March 29th, 2008
Hello Jazz Friends,
Here we are once again with some more market research tips. In the last few posts, I showed you some ideas and resources to do market research offline. Today we’re going to focus on marketing research as far as the Internet is concerned. Just as its important to an offline, brick and mortar business to have a prime location to gain traffic to it, your online presence should be about the same.
If you ask any business person the one key element of attracting visitors to a business whether online or offline, the common response will be “Location, Location, Location”. As jazz musicians we should be concerned with branding, having a clear marketing message, fulfilling the needs of our fans, and making sure the major search engine spiders are crawling your site when marketing online. The way to achieve this is through carefully planned keyword research.
As I have mentioned before, your online marketing efforts as jazz artists should be about problem solving for your fans. If you keep this in mind it will greatly increase your chances of success on the Internet. It’s one thing to have a great business idea, but brilliant as that idea may seem you want to be sure there is enough consumer demand for it.
Something else to consider is supply or competition. It would be a waste of your marketing dollars designing an expensive website, buying traffic for keywords in a paid search environment, or any other methods of paid traffic if your keywords are too broad and highly saturated in the online marketplace.
As it remains, the top major search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are hundreds of other search engines but the remaining ones are partnered with either of the three. You want to be sure your site is seen by these search engines and strive for top placement.
Us jazz marketers want to be sure that our websites, online articles, pay per click ads, social bookmarking tags, classified ads, forum posts & signatures, etc. are keyword rich.
It all boils down to finding those niche keywords and phrases that are related to your specific business model.
Here’s a resource that will further explain the concept. Feel free to save this somewhere on your hard drive.
Good Luck & Keep Swinging!
Andre Hayward
Posted in Niche Marketing | No Comments »
January 16th, 2008
Hello Jazz Friends,
Welcome back once again to another jazz music marketing post. Before we delve into the subject of marketing research, I feel that it’s important to really define what the term marketing really means.
Some common mistakes being made in defining this term is to equate it with advertising or selling. Advertising is merely a segment of marketing although an important component. Marketing is also in no way related to being a great salesperson. We’ll elaborate on the topic of sales in later posts.
In it’s most simple definition, marketing is satisfying or fulfilling a customer need. It’s important for jazz musicians to view fans as mutual partners. A broader definition of marketing is to establish, maintain and enhance relationships with fans or customers, for profit, so that the wants, needs, and desires of all parties involved are met.
The process in which the mutual relationship between jazz performer and audience is achieved successfully is through market orientation. Once you begin to understand where your existing and future fan base congregates, the better you can maximize and leverage your music marketing efforts.
Here are some ways to truly segment a jazz music audience:
Demographics – age, gender, income, ethnicity, marital status, education, occupation, household size, length of residence, social status
Geographic – city, state, zip code, county, region, location
Psychographic – attitudes, lifestyle, hobbies, personality traits, leadership traits, magazines read, TV programs
Behavioral – brand loyalty, usage level, benefits sought
Geo-Demographic – analysis of individuals by location. Combines geographic information with both demographics and even lifestyle information.
With that in mind here are some free tools that can be utilized for jazz market research.
Trade Publications:
For this type of research, simply go and visit the magazine rack of any bookstore and locate any jazz music or music industry magazines possible. These magazines can also be found at the public library. Also inquire about non mainstream publications with a reference librarian.
Although this is obviously not a music related site, it is very powerful because you can obtain some very detailed information pertaining to market segmentation by typing in a particular zip code using the neighborhood and schools tab.
The neat thing about this tool is that every piece of niche information by zip code is charted graphically. Be sure to bookmark this site. It’s going to helpful in the future for creating direct mail campaigns and scouting additional performance opportunities.
The majority of market segment information can be obtained from government websites. A powerful resource is the US Census Bureau. Again, everything from population, demographics, social, and income status is right here.
This is definitely another website that should be bookmarked without question.
All this talk of market research, segmentation, niche targeting may seem a little boring and trivial, but as jazz musicians today, we cannot afford to observe our audiences solely from the bandstand. Doing these initial pieces of homework will not only provide you with more comprehensive knowledge of your target audience, it will serve as way to build more loyal, dedicated fans and keep those bank accounts full.
Blessings and continue to research.
Keep Swinging!
Andre Hayward
Posted in Niche Marketing, Offline Marketing | No Comments »