John Oszajca, Founder, Music Marketing Manifesto, has has a neat thing going. In an age where musicians are gasping for sales and clicks on the internet, he is gaining customers on four fronts: email management, potential promotion clients, potential production clients, and his own music. It's pretty slick, and I think that the model can be tweaked for just about any marketing effort--even perhaps a college master's degree program. Here's how he's doing it:
First, he creates lots of content. This is done in two main arenas: (1) He is securing SHORT blurbs on other people's blogs and newsletters by offering content that will appeal to their readers. In this case he is offering something that promises to help alleviate a great pain. I personally noticed him on some spam called the "Indie Contact Newsletter" that I probably picked up from my dealings with CD Baby (you can purchase my trio's CD on CD Baby under Hey Mavis). (2) He is doing his own blogging, tweets, and You Tube videos where he creates content that "name drops" or "concept drops" (my phrase) with the goal of snagging other people's fans or people searching for a particular "something".
The goal of this content is to drive people to a "squeeze page" that exists solely for collecting email addresses, which is the second piece of the puzzle. The squeeze page offers a free video--in exchange for your email address--that tells how he teamed up with a musician and achieved the top sales in a particular day on CDBaby with a very low budget, which is a potential solution to the pain.
Third, he offers more videos and links that drives his now intrigued and/or jealous target customers to several different products, only one of which is well-defined, which opens the door for future curiosities.
Finally, he places the target customer in a system that delivers well-timed emails with strategic content that will ensure that the customer will always remember his name, even long after they hit the "unsubscribe" button. Many will buy something from him.
In his case, the targets customers are (1) musicians who are struggling with marketing and (2) a large subset of these musicians who are actually fans masquerading as musicians ("wannabees").
The primary product that he is selling is an email management company called AWeber. There are direct links to this site just below the teaser video (which actually gives quite a bit of information). A second link is a more subtle: It is a squeeze page template for you to use at no charge! He gives instructions on how you can set this up. To make things easy, all emails that you will collect feed directly to AWeber (so now you have to sign up as a client)!
The second product that he is selling pertains to his services as a promoter. It is not clear if this ties in with being a producer (it probably does), which is his third product that he is selling. And the fourth product is his own music and performing.
It's quite ingenious stuff. I am already trying to figure out how to use some of the tricks that he outlined in his video to drive the "one in a million" students to the Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Program. On the Hey Mavis front, I will see if Tootsie Parker is interested in upping the web content that will snag the searchers for the Kent Stage, Folk Alley, Folk Alliance, and stars like Bob Dillion and Guy Clark.
With an ounce of creativity, this can be customized for our unique situations. Can't say that we'll use his squeeze page template, though. But I might contact the folks at AWeber and actually speak to someone to see what they can do for us--at a better price. (Most people don't do this!)
As a side note, the goal is not frivolous content, which is one of the things that I like about John's approach. I'm getting a little tired of videos of rock stars brushing their teeth or eating a cupcake and getting frosting on the camera. It's more targeted and should be more artistic and intellectual. Or it's not worth doing.
Cheers!
Ed Caner
Director, STEP, Case Western Reserve University
Fiddler/Violist, Hey Mavis
0 comments:
Post a Comment