Getting Ghosted? Try This

What's up gigging pross! It's Jared Judge, welcome to another episode of the Gigging Musician Podcast. I feel like it's been a couple couple of days since I recorded an episode here. It's been busy. They've got a couple gigs coming up this week, kicking it off Wednesday night with the birthday party in a country club. That's a fun gig, I think you got that one off of the bash. Then on Thursday, during the day, I've got a wedding, which is an interesting time for a wedding Thursday afternoon. But I'm excited. It's a really interesting venue, kind of in the middle of a forest, where there's no electricity, and I'm an electric violin. So I actually just pulled the trigger on a Bose s one pro at the recommendation of one of our Fulltime Music Academy members, Ken, thanks for your recommendation. So I'm going to be testing that for a couple of these gigs. And I'll let you know how it goes. But I wanted to chat today about what happens when you get gig leads, who do not turn into bookings. So, you know, I'm of the mindset that as gigging musicians, you know, once you've got the music part figured out, which actually is a lot earlier than many people think, once you got your music figured out, you can basically have a setlist of at least an hour prepared, by the time somebody books you for a gig, then your challenge and your problem turns to generating leads, you have to get people to raise their hand, say they're interested in booking you. And if you don't have people reaching out to you, then there's no possible way you could book gigs. So that's why, you know, I talk so much about generating leads, driving traffic to your website and all that. But let's assume that all of that stuff starts to really work for you. For example, you know, so you took my advice about running Facebook ads, to one of those BuzzFeed style quizzes. And all of a sudden, you're generating several leads per day, which is a great place to be and imagine that several gig leads per day. Now the problem is, not all leads are created equal. And I think a lot of musicians don't really distinguish this, because it's not something we're taught in music school or our lessons. But not all leads are created equal. In the marketing world, you'll hear about like low quality or high quality leads. Who when you know that most musicians, you have a contact form on your website. And because you're not really driving traffic to your website, the people that do stumble upon it, tend to have gotten the hard way to get there, they've had to gone through a little bit of trials and effort to find your website. So they're probably already in a buying mindset. They're already in the market for somebody who does exactly what you do. And then when they stumble upon it, like, Oh, fantastic, this person, she plays jazz vibraphone. And we're really excited to have her at our wedding who are at our corporate event. So it's like they've already gone through all the trials and tribulations to figure out what they're looking for, why they want it, and why you're the person to give it to them. And so the people that come to your website, fill out your contact form tend to be high quality leads, meaning they don't really take much to be pushed over the edge to sign your contract and book book us. So that's very nice. But the problem is high quality leads don't come in very often. Right? That's it think about how many contacts do you get? How many contact form submissions you get on your website, on a daily or weekly basis. For some people I've talked to recently, especially those who are not Fulltime Music Academy members, it's less than one lead a month, which you know, that's hard to sustain a business when you've got less than one lead a month, which is why the problem becomes let's generate more traffic. And that's why we try Facebook ads, we do SEO, we partner with venues and event planners to get on their preferred vendor list, they put links to our website and theirs, and boom, all of a sudden we get some more traffic, which is awesome, because then that traffic turns into leads. Now, once you've got yourself a steady stream of leads, the issue becomes lead quality because not all of them had to go through that same difficult process to find you as the first leads I was talking about earlier. Which means the success or also known as the closing ratio of your leads, like what percentage of those leads become actual bookings tends to become very low or not very, not necessarily very low but definitely lower than when you first got started when it was really hard. Harder for people to find you and become a lead in the first place, you probably have a 90 100% closing ratio off of high quality leads. But the lower the quality, the lower your closing ratio will be. Which means the more often you'll get ghosted, and people just won't respond. So the problem then becomes, how do we increase that closing ratio. And for that, we have to think about the psychology of these new leads, the ones who have had an easier time finding you, the ones who haven't necessarily spent as much time consuming your website, your videos, your marketing materials, and even conversing with you. Right. So they are less trusting. They're basically like, you know, scared rabbits entering into the Wolf's Den. And they know they have to be on their guard. And so that's probably why they're not responding to you, like they're getting, I don't know, it's kind of like if you've ever been on vacation in Mexico, and you fly into the Cancun Airport. And as soon as you leave customs, you grab your bags and go out, you enter in what's called the fish tank. I actually think it's called the Shark Tank. And this shark tank is like a room that is full of all of these salespeople, trying to sell you on everything from renting your car, to getting a timeshare to getting a ride from the airport to your hotel, to vacation scuba and snorkeling package. And it's basically like you're a fish, and you're entering into the shark infested waters. And they're going to aggressively try to sell you something. Your lower quality leads feel like this themselves. They're like, Hey, I'm planning an event, corporate event or wedding. And they've raised their hand to say I'm in the market. For services, I've got money. And what happens when you you know, what happens when a fish gets a little cut in the water, and the blood starts to pour out? That is raising the red flag literally, to all the sharks, saying, hey, there's blood in the water, let's go get him. And then all of a sudden, our leads start to feel attacked and overwhelmed. And, yeah, it's kind of a bloodbath for them. So that's why, you know, a lot of people in the wedding market, a lot of new, newly engaged people create a separate email account for their wedding. You know, like, Mike and John wedding 2024 whatever@gmail.com. Why did they do that, for this exact reason is they know that they're going to be bombarded by all of these marketing emails and messages from people, once they say, Hey, we're in the market, we've got money come and get it. And I don't blame them. Because, you know, I got married in 2019. And it was the same thing we created their own email address is that Jim wedding 20 nineteen@gmail.com. And so we created that email just to prevent the sharks. But what's interesting is that a lot of the emails that we got, they only sent one email, you know, we entered our name to win a free hotel package or whatever, gave our email address our contact information, rights to our first board and etc. And we gave it to these companies, and then they only sent one email, which that is why people feel like they get ghosted, because, you know, you're, you're competing for a very short time with hundreds of other companies. But then, you know, after that competition dies down after the first week, there's almost no competitors left in the battlefield, which is so interesting, because that people just don't follow up. Musicians and other companies in the events industry do not follow up beyond the initial outreach. And that's why you're not closing your, your leads, that's why your closing ratio goes down. So you might spend hundreds or 1000s of dollars a month in marketing your act, just to generate a lead. And then to do nothing with it, is almost criminal, because it's wasting money. And you know, I'm very sensitive that musicians tend not to have as much money as like a venue or a hotel does. And so that marketing money really needs to stretch as far as it possibly can. So, enter in your hero, the thing that's going to save your your marketing money your leads, which is the concept of long term follow up Now I've talked about follow up in the past, I think I did an episode called the fortune is in the follow up. And that is still true and it's evermore true today, especially with people getting bombarded by messages. But then that bombardment dies down, it's kind of like, the first battle is over, the dust has settled, and now they're free to go about their business. But not you, not you my, my Gigging Musician Podcast listeners, or my Fulltime Music Academy students, because you're going to implement what's called a long term, nurture campaign. So, you know, just before I tell you about the specifics of how these people who have come to you for information, oftentimes, they're in the early stages of planning, where they want more information, the need to understand everything that is about hiring a live musician, or, you know, hosting a corporate event or whatever. They're in the early stages of that they're shopping for information. It's especially too true, when you go to like a wedding expo, you exhibit it and find out, all the people that come through are planning their wedding two years from now. So they're not ready to book. They're just gathering information. And so long term, nurturing does this for them, it provides them exactly what they're looking for at the time, which is information, and then provides them in every single email that you send an offering from the highway, an opportunity for them to say, Hey, I am ready. Let me actually schedule that call with you. So that we could discuss having you play at my corporate event. So long term, email, nurture sequence is a series of automated emails that gets sent out over a long period of time, such as a year, or even two. And it's consistent, maybe one email a week, one email every other week, it's up to you, you could experiment, figure that out. And each email, talks about some piece of information that they might need, or contains inspiration and persuasion that persuades them, to hire you. And get off that highway right now and schedule that call with you. And so we've been doing this with a bunch of our Fulltime Music Academy members. There's email marketing tools like MailChimp, mailer light, even click funnels, that's the one that I use, and one of my students uses, that makes it easy, that once you generate a lead, you can put that lead into an automated workflow that sends 52 emails over the course of a year. And each one of them, you know, talks about something different, contains testimonials, videos, all the fun things that these people are looking for and desperately need in order to trust you because they want to trust you. They just don't have enough information to trust you. And the ones that can stay in the game and follow up longer. Those are the ones that will succeed. And I'm talking about musician, as a musician, so you can stay in the game longer. So just because you generated a lead, doesn't mean you're going to close it. But just because you haven't closed it in the first email, doesn't mean you're never going to close it. So my recommendation is, generate yourself a nice long term, email, nurture campaign, at least a year, and then start to add your leads to that. And then you'll start to see the difference. You'll see some results. And I always get the question, well, what am I just annoying these people? Like what if they unsubscribe? Well, hey, fans subscribe. They weren't going to book you anyway. Right? They don't want to hear from you. Just let them opt out. That's totally fine. Say for like, you know, listeners of this podcast, if you're not getting value out of this. You don't have to listen to it. I would rather have people explicitly tell me, I'm no longer interested and unsubscribe from my emails. But I'd rather that happen, rather than them not really hear anything from me. And then me wondering, oh, why didn't they book me? Was there something about the way that I dressed or played? No, I'd rather market aggressively and have people tell me no, make them make a decision, rather than just leave it amorphous in that zone of maybe. So that is the concept of long term nurture. And I hope that you guys got some some good stuff out of it. Hope this motivates you to take some action. And by the way, if you want to see tactically how to put this together, how to put together a long term A nurture campaign, I invite you to join us in Fulltime Music Academy. These are the kinds of things that we work on every single day. We've got models and templates, step by step instructions, even on the technology side, because I know not many people really have done email marketing before. And if you want to see exactly how it's done, what buttons to click, I'll show you exactly how inside of Fulltime Music Academy, which you can get your free 30 Day Trial by getting the Gig Vault for free. Gig Vault, as you know, is a treasure trove of over 24,665 high end venue and event planner contexts, that you can get a link to your website on their website, generate some traffic to your website so you could generate a lead and then but that lead into your long term email nurture campaign and book the gig. So that is yours for free. Just go to OpenTheGigVault.com Get Your Free Copy, and I'll see you on the inside. Let's get your long term email nurture campaign going. Alright, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "Your music will not market itself!" Bye everybody