Reviews Excitement

Hey musicians, it's Jared Judge, I want to share with you guys something I'm super excited about that is going in the software BookLive Pro, to help me and the musicians who are using it, collect more reviews. So okay, here's a little bit of backstory, you know, I'm a wedding musician, and I'm in the wedding industry. And for people to book my wedding group as often as possible, there are really two gigantic factors that are like the most important thing to knock over the domino of them being at least interested in reaching out to my group, and seeing how much we cost. And if we're available. And the first is videos, you know, of course, they have to know that we're real group and that we are skillful and talented, and match the vibe of what they do. The second of which is social proof, because people do not want to be the first people to, to try a new thing. You know, if you think about pioneers and stuff, you know, the pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their back, they paved the way for everybody else to do that. And nobody wants to be the first person to do that. It's very risky, which is why reviews are so important. As a wedding musician, you know, I put reviews of my group everywhere, I plaster it on wedding wire, which is one of our main traffic sources, the not Facebook reviews, Google, my business reviews, anywhere that we could post a review, we try to get them everywhere. The problem, though, is that these platforms where the reviews exist, are actually very labor intensive to actually get a review there. The problem is that these platforms do not automatically solicit reviews for you. So when I first started my group, you know, I was pretty good about, you know, playing the gig. And then immediately after going into each of those sites, and clicking the button, you know, hey, request a review from John and Jane, or copy this link and paste it in an email and ask them for review. And I did that for a while. And that actually built us up to, you know, dozens of reviews in our first year, which was awesome. The problem was that the more gigs that I started to play, the more labor intensive that became, the more time I would have to spend doing that. And honestly, it just became so overwhelming that I stopped doing it, then so the number of reviews we would get, would actually declined quite a bit. And then the reviews that we did have on the site started to become outdated, you know, time marched on, but the data, the reviews stayed the same. And so that became frustrating and actually became a reason why we weren't booking as many gigs as I wanted, as as we were used to. And so last year, about a year ago, right when you know, the pandemic was starting, I decided, hey, I want to, I want to do something about this review thing, I want to start getting some reviews. And the first thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to automate it. So if any of you who have used BookLive Pro before, you know that when you start booking a gig, you enter the gigs details into the platform, including the date, the venue, the time, and the name and contact info of the client for whom you're booking the gig. And once you enter that, that triggers off a bunch of automations. You know, I don't want to go through the whole BookLive process, because it's a lot. And it just makes me feel very comfortable, because I don't have to do all of that planning work. But the one thing that I wanted to tackle was the reviews. So last year, I put together an automation that the day after the gig happens, the system automatically reaches out to the client and asks them for review. It does this all internally. And so basically, you know, I modeled it after a Google Form I used to use, and it asked them a couple questions like on a scale of one to five, how did you do? How did your group do? How was their professionalism? What comments do you have about their performance? And then I even asked for some feedback about BookLive, because you know, I always want to make sure our software is doing the best that it can be. And yeah, we launched that about a year ago, which was great, because we started to get some amazing feedback, our groups would get these reviews, and I would share them with the groups like Viva La strings would get reviews, and I would just post them on our social media and then share them directly with the bandleader so that she could post them on her social media and website. And that actually was like pretty consistent that we were getting these great reviews. Again, I got some nice feedback for BookLive. But the problem was that that's where it ended. So if I wanted to get those reviews on a platform where you know, couples who were searching for a musician for their wedding, were looking for a musician, I would have to copy paste that review on my website, or I would have to copy paste it on WeddingWire, which you actually can't do. You have to send them a link and they have to the client has to copy pasted themselves and so This weekend, I'm super excited to launch this, it's not out yet, but maybe by the time that you're listening to this podcast it will be launched is that once the client gets that request for review on our software. We are generously donating an Amazon gift card every month, and incentivizing the client by saying, hey, you just left a nice review, the group that you left the review for would really appreciate it, if you copy pasted your review onto all of these different platforms, make it really easy for them, give them a link to do it. And as an incentive to leave these reviews in other places, we're going to enter you in a drawing for an Amazon gift card. And so we're gonna launch that so soon. And I'm sure that this is going to work because I have tried this in the past with the more manual way. You know, I'm back in the early days before all of this automation stuff. I had my couples fill out a Google survey after the gig, saying, hey, how did we do. And then I said, You know, I appreciate the kind words that you gave to us. If you copy paste this review to any of these other platforms, I would enter you into a rap drawing for for gift card, and I did have people take me up on that. And we would give them the gift card. And it is awesome. There are certain ethical things that you might not be allowed to do that. So so check on on your platforms so that you don't get in trouble for doing that yourself. But an independent third parties such as BookLive's software is llowed to do that. There's othing saying that they're not llowed to. And we will help get And what I'm expecting this to do is I'm expecting this to hose reviews. really increase the number of reviews that I get on the multiple platforms that are necessary social proof, for people to be convinced that our group is the right group for them to book for their next event. And so if you're interested in that at all, there's a free we're giving away a free trial of BookLive Pro, it's two we ks long, it's totally free, yo can cancel at any time, if yo don't like it, you got to go to BookLivePro.com and give that a hot. And if you enjoyed this podcast, you got a little inspiration, a little bit of motivation to start collecting those reviews which are so important. If you're in the wedding industry or events industry, even just even if you're not reviews and social proof are just so important, you know, having somebody review your album, if somebody important somebody like in a newspaper that is just incredible that could launch people's music careers. So even if you're not in the wedding industry, I hope you at least take a little bit of advice on this and start to take those reviews seriously start to solicit those from people because it will change your life. So if you got any value out of this, make sure to like this Like this podcast, subscribe to it, share it with a friend. And if you have any comments I'd love to hear about it just shoot me an email Jared@BookLive.com and otherwise, I will see you on the next gigging musician, podcast.