Can You Over Promote Yourself?
Musicians find out how to properly sell to your lists more often.
This article tells indie musicians how they can promote themselves and their merchandise to their lists without having to worry about overselling themselves.
This is a question you should ask have already asked yourself as an independent musician. If you’ve created any merchandise or even just started "your band inc." you should already be marketing and promoting it, as well as yourself. So what is the answer here? Well, sadly, there is no easy answer. Sadly you’ll just have to find out by doing some different types of testing. You see, some people will respond to different marketing tactics in various ways. Just one campaign can be viewed as brilliant to one individual and totally offensive to another. Not only talking about overly sexual/blatantly offensive material here either, no, just sending out an email (even to members on your lists) can rub different persons the wrong way.
So then how do I figure it out as to what’s acceptable in the arena of how much to promote. Simple, just as above, you test the market. Trying various tactics-both hard and soft pitches-in various places and ways will give you the data needed as to how much promoting the average individuals on your lists can take. Realize though that you will have to be sort of detached enough to accept that some "touchy" individuals will immediately opt-out of receive anything else from you just from one more additional email than they are use to receiving. However, generally you as an indie will need to increase how often you mail your various lists. The more times you contact them and stay in touch with them, the more and more intimate your relationship with your consumer/fans will become.
Why is this important? Simply because the more they trust you, the more willing they’ll be to buy from you down the road. Don’t assume every person reads each and everything you send out or that everyone that signs up for your list will ever purchase something. The internet is the land of free products and access and many people don’t feel they should have to purchase things online. Just look at the huge multi-billion dollar copyright mess going on due to file sharing. This is why offering things for free and occasionally intermingling them with your offers will result in the best success. People in general won’t mind your additional mailings if they feel that most of the time they’ll also be getting something free, whether they purchase from you our not. This helps out your bands any way it goes though. Why you ask? Think about it, they are still listening to your free tracks, wearing your billboards–or t-shirts rather, and passing out your free band logo stickers you gave them for joining your email lists.
So in short yes, you can over promote. Filling a person’s email box day after day with relatively the same offers and deals will only result in them regarding you as a spammer and your risking having them block your IP address. So to avoid this, try adding offers to free deals, occasionally/incrementally increasing your email amounts each month and placing in more ads in places that you usually would not in them. It is a delicate balance you need to find here. No musicians or bands experience will be the same though. Some will be able to contact their list daily with offers and personal tidbits while many others won’t. But as time goes on, most people will adapt and more and more you should begin to see better results from your marketing and promotional campaigns. Start this all important testing today and begin your band’s road to marketing and sales glory.
