Brand marketing and why it is important to your band?
Competition for the attention of music fans has never been fiercer. Many artists are spending more time and energy trying to get noticed then on the most important part “THE MUSIC”. I recently took my periodical look into how many music specific social network sites are out there and found 273. Right there you can leverage some of your fans to set-up and operate profiles for you. They run it and you pop in once a month. Or better yet you stay in touch with these profile leaders via IM on all important news so that they can stay fresh and up to date. Just be sure to remain the gatekeeper of your online presence.
In medieval times a gatekeeper was in charge of lowering and raising a gate that protected the castle. They let people in and kept others out, depending on what their affiliation was with the community and king, as well as what the intent of the visit was. Gatekeepers were extremely important to the protection and survival of the community, yet they were either discounted or ignored. In the personal branding arena, you have to play the role of the gatekeeper or someone will steal what is rightfully your’s.
So how do you retain this Gatekeeper position? 1st off you build your own domain and web-site under your control. Then use the funnel approach to direct visitors from all your online peripheral pages to your main site. Do this through widgets, links, etc.
But what do you have once people come to your main site? You want them to both stick around and come back. You do this with interactivity. Have a few songs free to download in MP3 format. Easy to find page specific to selling your music and other merchandise. If fans don’t quickly find what they are looking for they will simply abandon the artist’s website. Highly motivated fans might check iTunes as an alternative but there is much less value for the artist in the indirect relationship.
So how does this relate to Brand Marketing you ask? Being your own gatekeeper means you control your brand not someone else. Expanding your online reach as far as your fans or street team will allow makes you easy to find. And once you have fans at your site giving them what they want keeps them there. Add in your own personal regular events and watch as people come back buying your music along with interacting with you.
Speaking of interactivity as time moves on speed of communication becomes ever more vital.
Keeping track of who is saying what keeps you in control as your own gatekeeper. How do you do this though. A few basics is to set up a twitter search RSS and Google alerts RSS. To really get into it you could look into reputation management providers. The main thing to keep in mind is that we are living in a day of lightening fast messages that can have an impact rather you are aware of them or not.
Additional resources or posts of note
Hypebot
Personal Branding Myths
How to build your online brand
[...] ongoing process. On a regular basis ask for submissions from fans. Watch for anything new in your brand monitoring forays. Update annually or bi-annually your EPK photos. Always keep the older folder for posterity [...]