Push, Pull, Push – Combining Official Websites & Social Networks
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Psst! Also check out my book!Having your own ‘gate to fame’ on the internet is important. It’s as simple as that. In all areas of business and promotion, the most successful ones online are the ones that have a portal to link back to – A home for them to link their other promotion tools and resources, such as social networks, widgets, interviews, reviews, etc. to.
A lot of artists use their MySpace page for this, which is understandable. Whereas a website will mostly be visited by people that have already found out about you through a different source, whether it be an interview, your music on a different website, a music review somewhere, etc. a MySpace page focuses mostly on pushing your content to people.
The difference between these 2 is that with the first, your website is sitting there, online, ready for people to visit once they find a need to do so. In the marketing world, this is referred to as ‘pull marketing’ – those that have developed a need to visit your website, will be ‘pulled’ towards it without you doing much more. However, with the second, you go online to find people that may be interested in you, and promote and ‘push’ your product (in this case probably your music) into their faces.
Which strategy is better? Well, this is debatable. In the online business world, more and more companies are turning to pull marketing through advertising. In most cases, this is done through search engines. They choose to display their advertisement on certain keywords, and when someone types in one of those keywords, they’ll come accross the company’s advertisement. For the rest, the company doesn’t push the product in the person’s face to promote it. The product is just there in the form of an online advertisement, waiting for people to search for it and be ‘pulled’ to it once they do.
However, in the music scene, pull marketing is a bit different. Especially for upcoming artists. Most fans nowadays need more than just good new music to make them support a new artist. They need to have a relationship – a connection – with the artist. Sure, a form of pull marketing such as advertising your online music store through Google may be successful to a certain (rather small, my experience) extent, but it would be nowhere near as successful as when you’ve first built up a relationship with your listener. Without any form of relationship or connection with you, the only motivation that the listener has to purchase your music is the music itself. Now ask yourself, if you decided you wanted to support an upcoming artist, would you rather support a friend or a stranger? If you said stranger, wack yourself in the head.
This is exactly why MySpace is such a beautiful tool for music promotion. It allows you to interract with your listeners through blog posts, messages, comments, applications, and more! Thus forming a good building ground for developing relationships with your listeners, and becoming their friend (and I mean more than a ‘friend’ that just hangs around your friend space and… no, there’s no ‘and’. That’s all they do).
However, does this mean that having your own official website should be ignored? Heeeelll no! Studies have proved that the average buyer, whether it’s to buy a barbecue or your music, needs at least 7 contact moments before feeling a ‘trust bond’ with the seller. So what do you do? Maximize your contact moments!
Here’s my advice: Get an official websites that has all the usual things on it – your biography, pictures, your music, etc. but most importantly, links to your most prominent profiles on other websites. Then, make all your profiles on these websites link back to your official website. This will allow you to push market your music using your profiles on other websites, grab peoples’ attention there, have them be ‘pulled’ onto your official website to find out more about you, and right away find out what other websites, that they may also be a part of, they can find you on!
Take these 2 examples:
Scenario 1: You have a MySpace page and an online music store at, let’s say, CD Baby. You start push marketing, and send out messages and comments to the select (or at least, I hope you’ve selected a group first) MySpace users that you think may be interested in purchasing your music. They get the message or comment, go to your MySpace page, listen to your music, perhaps read a bit about you, and are then left with nothing else but the ‘Buy My Music On CD Baby’ link provided.
Scenario 2: You have a MySpace page, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter profile, a YouTube channel, a Bebo band page, a Friendster page, a Hi5 page, an online music store at CD baby, AND an official website. You spent a while setting up all of these profile pages and link them all back to your official website. On your official website, you integrate links to all your profile pages plus the ‘Buy My Music On CD Baby’ link. Now you start push promoting and sending our messages or comments to the same select group on MySpace. What happens? The MySpace users get the message or comment, go to your MySpace page, listen to your music, read a bit about you, go check out your website, see the links of other websites you’re on, thinks ‘hey! I’m on 2 of those other websites also!’, and adds you as a friend, or becomes a fan, on those websites also.
In the first scenario, there’s only been one contact moment before you right away hit your potential listeners over the head with the ‘Buy My Music On CD Baby!’ cry. This is what at least 90% of all artists do. The listener has not yet had time to get familiar with you, has not yet gained any trust bond, and most importantly, only has one manner of gaining that trust bond – through MySpace.
In the second scenario, the listener has had a contact moment on MySpace, then another one on your official website, and another 2 if he/she read the information on your other profiles as well. And most importantly, since you now have this listener as a contact on not just 1, but 3 websites in your arsenal, just by using your official website as a gate way, you automatically have more manners of building your trust bond with him/her. As time goes by, you can now spread your future contact moments over messages and comments you send them through 3 networks instead of just crowding them with messages and comments on just 1 network. It may seem strange, but this actually works better since the listener doesn’t get the feeling that you’re ‘dumping’ everything on them at once. Instead of seeing 3 messages in 1 inbox, they now see 1 message in each of 3 inboxes. Sure, it’s a bit more work since you’re promoting over multiple networks, but believe me, your ‘return on investment’ (the investment being your time) will be greatly worth it!
One VERY important thing to note with this, is that you never ever send out the exact same message over multiple networks! If you have news to tell your listeners, and you tell them in the exact same way at the exact same time over multiple networks, ’spreading’ your contact moments will not work. The listeners will merely feel like you’re dumping stuff on them even more than they would have if you had used just one network, since it’s all the same information, presented in the same way, sent to them numerous times. It’s like receiving the exact same letter in the mail three times on the same day!
However, it’s logical that when sending out messages over multiple networks, you do need to change your style of writing a little bit. A good trick for this is to first send out a message on one network starting with something like ‘Wassaaap! To just show my appreciation to you, you’re the first one to hear about this!…’ and then sending out a different message regarding the same topic on a different network 2 or 3 days later, starting with ‘heyy there! Some of you may have already heard about this. But for those that haven’t…’ This will turn the fact that you may have sent a certain listener 3 messages about a similar topic into a positive thing. Now, the listener will read the message and think ‘hey! I already heard about that!’ and feel closer to you and more valued in the sense that they ‘knew it before anyone else’. And get this – the listener isn’t even irritated that he received a similar message multiple times! Further more,As you progress, you can switch up the networks. One month, you make the MySpace listeners the ‘first to know’. Another month, the FaceBook listeners. This way, all of your listeners across each of the networks get a chance to feel that ‘first to know’ thrill and feel closer to you!
So, just to sum it all up:
1. Push market yourself to your potential listeners using your various networks.
2. Pull market them to your official website, and in turn, to other networks that you’re part of.
3. Push market yourself to those same listeners accross the other networks as well as the initial one.
Push, Pull, Push… All to the same target: Your Music.
I realize that this post doesn’t quite have an outro, and perhaps not even a steady ’story-line’. Thus, these are just some thoughts I had about my past and existing promotion strategies for artists. Hope this benefitted some of you!
Your friend and T.A.M.P.O.N. expert (The ‘Amazing Music Promotion Online Now!’ expert),
Laszlo.
PS: If you’re looking for an absolutely AMAZING program to help you find, gather and select the appropriate potential listeners (that actually WILL become listeners) and easily, quickly and AUTOMATICALLY send out messages, comments and bulletins to them, check out my review of Friend Blaster Pro.
Filed Under: Music Promotion
