June 10th, 2008
Hello Jazz Friends,
Welcome back to another jazz music marketing post. My apologies for not being consistent in my postings, but unfortunately life matters get the best of me and there just never seems to be enough hours in the day. However, here I am once again to leave food for thought.
Have you considered to really think about the type of work jazz musicians take part in. Just think of the countless number of recordings, interviews, books, videos, and educational material produced under the title of “Jazz”. From the early jazz masters to today’s wonderful musicians who have produced a number of the materials I’ve mentioned, it’s far too limiting to label ourselves as only jazz musicians.
All of these items represent the varying media in which the music can be presented. Thanks to the internet, there now exists a variety of mediums to present the music. Today, we have web pages, blogs, viral video, mp3s, social bookmarking, articles, and forum posts. All to spread the gospel to potentially thousands of patrons about this beautiful art form. What I’m suggesting here is that we not just look at ourselves as only jazz artists, but to view every documented medium as an information product and consider becoming jazz info-marketers.
As jazz info-markters the most lucrative, low risk, minimal cost product one can produce and sell are often labled as instructional or education based. The legacy of recordings our jazz masters have left for us to enjoy and learn from for years to come are perfect examples of this. Information is the new currency in the digital age. If you as an experienced jazz musician have a specific type of technique on a respective instrument to share, some music business expertise, or just a wellspring of jazz historical data, you are in the information business.
This pertinent information should be documented in some way utilizing the various forms of streaming media such as audio, video, or text.
Streaming technology is changing the face of virtually every marketing endeavor. Certainly it will affect the way jazz musicians conduct business online and offline. We all know in this industry that establishing solid relationships is key to expanded marketability. Establishing a web presence is extremely valuable, but providing compelling content is crucial to maintaining a consistent customer base.
One way of providing such content is the utilization of streaming media.
Streaming media has several benefits for musicians:
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Archive any live or past performances
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Establish yourself on a global level as an educator by giving online instruction.
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Communicate with other artists as well as industry associates.
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Conduct interviews
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Podcasting
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Create live broadcasts covering a wide range of jazz related topics.
These are just a few ideas that streaming media can offer.
So from now on when performing, teaching a lesson, conducting a masterclass, or discussing jazz with a fellow musician over the phone, take the time to document these wonderful nuggets of information either on a digital recording device, video camera, or a journal of some sort for later transcription for a word document or PDF file.
The great thing about producing information products is that you can repackage, rebundle, or repurpose them for any type of content needed for your online and offline marketing efforts.
I will further discuss this in another post.
Peace & Keep Swinging!
Andre Hayward
Posted in Product Creation | No Comments »
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 »
