It's Not About You - It's About Them | Digital Product Launch Pt. 3

So - we’ve got an album that no-one knows exists, we have no access to or influence with industry gatekeepers, we have no budget to significantly impact awareness and our plan for circumventing the music business failed because it required too much work from people we had no relationship with.

Nice problem huh!?

Re-Focus On The Market

So we stopped thinking like a record label, like a business, and for the first time started to think as altruistically as possible from the perspective of the people who are actually grieving.  What is it they need, and how can we help them get it?

I’m oversimplifying here but, the thing that most helps people dealing with grief is connection.

They may not know it and the way they connect may be unique and different from yours, but the underlying behavior that helps to alleviate grief is some type of connection with other human beings who have experienced something similar.

The True Problem

There’s too much information.

Whether you’re looking for music, for political news, for the right trainer or lawyer or insurance agent, or even help with your grief - there’s just way too many options out there.  Google does a pretty good job and social connections help, but finding what you need is becoming harder not easier.

Curation - A Global Trend

The fully digitized music world has already made the transition to playlists - curated indexes created by taste-makers.  As local businesses we strive to be reviewed and featured in Yelp, Foursquare, and Google - again, nothing more than indexes “curated” by customer feedback.

These things exist because they work, because they create value for the end user by saving them time.

So how do we serve people who are looking for help with grief?

Next Week: The Grief Directory

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Unsplash

Gatekeepers - They’re Everywhere | Digital Product Launch Pt. 2

In the digital world, gatekeepers hold the key to your content being shared with large targeted audiences.   If you think they’re going to break their habitual inertia just because you ask them to - you’re as deluded as we were.

With a pitiful response to our initial outreach to leading grief organizations, we recognized the need to sweeten the deal.  If they were going to do something for us - we needed to reciprocate.

Plan B

What if we created an entry about their organization on our site?  They’d have increased visibility, they’d have new content to share on social platforms and of course they’d have a link back - hell - everyone wins!

We came up with a set of simple questions for the organizations to answer, amended the outreach letter and sat back and waited for the responses to roll in.

Beware Early Outliers

We had a beautiful early response and suddenly everything looked like it was going to work, but with an overall response rate of less than 5% it became apparent that plan B was also going to strike out.

On reflection we should have seen the obvious flaw.  If it was too much for people to share a simple link, it was even more unlikely that they would sit down and take the time to answer questions and source images for a record label that they’d never heard of.

Running Out Of Time

If you’ve read my piece on Helmuth von Moltke the Elder you’ll know that this is pretty much par for the course, the thing is for small businesses, there isn’t a lot of runway to get it right.

Next week: Go Big or Go Home

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Plan A! - Launching A Digital Product Pt. 1

TL;DR - You Have To Create Something of Value

Earlier this year I had an opportunity to buy the domain name Musicto.com - it fit beautifully into my long term strategy as the artist music2work2 so I jumped on it and went about the process of establishing a record label.

Here’s the brand positioning statement:

"For people who have to address a specific task or challenge and are looking for music to help, musicto publishes albums designed to create the optimal sonic environment.  Unlike other music sites, musicto creates music for specific actions and behaviors and does not charge a subscription fee."

Identify How The Money Flows

The music industry has been nuts for the last 15 / 16 years.  Digitization burned down the production and distribution models while the mobile revolution took care of everything else.  As an independent record label I don't care about sales - I don't care about downloads or CDs, all I care about is streams. 

As more people pony up the $10 a month to Spotify or Apple or Tidal to access all music everywhere - we begin to make a living.

Identify The Behavior You Want

The behavior our label needs is for someone to listen to our music - that's it.  They don't have to buy it - they just have to select it from the almost infinite choice they already have in their hand.

Traditional labels are well aware of the new paradigm and a whole new breed of gatekeepers have already arrived.  The music industry is back and money has started to flow, payola is alive and well in the form of Playlist Influence and once again the public are being seduced by large corporate budgets.

Our marketing strategy is to bypass the music industry and connect directly to the people.

Identify Product Market Fit

My Dad died last year.  The music that was coming out of me was pretty down tempo - sure it was pretty, but it was sad and I didn't know what to do with it.  As we brainstormed possible album names from Music to Write An Essay to, Music to Beat Procrastination, Music to Walk to, etc., one leaped out at me...

I knew there were hundreds and thousands of small to medium size organizations that provided services for people dealing with grief.  I also knew a link back from them, with their relatively high non-profit domain authority, would deliver a great bang for our outreach buck.

People don't search for Grief Music but they do search for Sad Music, almost 100,000 of them a month.  If we could become the #1 search result, we'd have cracked it and I'd have to stop writing Simply Friday emails.

Our first release became “Music to Grieve to.” 

Identify Plan A

The idea was simple - create something of value that the grief organizations would share with their audiences.  This would result in links and social shares and drive us to the top of the search results.

Much as we loved the album we didn't think that the organizations would blindly market it for us, so we started researching grief and in particular how music impacted it.   It took over 2 months and cost over a grand in research and writing costs, but after multiple revisions, we finally had a long form, research backed article that showed that listening to sad music was actually good for you.

We compiled a spreadsheet of the leading grief organizations - wrote a basic outreach letter that touted the benefits of our information and asked them to share it with their audience.  We sent out the first 20 emails and waited.

Next Week:  When Plan A Fails...

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Flossing & Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Did you see that report that says there’s no evidence that flossing works? 

Apparently the studies funded by Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson (a family company!) that said flossing helps to remove plaque, were discredited back in 2011.

Apparently what flossing is really good for is sustaining a $6 billion industry.

And This Is Relevant How?

The argument being used by Dentists to refute this report is that flossing is actually good for you but that most people are doing it wrong.

Here’s the tenuous link to digital marketing…

Content strategy works - but most people are doing it wrong!

Your Content = Your Teeth

I know it’ll come as shock to most of you but, content production is probably the easiest part of your marketing strategy.  

Oh sure, it takes a while to find the format that works for you and it takes even longer for you to get good at it, but nowadays there’s no barrier to producing and distributing content.

Your articles, videos, pictures & witty comments are just like teeth - everyone has them!

Promoting Your Content = Flossing

I’m not talking ad spends - although that’s definitely a good way of getting your content in front of people - I’m talking about what you do to ensure that other people will find, view and link to your content.

Remember you’re producing this stuff so that when someone comes looking for your services or products:

1/ they’ll actually find you because people will have linked to your content and the search engines see the links and think - this must be good stuff - so they put you higher in the search results and...

2/ when people do arrive on your site they see all this great information that answers their questions, demonstrates how wonderful you are and so they choose you to meet their needs.

What Should You Do?

Well, everyone’s different so your situation is likely unique but there are things to consider.

Technical stuff like targeting the right keywords, formatting content in the right way, getting the filename right on your video, things which are tedious and take longer than you wished they did, these are super important.

But the holy grail of generating links is creating a community that looks out for your content - that is kinda stoked you took the time to produce it, that reads it when they see it and shares and links to it.

You only get this by investing your time in them - by reciprocating, by creating real world loose relationships with strangers.

It requires you spending as much time (preferably more) on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc than you do creating your content in the first place.

Need Help?

We can help with the technical stuff - I have access to trusted people who know how to set things up and can take the tedious bits off your hands.  

As for the whole outreach, community building stuff, that will be unique to you and will require some strategy - that’s when you should talk with me.

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image credit: Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

Why You’re Worse Than A 3rd Grader

Good data coming out of the Boomerang email study.

If you want to increase the likelihood of someone responding to your email, here’s what to do:

• Lose the big words and long sentences
• Include a couple of questions in the copy
• Be slightly positive or slightly negative
• Aim for shorter subject titles
• Try and keep it under 150 words

Only Applies To Responses

Note that this data only applies to campaigns that are looking to generate a response.  Some of you are writing purely informational emails - like me - that aren’t really geared towards generating a reply. 

However - when the time comes to elicit information from your list - keep it short and simple!

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image credit:  Boomerang Email Study

The Things Inside You That Will Help Market Your Business

What are your core values?

What are the guiding principles that you will pass on to your family?

Your Unique Selling Proposition

The beauty of being an owner of a smaller operation is that you can instill your values into how you do business, and how you do business is the only thing that really differentiates you from your competition.

How This Applies To Marketing

Content strategy can be challenging - what should your new blog, video or image be about, what should you be liking, sharing or commenting on?

What I’m suggesting is that you take a step back from ”What” and start looking at “How.”

Frame Your Content Through Your Core Values

If you know your core values, if you’ve gone through the process and worked them out for your business, working with content becomes easier.

When you’re creating new content, don’t just describe a thing, tell the story of why it’s important to you and how it reflects what you believe.

Likewise, before you share or comment on other people’s content, ask yourself how that interaction reflects your core values.

The Next Step

This can be pretty tricky to grasp but once you’ve got your head around it, the impact can be huge.  If you haven’t gone through the process of establishing what your business’s core values are, now might be a good time to start.

I’m going to be talking more about this over the coming weeks and will be sharing the process of how I worked them out for my own business.

If you’d like to see how it can work for you - get in touch.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image credit:  Steven Van Loy on Unsplash