Creating Your Own Category To Eliminate Competition

Hey, what's up gigging pros! It's Jared Judge. Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

48 in the morning, and I'm on my way to yet another gig. If you're wondering why all these early morning, weekday gigs, well, it's corporate event seasons, and of conferences, corporate events, you know, I'd say the majority of the corporate events that I've played so far, have been for conferences. Here in Denver, at least, actually, don't think I've ever played for a conference back when I lived in Wisconsin. But this all spiraled, because of me performing at the MIT conference back in March, I actually sponsored their walk in music, which led to all these other gigs. So I'm headed to the Gaylord Rockies, which is a really big hotels slash conference center, slash, I think we have a waterpark, which actually was in the news, a couple, like a month or two ago for having some each back falling into the pool. So I will not be swimming, but I will be swimming in music. And yeah, I'm going to be playing about a half hour music from 830 to nine. Obviously getting there early, because it's across the Denver area from where I live. And there's a ton of traffic typically, I'm lucky there's not much traffic right now. But I expect to run into some. So I gave myself plenty of extra time. But anyway, I wanted to chat and kind of like, brainstorm with you guys as my sounding board, if that's cool with you. And the thing that I wanted to brainstorm and chat about is this idea of walking music actually. Because, you know, with gigs, I'm not gonna say there's like a ton of competition for these corporate events. The biggest competition that we face is event planners choosing to do nothing at all, or just having the AV team play a playlist, you know, put on Spotify. In fact, at the conference I played last week, back on Saturday, the AV guy, he was awesome. But I saw on his computer, he had queued up a Spotify playlist called conference jams. They had that that was kind of cool. But then I was like, Oh, wait, that's my competition. So that was kind of annoying. Except for the fact they'd already hired me. So they were they had that as like music in between speakers. Walk in music, however, is when they first opened the doors to the conference, there's about a 30 minute period of time when people start to walk in. It's kind of like if you play weddings, 30 minutes before the official start time that's printed on the invitation. There is a 30 Minute buffer when people start to roll it and you know, especially your out of town guests, the ones who like to get the lay of the land and be the first in the seats, they're going to arrive about a half hour first half hour early, and they want to be entertained. And the same is true for conferences. There'll be people who start to go in the doors as soon as they're open. And yeah, I sponsored walk in music for the MSC conference. And ever since then, I've been getting booked a lot to play, walk in music at conferences, which is pretty cool, because I think this is a unique thing. I don't think many musicians do this. I think it's a pretty new category. Now one of the chat about this idea of like creating your own category, that you're the only in the market to, I believe it's called category design. I wouldn't say necessarily designed it, I'd kind of fell into it by accident. But these these categories that you create, it's there was a book, I never read the book, but the concept was pretty easy to understand. It was called the Blue Ocean Strategy. And it is about business and marketing. And it's the idea that like when you're providing a good or a service, you exist in an ocean. And that's that's the market and some oceans are blue, and some oceans are red. What do I mean by red? Red oceans are the ones that are crowded and swimming with sharks. So they were red oceans are bloody, because there are so many people in that ocean. And the sharks know, like, I'm going to feed off of these people. And I don't exactly know in the analogy of the businesses are the sharks or if the businesses are the people. I think the businesses are the sharks. Yeah, the people are like your customers are the people who could book you. And so in a typical gig, you know your bargain that is a red ocean it is full of tons of bands providing services of the demands of the sharks. And there are a limited number of consumers who are the bars All, all swimming in that, that ocean, so the bands all, you know, prey on the bars. And they're like the sharks preying on the people. So those those oceans are very bloody. And I would even say loans. In normal corporate gigs are less red, they are a tiny bit red. But they are a little closer to blue because there are not that many sharks going after them. That to me is one of the reasons I love private events is there another many sharks going after the private events, I guess either because many musicians don't know that they exist, or how plentiful they are. Or they don't know how to get them. But walk in music, in my opinion is such a niche of corporate events, that I think it's a blue ocean. And I get really excited by this because this means I have almost no competition other than Spotify playlists called conference champions, which I want to out compete, I want to beat conference jams, I want to be the shark that bloodies this ocean. And category design is so cool. Because if you're the only one providing a service in it, you are basically the go to for that service. And you know, you'll get booked. And the same is true for like any thing in business, if you're the only one providing that service, you're the one that's gonna get the most business, you know, think about it when I'm trying to think of a good analogy. But back in the early days of marketing, like in the 1900s, or 1800s, when people there was no Internet, there was nothing. And in general, you basically, I don't know, it was a hunter gatherer society, maybe not quite that, but like, you know, everybody had their own niche. And people did a lot of their own things at home, like people were bakers or whatever, there weren't that many have a certain category around. So you might have been the only Baker in town. And so people would buy their bread from you is like you were the only person to buy bread from him. And as a result, you had 100% of the market share for for baked goods. And that, to me is kind of how this walking music thing is, it's basically me creating my own category here. And I don't imagine many musicians will purely pursue this niche, but I think I should, because I've had such success with it without trying much. And the way that I think I'm going to do that is by creating a funnel on my website that talks specifically about walking music, and why you need it. So you know, if you have been following me for a while, you know, a funnel is a specifically designed journey of web pages, that could be as short as two pages, or longer depending on your needs. That basically is targeted at one specific customer type with a goal of generating a lead and potentially generating a sale. So I'm going to create a walk in music page, and have a really nice picture that I took from the MIT conference of a sign that they had right outside the doors to the conference that said walk in Music provided by extreme straightens. And I'm going to use that as the centerpiece. And then I'm going to put a video of myself playing on it. And a actually a video of me playing walk in music at the MIT conference, I'm going to use that video for sure. And then I'm going to write text on the page. And this is the key, I think most musicians don't do this. But if you did this, it would totally change the game for you. So I'm going to write the text on the page that talks to my specific customer who is a conference event planner, who is looking for ways to you know, enliven their event and I'm basically gonna write a letter to them. And I am talking about like fundamental marketing principles, which direct response marketing use this concept of a sales letter, which is a letter written to your prospect, designed to use persuasion in order to convince them to either become a lead for you or purchase your goods or services. So I'm going to write that my sales letter that talks about the power of walking music, specifically about conferences. So I'm going to brainstorm ideas like, you know, if you're planning a conference, and you you've spent so much time, money and effort planning this conference, because you want to give your conference attendees a great experience. Think about it, every conference should give their attendees a transformation. Some of them you want the attendees to go away feeling inspired, and fueled up, ready to take on the world. Some conferences, you might be selling something at the conference, and you want to get people inspired and motivated to buy. But the problem is that most conference experiences are pretty dull. If you think about it, there's hundreds of chairs that all look the same, they're not very comfortable, people will be sitting in a room, sometimes the air conditioner won't work at all. So your conference attendees will be hot. Sometimes the air conditioner will work too well, and people be freezing. Oftentimes, they'll have people gathered in the hallways, chit chatting that they might actually miss the session. And so these are big problems. Because if you want to give people a transformation, they have to be in the room, they have to be pumped up, they have to be fired up, ready to receive your message and your transformation. That's where my walk in music comes in. That's where extreme strings electric violins comes in, where you can get your conference attendees pumped up, the music playing from inside the conference room, will draw people into the room. And once they're there, the excitement of the music and the energy of live performance, will put them in the right mindset ready to experience the transformation that you know that they deserve and need to have from your conference. And so that's kind of the sales letter. And I used a very, I used a marketing formula there that I've actually talked about on this podcast before, which is the P A s problem, agitate solution copywriting formula. To write that letter where I demonstrated the problem, like I understood that I knew where they were coming from. The problem is that your attendees won't be fired up and inspired. And I agitated the problem by saying, you know, they deserve to have this transformation. But people will be in the halls not enjoying the conference, not fired up, not ready to experience what you've prepared for them. So agitated the problem. And then I solved the problem. That's the s part of the formula. By telling them about how extreme strings electric violins, will put them in the right mindset, get them ready to experience the transformation that they deserve. So that's kind of the outline of the letter that I would write to these people on the website. So you should see this come together in the next couple of weeks here. Cool, so I'm driving to the gig and there is a road close sighted. So we're going to do a u turn, and go a different way. That's why I planned extra time for for this. Alright, cool. So where was I? Yeah, so I use the problem agitate solve, to create the sales letter that I will put on my walk in music funnel. And then, of course, a funnel, without traffic will fall very flat. So I'm going to need to generate some more traffic to this. And by this point, so actually, this is a another really cool perk of me sponsoring that conference back in March was that they gave me a list of email addresses of all the attendees of that conference, many of whom are meeting planners themselves. By the way, this is another little gold nugget that I hope you take away from this podcast episode is that if you're looking for corporate event planners, you all you need to do is look for people with CMP in their their title. I'm not sure exactly what that means. I think it means corporate meeting planner or certified meeting planner. But that will get you more than halfway there. So that's a little secret for you. And so I am going to use this email list of CMPs and just send them an email, I'm going to put them on my regular email list. And then I'm going to start sending them emails, directing them to the walk in music funnel. And that is a very fast way to generate traffic, because I've got an email list. And all you need to do to get traffic to your website, the easy way, is send out an email to your list. That's another like big lesson for another time, which is building up an email list and then sending emails to them. But anyway, this podcast got in for 14 minutes, think I've fleshed out my idea enough for me to take action on it. And I hope it inspired you to take action on it. And think about a couple things like category design. How could you find a blue ocean for your act? So you're not competing with all the other sharks in the bloody red ocean? And then once you define your category, how do you basically create a tool to sell the product in your blue ocean? And to me that's going to be this walk in music funnel. Okay. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. By the way, if you want an email list, a list of emails that you can send your category to send your A new designed to, I would highly suggest you get the gig vault. Gig vault has over 24,665 emails that you can then send an email to and book a gig. And that that's how the game is played. So go get the gig vault. And it comes with a free trial of Fulltime Music Academy. So you have some email templates, and some accountability, and some really motivation to really take your music career to the next level. There is nothing like this program on the earth, specifically one designed to get you these high paying private event gigs, coming at it from a variety of really unique and new ways that I'm proving to be effective. And you can hear my progress on that on this podcast. So go grab your copy it is at FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/venues And I would love to see you there because remember, "Your music will not market itself!".