The Music Marketing Funnel

What's up gigging pros. Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. This is your host, Jared Judge. Today, I want to chat about the marketing funnel. So, as musicians, we all know that we need to market our music. And, you know, we're never taught how to market our music, in music school or in our lessons. And I had an amazing experience over the last week, we just got out of our first ever Book More Weddings Challenge. This was a free challenge that I hosted live on Facebook. I went live every day, in our Facebook group for an hour, Monday through Friday. And I had about 88 musicians there from all over the country. You know, California, South Carolina, South Florida. We also had people from Canada, there was someone from Toronto there who plays steel pan, there was also someone from Mexico City, and then all the way across the globe, we had somebody from Australia join us, she watched the replays because you know, if she joined us live, it would have been at three in the morning. And it was just such a cool experience, because it was all at eight musicians learning about marketing together. And we dove really deep, like we referenced a lot of traditional marketing trainers. And we brought the world of marketing into music in a way that nobody has ever really done for wedding musicians before. We've all kind of figured out our own paths. But this was the first time we were all studying the same thing together and sharing our successes. And it was really cool, because during the challenge, we had some people actually book weddings while they were on the challenge because of the learning and training that they got during this challenge. So by the way, if you're interested, we are running this challenge. Again, if if it's running, when this podcast is released, you can see you can register for absolutely free, we're not going to sell you anything extra at BookMoreWeddingsChallenge.com. So if it's open, you know, go ahead and grab it. It's totally free, super fun. And we build a great community. But the big thing, like if I were to say that there was one concept, one belief that I had to build, and everybody, before we could dive into the marketing and actually get the successes was I had to show everybody the concept of the marketing funnel. And if you're a marketer, then you know what this is. But if you're a musician, the word funnel might make you think of something in your kitchen cabinet where, you know, you pour liquid at the top, and then it gets smaller towards the bottom. And then there's a hole in the bottom. But the marketing funnel has been around for a very long time. And it's used by real marketers at real companies, and can totally and should be applied to your music. Because the amazing thing is like, once you realize what a marketing funnel is, and you start to apply it, then you lose all of the uncertainty that goes into marketing your music, it all of a sudden becomes so clear, and you know what's working and what's not. Which means if you know what's not working, you know what to fix. So the concept of the marketing funnel that we taught at this Book More Challenge book, more weddings Challenge is a pretty simple four step process that a wedding musician can use. And it's not just weddings, by the way, this can be used for any type of music, too. But you just have to figure out how to apply it. But for wedding musicians, it was a four step process to take a couple, like bride and groom to be and to introduce them to your wedding music business for the first time, then, essentially get them to give you their contact information like an email address, the date of their wedding and the venue. And that basically expresses interest in possibly booking you. Then the third step is to actually present them your offer to play wedding music for them. And I'll kind of dive deep into these steps. But once you present your offer to them in such a way that is persuasive, and convinces them to book you well then the final step is to actually secure the date with a contract and money in your account for the deposit. So it's a four step process, which to put it in some more marketing terms, but also apply it to music. So don't be too intimidated. If this is your first time hearing about this. The first step is to expose people to your brand by tapping into traffic sources. So that's the first step of the funnel is you have to realize that couples getting married or if you're doing other types of gigs like corporate event planners or private party planners, they're already doing other things related to the planning of their event that you can tap into. For example, they are like every event, regardless of what type it is, has to have a venue. It has to have a location in which to have and that can be leveraged To buy you, the musician to tap into that traffic source, a lot of wedding musicians already tapped into some paid traffic sources like Wedding Wire and the knot, which are online directories. And so that is the first step of the funnel. And you can optimize your conversion rate between those traffic sources. And then the second step, which is using a lead generation tool to generate a lead. So what is a lead a lead is simply when somebody gives you their contact information, so that you can follow up by giving them more information about booking you or something else. So for many musicians, their primary lead generation tool is their website. If you're on Wedding Wire than your your lead generation tool is your actual Wedding Wire profile. But essentially, your lead generation tool is either effective or ineffective at getting somebody to give you their contact information. And most musicians don't even realize how much power they have over how effective that is, for example, many musicians websites simply look like a glorified You know, resume, where they just brag all about the venues that they've played, and what instruments that they actually play. The teachers they studied with that kind of thing, which ultimately is not an effective tool to get somebody to give you their contact information. It's not persuasive. It might convince other musicians of how good you are. But you're not selling your music to other musicians most of the time, especially if you're booking private events. Like very rarely do I actually book a wedding, where the bride or the groom is currently an active musician. But most musicians target their websites at other musicians. I've talked about that on another episode. But this is how it applies to the funnel. Because if you can optimize your website or your other lead generation tools to persuade somebody who's a non musician who doesn't care what instruments you play, or what set of strings you put on on Friday, and instead optimize it to show them how you actually are going to help give them the best possible event. If only they were to give you your their contact information, then all of a sudden, that becomes a very effective part of your funnel. So we tapped into a traffic source, which is where they're already trying to plan out their event. Second step was to bring them to your lead generation tool and optimize that to persuade somebody to give you their contact information. And then the third step is a gigantic place where I see so many musicians making mistakes, because it's where you have to actually present your offer to them to give them the information of hey, here's what we bring to the wedding that we're going to perform. And here's how much we charge for that. I see so many musicians simply just presenting their offer with an email response, like saying, hey, thanks so much for reaching out. Yeah, we're available on your date, it's, you know, 50 bucks to perform at your event. I mean, 50 bucks is low, don't do anything less than like 500 or 1000 bucks. But that's the gist of the email that people send is like, yes, we're available, and it costs $500. And that's it, which is a completely ineffective sales presentation, you might get some people to book you, you know, if they're really if they love your your group, you know, they've seen you play live before, or they're your friend or something like that, you might still get some measure of success with that. But in general, and hang on one second, just got to pause for a second. We're back. Sorry about that. So in general, that is an ineffective sales presentation. And you will have a low percentage of people who book you with simply an email response, which the amazing part is, if you know that that's a weak point in your funnel, you can fix it. And I do teach musicians how to do an actual sales presentation with a PowerPoint presentation or Google Slides. But I obviously don't have time to cover that in a brief podcast. But the thing is, like, if you have somebody who reaches out, you know, a lead that says, we're getting married on July 1, looking at your string quartet or whatever, tell us more. And then you actually present to them, you make a compelling case, and you cover all of their questions, you answer all of their questions before they even have a chance to ask them, then you present your offer in a way that I teach. That is super cool. So the offer stack, listen back to one of the early episodes of this podcast for that you presented to them and give them an easy way to book and that will increase the percentage of people that book you after you've presented to them. It's so simple. I mean, I've heard one of my marketing mentors. His name is Dan Kennedy. And he said at a presentation that I was at marketing is simply behavioral psychology plus mathematics. So the mathematics is that you have a four step funnel and Each step has a percentage of success, that you can manipulate that percentage by improving your website or improving your profiles, improving or even creating your sales presentation. And the that's the mathematics part. Because, you know, if you increase the, if you improve the earlier steps in the funnel, but you don't fix anything else in the back end, you're still gonna get more bookings. It's so cool how that works. And the behavioral psychology part is how you actually improve those percentages. Because you have to tap into the psychology of the person booking you, rather than just putting something on a website, because you think that that's what impresses other musicians, which that's what most musicians do. So that's the four step marketing funnel, the last step is where you should have almost a 100% success rate, if done right, you've already presented to them. And they're sold, they want to book you. And so the tools that you use to get them to actually complete the booking, especially if you're doing private events should be a contract, which of course, in BookLive Pro, there's a digital contract, which you can send it to them send them a link, they type their signature, and boom, within seconds the contract is signed, plus a deposit, which again, in BookLive, there is a digital way for them to pay you via credit card, which most couples when I'm booking my weddings, they prefer to pay credit card because they're paying all their other vendors with a credit card. And then they earn those points and miles if they're using their airline rewards cards and all that jazz. And so that last step, the booking the contract, and the deposit should have a 100% success rate. And so that's the four step funnel, you know, step one is tap into the traffic sources, that these people who are planning their events are already congregating on step two is to create or improve your lead generation tool, which is your website or your WeddingWire profile, GigSalad profile, to convince them to give you their email address in exchange for more information. Step three is to create or improve your sales presentation, which you know, many musicians use email, which I think is a mistake, you got to use email to get them scheduled for a presentation or using my favorite tool, which is one of the automated sales presentation. But I don't have time to cover that right now. And then step four is just the mechanics of booking with the contract and the deposit which BookLive Pro does for you. So that is kind of the big belief that if we understand that a marketing funnel is the way to play more high paying gigs, then everything else that follows is just setting up the things that are inside the marketing funnel, and then improving what's inside the marketing funnel to increase those percentages of success. So I hope that this sheds a lot of light into how I do my wedding bookings, and marketing for my group. It all boils down to those four steps, if it's any more than four steps, and it's a bit too complicated. And the more complication you have, the more chances you have for people to say no or get lost in your funnel. So try to keep it simple, because you'll be able to execute better on it and people will go through it with a higher percentage of success. So that's all I got for you guys today. If you are interested in joining our next Book More Weddings Challenge go to BookMoreWeddingsChallenge.com If we're running one, you will see the date of it and when we go live you know you'll be in that Facebook group established that really cool community of other musicians who want to book more weddings, and dive deep into marketing your music which is so rewarding because it is a means to the end of being able to play more music and earn more money doing it. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.