoting to your mailing list! Be sure to tune in for our next and final installment, promoting your Experiences through word-of-mouth.

Promoting Your BandPage Experiences: Part 3 – YouTube

Hey Musicians,

Now that you know how to promote your BandPage Experiences on Facebook and Twitter, our third post in this series will cover how to promote your Experiences on YouTube, both on your channel page and on your individual videos.

Promoting on YouTube

YouTube recently announced the YouTube One Channel, a redesigned layout for your YouTube account. You can promote your BandPage Experiences URL on your YouTube banner so that fans visiting your YouTube (in addition to your individual videos) will click through to them. Below is a screenshot of how to edit the links that show up on your banner.

BandPage is also an official YouTube Merch Annotations partner, which means that you can link out to your BandPage Experiences directly from within your videos. Annotations show up to your fans right when they are immersed in your video, so it’s the perfect place to promote your Experiences. It’ll show up as a transparent box that hovers over your video, like in Jack Conte’s video below:

 

Best Practices:

• Keep your tone genuine and excited. This is an opportunity for you to reward your fans and give them a chance to get closer to you.
• Always have a call to action. Jack Conte’s annotation gives the viewer a clear action step by telling them to buy his experience if they want to learn how to play the Ableton like him.
• Show your fans what they’re getting. Whether in the video content itself like Jack did or in the annotation details, show your viewers what they’re getting. If it’s lessons, show off your skills. If it’s a meet and greet, show off your personality.

Resources

• Your account needs to be enabled for monetization, your channel must be verified, and you should be in good standing to use Merch Annotations. See these settings on your Channels account features page.
• Get started with Annotations
• Set up YouTube Merch Annotations
• Set up YouTube One Channel

For our other posts on how to promote your BandPage Experiences:

Part 1: Facebook | Part 2: Twitter | Part 4: Mailing List | Part 5: Word of Mouth

Music Monday: Alex Day and the Power of an Engaged Fan Base

The internet has been buzzing lately about Alex Day, the YouTube sensation who released his album at the same time as Justin Timberlake and outsold him on the iTunes UK charts with a fraction of the resources. How did he do it? Years of hard work to engage and cultivate his passionate fan base.

Day started posting videos on YouTube in 2006, and has kept a schedule of 1-2 videos a week since then – that’s some real dedication there. Now he boasts more than 600,000 subscribers, 100 million + views on YouTube, and over half a million songs sold. Now for the biggest revelation – he’s done it all independently, without a label.

James Altucher of TechCrunch wrote a great piece on Alex and it has some great lessons in there about how musicians should manage social media. The thing to remember about all of this is that it didn’t happen overnight. This was a product of almost a decade of hard work that finally paid off. So to our musicians who are reading this, there will be hard times in your career – but keep building up your foundation and content. Practice and get feedback from your friends and the larger music community. Continually engage your fans and reward them for supporting you. That’s the core idea driving BandPage experiences – we want to give musicians like you an opportunity to break down the glass wall between you and your fans, to reach out to them and engage them like never before.

And of course, here’s Alex Day’s new album for you to listen to and buy:

Alex Day – Epigrams and Interludes

And just for fun, Alex will explain “Lost” to you right now.

Note: BandPage is bringing back #MusicMondays for you! Every Monday we’ll post a little something on happenings in the music industry. Subscribe on the right and stay tuned for more!

Completing Your BandPage Profile: How to Do It and Why It Matters

Hey BandPagers,

With all the new tools BandPage is releasing for artists in the upcoming months, we want to make sure you know the importance of having a complete and up-to-date BandPage profile to make the most of these new opportunities. In this post we’ll give you step-by-step instructions for completing your profile so that your BandPage is optimized for fans to discover across the web.

Remember, your BandPage info is a first impression for potential fans that come across your profile online. Make sure you’re presenting yourself the way you want! We’ll use Maroon 5 in this blog post as an example of a band that makes a good impression on both new and existing fans.

We highly recommend that in addition to filling out all BandPage fields, you should have a minimum of:

• 1 paragraph bio
• profile picture
• genre
• 4 songs
• 15 photos
• 4 videos
• updated tour dates

Sign In Now to Update Your Profile

Tip of the week: “Gating” tracks on your BandPage Profile

At BandPage not only are we dedicated to helping you share your music, tour dates, photos and videos with your fans but we are also dedicated to helping you make new ones.  Which is exactly what our “gating” features are meant to do.  Gating simply refers to asking a fan to take an action in order to gain access to a certain piece of content.  This action could range anywhere from “liking” your page, joining your email list or even tweeting about your new video.  In exchange for this action, a fan is given exclusive access to exclusive content like a song, video or photo.  Gating features are a great way for you to increase your number of page “likes,” help spread the word about a new song or video or gain new email addresses for your email list.  We do, however recommend being strategic when it comes to utilizing gating features.  If you are a developing artists hoping to build a fan base asking someone to “like” your page or give you their email address in exchange for the ability to stream a song may be counter-productive.  Instead, consider letting potential fans listen to your music for free.  If they like what they hear and want to own the mp3, than asking them for a page “like” or an email address in exchange for a free mp3 isn’t such too much of a stretch.  If you are an artist who has an established fan-base than you have room to be a bit more liberal with your gating.  You know fans are going to be excited to check out a new song or video so leveraging that excitement to help spread the word is a no-brainer.  Fans will have no problem tweeting or liking your page to access the new content which only helps grow your social reach.  Gating is a powerful feature, so use it wisely and experiment to see what works best for you.

In case you’ve been out of the “gating” game for awhile or just new to it, below is a quick refresher on how to set up “Like to listen”, “Like to download”, “Tweet to download”, and “Join Mailing list to download”.  Enjoy!