This is the fifth post in this series, covering promotion. Previous posts have covered developing your overall goals, figuring out what your product(s) could be, determining how to price those product(s), and deciding where to place yourself and the product(s) you’re selling.

Promotion is often the most prominent of the 4P’s, as much of the “What should we sell?” and “How much should we sell it for?” takes place behind the scenes. However, the basis of promoting your products in the places you’ve chosen are founded in the decisions you made earlier in this series, so they’re no less important to you.

Here’s where our first ideas really come in handy, “the big picture”.

1. What is my ultimate goal?
2. What do I want to achieve on the way to my ultimate goal?
3. Why am I in the music business; what’s my motivation?
4. If I’m going to make money off of this venture, what are the ways I see myself doing so?
5. How in the hell am I going to measure success?

Big Idea(s) –> Strategy –> Tactics –> Execution

Your product, price, and place(s) must all tie in with the answers to theses questions.  The promotion questions really start to guide your execution. It all fits together.

How Should I Promote Myself?

In place, we covered these three questions:

1. Where does your audience exist?
2. Where does your audience go for information?
3. How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?

Your answers are a great start for your promotions strategy.  You know what you want to sell, whether it’s  your music, your schwag, your services, your shows, or even your brand (guest appearances, anyone?).  You know where your audience exists, which gives you a clear path for how to reach them.  Promotion follows logically from there.

1. What is my ultimate goal?
2. What do I want to achieve on the way to my ultimate goal?
3. Why am I in the music business; what’s my motivation?
4. If I’m going to make money off of this venture, what are the ways I see myself doing so?
5. How in the hell am I going to measure success?

These are all questions that your promotion strategy can help you answer, though I’m sad to say that there’s no “magic formula” I can give you to help you determine the “right” answers to these questions.  Some of it is gut instinct, some of it is personal preference, and a lot of it is making sure that your promotions are intimately tied with the product you’re selling, the price you’re selling it at and the place that sells it.

Promotion… What?

Consider this…

If you run a promotional campaign for your new record, where will this campaign run? Will you print posters to put in your local record shop, or buy banner ads online? If you buy banner ads, what sites will you buy them on? Should you have a Facebook Fan Page to help promote the album? Should you create a Facebook Event to allow your fans to register for, and share your even with their friends? How does Twitter fit into everything? What about your blog? Should you even have a blog?

OK, breathe…

Start with these questions:

1. In the places where I’m selling my products, how do people communicate?
2. Are there opportunities to get in front of my fans virtually? If so, where and how?
3. What has “worked” for people similar to me in the past? Even better, what “hasn’t worked”?

Now, here’s where more than a few common mistakes are made.  For example, as a counterpart to Pistachio’s “Musician’s Guide to Rocking Twitter“, I created “A Guide to Completely Failing at Twitter (As A Musician)“.  We’ll get to more later, but as you move through your answers, you may want to power up Google or Twitter Search and type in a few of the keywords in your answers.

As for our hip hop band, their answers are below.

Q: In the places where I’m selling my products, how do people communicate?

A: My local record store is a really tight-knit community.  In-store performances and discounts to shows work well.  My fans are also on message boards talking to each other, on Twitter and on our website.

Q: Are there opportunities to get in front of my fans virtually? If so, where and how?

A: Yes, on Twitter, our website and major hip hop message boards.  We notice that most people go to Facebook more than MySpace now, but our fans aren’t really into either.

Q: What has “worked” for people similar to me in the past? Even better, what “hasn’t worked”?

A: MF Doom and Burial have built quite the name for themselves being slightly mysterious, and both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have made quite a bit of money offering their music up for what their fans feel like paying.  More recently, Imogen Heap created great buzz before her album launch by involving her fans in the process of making the album.

Here are a few resources, giving you some ideas of how to plan and execute your promotions.

• Integrated Marketing Communications Plan (it sounds complicated, but click anyway as it’s good info to know)
• Guerilla Music Marketing Suggestions
• Creating a Music Marketing Plan (bit old, but there’s good info in here)
• 1,000 True Fans (saved the best for last!)

So far we’ve covered defining your goals, determining your product(s) and researching how you should price your product(s).

This post is all about place.

Some places may be obvious, and some not so obvious. It’s up to you to determine where the best place for your products may be, whether that be existing for free online, or in a store on a shelf.

When you determined what you could sell, you answered the following questions:

What do I pay money for now, music-wise?

What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?

How can I add value to my fan’s lives?

What makes me different?

How can I make money off of what makes me different?

Then, you took those answers and dug a bit deeper by asking these questions:

What do these products or services cost me to produce?

What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?

Now, your challenge is to take those answers and again, do something more with them.

How?

Since you did a bit of research when figuring out how much items typically cost, go back and figure out where you went to look for that information.

I’ll again use the example of our live hip hop band.

They first went to MySpace to look at the profiles of bands in their local area, as well as similar types of bands across the nation. From there, they went to iTunes and to see how much they were selling their songs for, and they also visited their websites to see what they put up on their sites content-wise, and how (and what) they were selling on their sites.

They ended up with a lot of information.

It seems like most of their counterparts don’t sell merchandise on their websites, but they do use their sites to direct people to their new songs (and places they can buy them), as well as their shows and other in-person appearances.

That was an interesting find, as place is both about where to place your products, as well as where to place yourself.

This brings me to the questions for this post:

1. Where does your audience exist?
2. Where does your audience go for information?
3. How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?

For our hip hop band, they found that:

Q: Where does your audience exist?

A: Our audience exists on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and on our website.  We get quite a few hits to our site, especially to our “upcoming gigs” section, and our new songs that we post on MySpace have a lot of people listening to them when they’re new, and then we start seeing Tweets and Facebook Status Updates about them.

Q: Where does your audience go for information?

A: Our audience seems to go to our MySpace page and our website for information about us, though we know that at lot of our fans also post on popular hip hop message boards and also use Twitter to keep up with news and information.

Q: How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?

A: Our fans are a fan of MySpace, message boards and Twitter, in that order.  We also get quite a few emails and notice a lot of our fans arranging pre-show meetups whenever we go on tour.

Photo provided under a Creative Commons License by slworking2

Where Do I Go?

First, you have to understand where your audience exists.

You can have a great product and a reasonable price point with a lot of people willing to buy, but if you’re not going and selling to them where they’re looking, you’ll never make a sale.

From the answers above our hip hop band should certainly keep up their presence on MySpace and Twitter. It doesn’t seem that Facebook is a huge place for them to be at the moment, but perhaps if they developed their Fan Page they may see more activity.  Their website seems to be quite popular, especially the section about their upcoming shows.

Also, if they don’t participate in the hip hop message boards already, they probably should, since they said that their fans go there for information.

Now, so far all of this is online.

I’m assuming that if they make a CD, they’re going to contact their local record shops (or have the company doing their P&D do it for them) to talk about selling their CD in stores. If they don’t, they should.

As I said above, place is both about where you place your products, as well as where you place yourself.

Make sure to go where your audience exists and pay attention to trends, it’s hard, but see if you can try to go where they’ll also be going tomorrow, not just today (or yesterday).

The first two posts in this series outlined how to define your overall goals as well as determining what your product will be.

This post covers how to price your product.

To review:

Product – What are you going to sell?
Price – How much are you going to sell it for?
Place – Where are you going to sell it?
Promotion – How are you going to get the word out?

History

Price has changed drastically over the last 10 years for the music industry.  Records used to sell millions of copies at $15 (or more) a pop, and 360° record deals were far less popular.

Musicians didn’t have as much power before as they do today.  The dream of being signed to a big label and making millions was most often the quickest (and hardest) way to riches.  Artists “doing their own thing” were few and far between, and for the most part, musicians were at the mercy of “big business” to make their fortunes (if that was their goal).

The world has changed.

Today, musicians have more power than ever.  Companies now exist to let artists do much of the work they used to hire people to do themselves… if they choose that path.  On top of the resources available, our lives as consumers have fragmented. Our attention spans have shortened and we expect the companies we do business with, including our favorite artists, to slice and dice their content and make it available where we want it, when we want it.

How Does This Affect My Prices?

Photo provided under a Creative Commons license by marie-ll

I’m going to go ahead and say that every business struggles with how to price their products.

A number of factors going into determining your price, and these factors can fluctuate, sometimes making pricing feel like trying to kill a pesky mosquito -  chasing the annoying thing around the room, numerous close calls and escapes, and a rush of satisfaction when you finally nail it.

On top of outside influences from the market, there are many different pricing strategies to choose from, each with their own pros and cons.

What Is My Price?

I’ll stop sounding like a textbook, and instead give you two good questions to ask yourself when trying to decide “how much will I sell my products for?”:

1. What do these products or services cost me to produce?
2. What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?

A good place to start determining your price(s) is to take your answers from the “What is My Product” post and separate your answers into categories.  I’ve taken the answers from our live hip hop band and done exactly that below:

Q: What do I pay money for now, music-wise?

A: Music, t-shirts/schwag, concert to tickets, limited/deluxe edition CD’s.

Q: What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?

A: Recording session, face-to-face interviews, concert tickets

Q: How can I add value to my fan’s lives?

A: Music lessons, recording sessions, meet-and-greets, online connections, charity events

Q: What makes me different?

A: Female band, themed shows

Q: Out of the answers above, which ones can I make money from?

A: My music, concert tickets, t-shirts/schwag, Limited Edition/Deluxe CD’s, auction off signed merch.

As you can see, a few patterns emerge.  Our hip hop band sees their major revenue streams coming from:

• Selling their music
• Putting out Limited Edition/Deluxe CD’s
• Performing concerts
• Selling merch
• Selling their time and teaching lessons
• Selling their time and helping artists record

Now it’s time to apply those two questions above:

1. What do these products or services cost me to produce?
2. What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?

We asked these questions for merch as an example.

Q: What do these products or services cost me to produce?

A: For merch, we want to sell t-shirts, baseball caps and stickers.  We’ll hire a designer to design each item, then send the designs off to the printing shop for creation. They’ll then be shipped to the final destination, which will vary per show.

We’ll have to pay the following costs: design costs, print costs, shipping costs and possibly storage costs.

Q: What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?

A: T-shirts typically retail for anywhere between $15-30.  Baseball caps sell for $30-40.  The stickers will come in different sizes, and be sold for anywhere between $5-7.50.

Now comes the math. You need to figure out what your total costs will be, and compare them to what the current prices are for similar items.

Before coming to your final number, or thinking this is all hopeless because your costs are larger than what people tend to buy the products for, consider a few points:

Quantity is a factor – Make sure to talk to the company doing your production work about price breaks for ordering higher quantities. Sometimes this is applicable (like with the stickers), and sometimes it’s not. Make sure to ask in any case, especially if this is new to you.

Demand is a factor – If there is a lot of demand for your items, either because everyone wants to have one and they’re willing to buy one, or everyone wants to have one and the item is scarce, you may be able to charge above the market price for that item – leaving more money in your pocket than normal.  Keep an accurate log of how much your items are selling and how quickly and you’ll be able to more easily spot these trends.

Notes

I’m by no means a pricing expert, and within the music industry (well, the record industry actually), pricing is especially hard as the cost of the item and the amount people are willing to pay (these days, sometimes $0) may be drastically different.

It never hurts to ask around. What are similar artists doing? How are they pricing their products? Do you see things they’re doing right or wrong (in your opinion)?? Learn from the people around you and don’t be afraid to ask questions!

Here are some resources, some academic, and some just information that may be good to know when you’re reading this series:

• New Hope for Monthly Music Subscriptions
• The Global Decline of P2P
• USB Uzi’s – The “New Hot Thing”??
• Artist-Specific Social Networks

Have something to say? A story to share about how you figured out how to price your work or time? Leave them in the comments!

Next up… “Place – It’s More Than MySpace”

Following up on the introductory post to this series, you should be armed with answers to the following questions.

What is my ultimate goal?

What do I want to achieve on the way to my ultimate goal?

Why am I in the music business; what’s my motivation?

If I’m going to make money off of this venture, what are the ways I see myself doing so?

How in the hell am I going to measure success?

These answers are important to know before reading the rest of the series, as each post incorporates answers from one or more questions.

Your product forms the foundation for the other 3 P’s (Price, Place and Promotion).  In order:

• Product – What are you going to sell?
• Price – How much are you going to sell it for?
• Place – Where are you going to sell it?
• Promotion – How are you going to get the word out?

To make this simple, I’m going to use the example of a band throughout this post series.

My fictional band is based in NY, plays live hip hop and has 4 female members.

Product

Before committing your life, or at least a significant portion of your life, to making a living from making music, every musician should sit down and consider what their product(s) will be.

If you haven’t woken up and smelled the french-pressed coffee yet, the days of making a few mediocre songs, getting picked up by a label, produced six ways from Sunday and making millions are gone.  Musicians now have the ability to be their label, be their manager, be their tour promoter, and be their own music marketing machine.  But, as they say, with power, comes responsibility.

These questions should help:

1. What do I pay money for now, music-wise?
2. What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?
3. How can I add value to my fan’s lives?
4. What makes me different?
5. How can I make money off of what makes me different?

If you need help brainstorming, check out this list of 29 streams of revenue for musicians.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anthonysalvi/    CC:BY-NC-ND 2.0

Examples

Our pretend hip hop band answered these questions, and their answers are listed below:

Q: What do I pay money for now, music-wise?

A: I buy tracks I like online from iTunes or Beatport, but rarely buy a full album.  I also buy t-shirts, limited edition records and concert tickets.

Q: What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?

A: Since we’re musicians, we’d love to buy a recording session or face-to-face interview with one of my favorite musicians in the band to see how they made it big, and learn how to improve how I play.  I’d also love to buy better concert tickets since I’m such a loyal fan. I’d really love to sit in the front row!

Q: How can I add value to my fan’s lives?

A: I can share my talents with my fans through music lessons and recording sessions. Or, I can work with aspiring solo hip hop artists on their lyrics.  I can spend time with them backstage at gigs, and I can connect with them online.  We’ve all been touched by cancer, so we can also link up with the American Cancer Society to put on a fundraiser concert. We can certainly involve our fans that have also been touched by cancer to volunteer.

Q: What makes me different?

A: We’re an all-female live hip hop band, which makes us very different.  You don’t see many all-female bands, or many live hip hop bands.  Also, we theme each show – our last one was Kriss Krossed, for example.

Q: Out of the answers above, which ones can I make money from?

A: I can immediately make sure our music is available on iTunes and Beatport (perhaps by using Tunecore), and I can also connect with fans online (using ArtistData to manage everything) and invite them to one of our themed concerts.

Once our popularity grows, we can release limited edition CD’s of our music. We’ll put out three versions – one, just a CD with a basic jacket, and another that is a CD/DVD package featuring lots of extras, uncut versions, takes from recording sessions and backstage videos.  The highest level will also come with a signed baseball cap in addition to the CD/DVD package.

We can also start a contest when we get this popular. Half of the proceeds will go to benefit a cancer charity of our choice since it’s a cause close to our hearts.  The contest will be like an auction, allowing fans to bid on signed merchandise, as well as the top prize of recording with us to create their own song.

Ok, Now What?

Now it’s your turn.  Open up a document on your computer, put up paper on the wall and grab some markers, or get out some old fashioned pen and paper and start writing.  It’s important to brainstorm right now. Even if you can’t use an answer immediately, keep them all to see if any become relevant as time progresses.

Once you’re done answering the questions you should have a lot of ideas.  Don’t worry about how much you’ll sell these things for, or even if they can be sold.  The ideas are what we want at this point.

Are there any other questions you would ask at this point in the game? Leave them in the comments if so!

The next post “How Much Is This Worth?” goes into detail about ” can it be sold” and “if so, for how much?”.  Stay tuned…

I’ve always been fascinated by how, despite massive changes in technology and culture, some very basic business principles stay the same.   Any marketing student learns about the “4 P’s of Marketing”.  Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

These 4 P’s guide businesses large and small in developing their marketing strategy and defining their marketing mix.

This all may seem a bit boring (or irrelevant) to you as a musician, but these P’s are equally as useful to you as they are to a Fortune 100 business when planning and executing your marketing strategy.

For example, these 4 P’s can help you answer questions you ask yourself along all points of your career, including:

• Am I going to sell my music or give it away?
• If I give it away, how will I make money?
• Where are my fans?
• What is the best way to connect with my fans?
• How can I get more people to listen to my music/attend my concerts/buy my stuff?
• How can I keep track of it all?
• Where should I spend my time promoting myself?
• Should I hire someone to manage part of my workload, or is it better to do it myself?

With a plethora of choices about what you can, and should sell – how much (or little) you should sell it for, and where you should engage with fans and place your messages, it’s important for any musician to dedicate time and figure out exactly what their goals are and how they’re going to go about achieving those goals.

There are quite a few lists about high-level questions to ask when you’re developing a marketing strategy, but I have yet to come across one that’s applicable for a musician.

Here are my top 5 questions that I suggest asking yourself (and your band) before you start formulating your marketing strategy:

1. What is my ultimate goal?
2. What do I want to achieve on the way to my ultimate goal?
3. Why am I in the music business; what’s my motivation?
4. If I’m going to make money off of this venture, what are the ways I see myself doing so?
5. How in the hell am I going to measure success?

Remember not to limit yourself. These questions should help you brainstorm so the sky is the limit.  Worry about the plan later, as further scrutiny has a funny way of narrowing down your options while opening up new ones.

There aren’t any “right” or “wrong” answers to these questions. They’re personal, they’re hard, and they require work to answer.

Have questions to add to this list? Please comment and add your own!

This post is the first post in a series about how to develop a marketing strategy… next up, “What Is My Product?”

I’ll admit this upfront – this post is selfish.  I cannot count the number of times I’ve logged into Facebook and had an event invitation in my inbox for an event I couldn’t possibly attend.

You know what I mean. You log into Facebook and WHAMMO!, you have an invitation to an event that you’ll never attend because it’s 15 states away and a 2,000 mile drive. Or, even more outrageous, it’s across an ocean and a 5+ hour plane ride away.

What’s the culprit?

Lack.

Of.

Thought.

Why do I care? As a fan, I want to believe that you care about me. Read the first sentence again – “this post is selfish.”

As a band, a DJ or a solo musician, you play gigs. As a fan, I really like that! I love to come see you play and I’m usually really happy when you come play in my area.

But as a socially networked busy human being, I’m not a fan of logging into my Facebook account to see event invitation after event invitation for gigs far far away that I’ll never be able to attend.

Here’s a step-by-step guide you can use to help lessen my frustration, make me feel like you care about me, and still make sure I show up to your gigs:

1. When inviting guests/fans to an event, use the drop-down box in the upper left-hand corner of the event invitation to select networks, friends lists or groups of people to invite
2. Invite people from the surrounding areas to your gigs

It’s really that simple.

As an alternative, you can also create Friend Lists.  This would be useful if you have a group of people who you know are die-hard fans and always travel to your gigs. Instead of going through and selecting them one by one, you can put them on a Friends List and select that one list to invite to all of your gigs.

How to create a Friend List:

1. Click on your “Friend” tab
2. Click “Create New List” from the upper left-hand corner
3. Name your list and put your friends on it

What’s the result?

For the fan – they’re invited to gigs that are relevant to their life. They feel like you take care when inviting them via Facebook to your gigs, which (for me, at least) makes me feel like you care.

For the musician – you have a smaller invite list, but a more accurate count of people who are coming. This should give you a more accurate count of people who are actually going to the event, instead of lots of “Not Attending” and “Maybe Attending”  responses cluttering the event invitation.

Social media isn’t about shouting your message to everyone within your reach and hoping that a few pick up on it. It’s about talking to people that are relevant and giving them a voice.  Event spamming me by inviting me to events I’ll clearly never attend is the equivalent of shouting, and it doesn’t equal a happy fan in the end.

“As a fan, I want to believe that you care about me.”  Show me you care and think when you invite people to your gigs, please!

Social media is a lot of work. Anyone in the industry will tell you the same thing, and there are a number of posts by people far more eloquent than I about this very subject. Check here, here and here for starters. Notice the constant mentions of “time”, “time consuming” and “measuring”.

For me, there is the full-time job, the 50ish blogs I subscribe to, Twitter, my personal blog, this blog and various new media and music events around the New York City area.

For being so “easy”, keeping up with social media is really hard work.

My Activity

I’m active on Twitter daily, and I set aside a few nights a week to read (and usually draft, though more on that later) blog posts as well as catch up on everything I’ve missed throughout the week.

I also end up checking Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn more frequently than once a week; though it is a priority to check them all once a week at the same time to make sure I haven’t missed anything.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is my blogging activities.  I’m the type to think on the go quite frequently, which is why I enjoy living in a city like New York so much.  It’s not uncommon for me to use the WordPress application on my iPhone to jot a few quick notes while on the go, saving these thoughts for later when I have more time to flesh them out into a full post.

I’ve found it important to map out which networks and social sites I want to maintain a presence on, as well as how I plan on being active on those networks.

The same questions can be used to plan your own activities in social media.

Planning My Activity

Here’s how I started:

Presence

• Where (what networks and sites) do I currently participate?
• Where do my contemporaries or audiences participate?
• Do these sites make sense for me?

Planning

• How active do I want to be in social media?
• What sites tie into my objectives (for me, this is personal, for you it’s probably business)?
• How can I manage this activity without losing my mind?

Many social media professionals have shared their own strategies and tips and a few are linked here for your enjoyment.

How do you handle your social media activity?