The Two Types Of Marketing And Why Most Musicians Choose The Wrong One

What's up gigging pros. It's Jared, welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Today one of the share with you the two different types of marketing that exists in the world, and why most musicians use the wrong kind. Alright, so I'm gonna dive in here, when I first got my start, as a musician, I actually learned pretty early on in grad school, that you needed to market yourself. And I didn't learn that from music school, actually learn that from the Student Startup Challenge in the business school, which I'm not a business major, by the way. I was a master student in orchestra conducting, but I was getting really frustrated with the lack of gigs. Plus, losing auditions made me realize, like, I need to figure this out on my own, without relying on auditions, luck, or even building a following. So I went to the music school, I went to the business school because I saw a flyer on the music schools bulletin board for something called the Student Startup Challenge. And they said, regardless of what made you come in, and we will teach you how to start up your next business or your next project, I was like, hey, my music career is kind of like a business. And it's already failing. Yeah, what, what could be the harm of trying this out. So went over to the business building was joined by students of all kinds of majors, not just business, but architecture and engineering. And even, there were no other music students. But I think after I showed them that could use us for music, more music students started to join. And they helped me launch my first ever gigging group, Dream City Music back then, because we were offering everything. And that was when they introduced me, like, to the concept of marketing. And the kind of introduced me the concept of the marketing funnel, which we talked about last episode. But it was a vague introduction, I had to do a lot of research on my own. And that's when I discovered that there are two kinds of marketing. The first kind of marketing is the kind that most musicians use, which is called Sorry, I'm just gonna wait for that truck to go by. It's called Brand Marketing. The other kind is called Direct Response Marketing. And when I actually first got my start with the Student Startup Challenge, they taught me brand marketing, the more traditional kind. And what brand marketing is, is just doing marketing activities in a way that, you know, gets the word out there about you, but does not really sell yourself that much. It just vaguely references the fact that you exist, and then kind of passive aggressively hopes that people take, take the next step, to interact with your brand. So if you think about, I don't know, if you think about like, Apple, and the larger brands, Amazon, that kind of thing, most of what they do is brand marketing, brand marketing tends to be rather slow. And if you think about commercials, that the recent one that I'm seeing for Amazon, is that it's just kind of advertising that Amazon is a good place to work, which I'm not sure if those claims are true or not. I'll leave that up to you to decide. But it basically has a testimonial from one of their warehouse workers, that talks about all the benefits of working at Amazon. And, you know, maybe they're using that as part of their hiring funnel, trying to generate leads to potential candidates for their warehouse work. But for most people, they're not, you know, interested in a job at Amazon. But just hearing the the name Amazon in this commercial is a form of brand marketing, because you know, that might trigger something in your mind. It's like passively, aggressively, passive, aggressively asking you to visit Amazon, open up the Amazon App, and do a little shopping. But there was no clear call to action, saying, hey, go to Amazon and find the deals you're looking for, knows more about Amazon's a great place to work. And if that resonated with you, and you needed something on Amazon, you would open up the app and go shopping. So that is brand marketing, brand marketing is slow. Meaning that when you spend your money on advertising, or you spend your time making a social media post or spend your time putting your website together that you think looks really great, but it's not, you know, it's not direct response. It'll take time for it to pay off if it pays off at all. You know, it's there's a lag time between the effort that you put in and the results you're looking for. So part of this is you have to know what results you're looking for, which for my my group, it's bookings, like 100%, we really just want as many high paying bookings as possible. And so brand marketing actually wasn't a good fit for us. So when I went through the Student Startup Challenge, and started out with brand marketing, you know, they told me put together a beautiful website, and people will come. And so I did put together a beautiful website, spent a lot of time on my website, and thought it looked amazing. And then within, you know, days and weeks after we launched, we were getting no traffic, I went to Google Analytics, I saw that we had no visitors. And as a result, we were getting no bookings from just putting together this website. So that was kind of frustrating because I came to the Student Startup Challenge to learn to start up my business. And to start up your business means to make money. So I told them, hey, you know, my website's not making any money, it's not helping me book gigs, what do I do. And so they helped me find the other kind of marketing, which is direct response marketing. direct response marketing is a kind of marketing that leads people who are interacting with your brand, to take a direct action, based on the advertisements or things that they see, which make no mistake, your website is an advertisement for you, for booking you. And if you start treating it like one with the principles of direct response marketing, all of a sudden, things will click into place. And you'll start to book more than you ever thought possible. And you can raise your rates to a rate that's higher than you thought possible. So direct response marketing has a lot of principles behind it can get a little cumbersome and complicated. But as musicians, we don't really need to dive too deep into it to have more results than others because most musicians are not using direct response in the first place. By the way, the concept of a funnel does fall into the category of direct response marketing. But direct response marketing also has the big component of copywriting. Now, copywriting is the words that you choose to put on your website, or on your business card, or wherever you use words, including if you talk to people at like a wedding expo booth, the words that are coming out of your mouth is copy. So we are doing copywriting all the time. And we have to say specific things, to encourage people to take action. And the cool part is if you say the right words, and you put the right words on your website, people will take action. It's not going to be everyone. Of course, having 100% response rate is nearly impossible, even for the best of the best. And copywriting has been around for centuries. It really picked up in the early 1900s. And now some of the marketing direct response marketing greats are Dan Kennedy, which there's a whole he has a whole system called magnetic marketing. There's a whole magnetic marketing podcast and if you like this podcast, and you're looking for, you know, to dive into direct response marketing, check out the magnetic Marketing Podcast, just be warned a little bit there is some outdated things in what he says. So if you are triggered by things like that, it might not be a good fit. But don't let those kinds of things get in the way of you learning the marketing, the direct response marketing gold that is inside that podcast. So he I just wanted to direct you to that resource and to start to help you shift your marketing from brand marketing, which is just the let's put it up and hope that people enjoy it and have the idea to respond and switch it to kind of direct response marketing, where you're actively trying to get people to take a single action based on each thing that you put out. If it's your website, the single action should be for them to give you their email and phone number and name so that you can start to sell them on booking you. So I hope this plant some seeds. If you found it at all valuable make sure to like and share and subscribe to this podcast. And thanks for listening to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember you are just one gig away