Branding Your Musical Domain

As an international traveler, there is nothing more annoying to me in an airport than a lack of signage. More than not having available Internet WIFI, more than not having good food or adequate restroom facilities, more than not being able to change monetary denominations or even grab a bag of Fritos® or a magazine for the next leg of travel, if there is not proper signage in the concourse you could have the best of all these things in your airport and it wouldn’t mean a damned thing. They’re all worthless to a large portion of travelers if you don’t have a way to easily point those people to them.

I watch musicians struggle with branding all the time. In our SCOREcast communities alone the debate over whether it is necessary to have a “logo” or a “brand” comes up almost as much as “which sample library will make me sound more like Zimmer?” [Answer, by the way? None of them.] But more important than whether musicians should invest in a designer to create them the perfect musical Nike swoosh are two things I believe most musicians are lacking in fundamental online presence marketing: An identity, which a lot of young musicians miss the boat on from the start…  and a path… Or, if you wish, “signage”.

Identity

I’ve talked at length before about IDENTITY in your career both in this blog and in several QOR video posts, but if you haven’t gotten the message I’ve tried beating into you, here it is again:

You have to know WHO you are before you can use the tools of image and marketing as differentiators.

If even you — the artist — doesn’t understand what business you are in or what professional goals you ought to be pursuing then how can you expect your potential clients to figure it out alone?

I’ve tried many approaches to this, but no matter what I’ve done I’ve always made three things super clear: I’m a composer, a drummer, and a recording artist. Period. Everything else I do, while important to me (i.e. Professional speaker, author, community organizer (SCOREcast), advocate, podcaster, blogger, *sometime* consultant, etc.), are all things that run secondary to the CORE concentrations that I support as my career focus. There are a hundred things a day coming at me. Things that need answers right away. Things that might be great possibilities both in business or just as life experiences. But keeping my eye on the ball of my three main career spokes keeps me from committing to things that I could be doing but shouldn’t be. As artists (read: people pleasers), it is very easy to say “yes” to people and very tough to say “no”. You might have heard that old saying, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” I’m convinced whoever said that was sitting across the table from a musician, because we are the Kings and Queens of that shit!

Who do you want to be? That’s the first question. You have to be laser-specific or you are going to get crushed. If you say you are a “media composer”, stop for a minute and ask yourself what kind of message that is sending. The reason I want you to ask yourself that is because while you are proudly calling yourself “a media composer”, so are a gazzilion of your closest competitors. How are YOU different? If I lined you up against a wall with twenty other people who also call themselves “a media composer” what would make me choose you over them? “Media composer” is an oft-used phrase now in the composing world because people are willing to be whores for ANY gig they can get and they think that a catch-all phrase like “media composer” is going to cast the widest net for the most potential ROI. I believe that’s a chimera. If I were a film director, the last person I’d want taking care of the baby that I’d just spent two to six years primping and preening is some joker who doesn’t have the experience of a “film composer” and has to call himself a “media composer” to make it sound like he’s done so many projects that he requires a more overarching tagline. I wouldn’t want a “media composer”. That sounds like someone who is spread too thin. I’d want a “film composer”.

But that’s just me. No matter if you agree with that or not, the point is that you need to make clear who you are and what it is that you do. In this day and age of social media over-saturation, people do not take titles at face value the way they once did. You need to spell it out for them. Don’t make your potential clients play guessing games about what you are capable of giving them. Make it easy for them to decide that you are the right partner to hitch their wagon to. Call yourself what you really are and leave the other marketing keywords for when you have actually done the work necessary to claim those other titles.

Path

Once you know who you are and what you are selling, how do you point people to where they can find you? How do you make a loud enough impression in the static that is the competitive industry of music and rise above the noise? You must have a path with clear coordinates as to where you are and how people can find you. In social marketing these are called “access points” or sometimes “on-ways”, as in “How do I get ON your train and take the ride?”

My solution to this is simple: I have a website, DEANEOGDEN.COM. It’s what I consider my home base. It’s probably where you are now reading this, in fact. How did you get here? A number of possible ways. You might have seen a link on Facebook and followed it. You might have clicked a Twitter link. Maybe you saw someone share this post in Quora. Perhaps you are a LinkedIN fanatic and my Twitter feed popped there, which you then followed here. Maybe you and I have simpatico over a long time of communicating with each other, you are an RSS subscriber, and you got the alert in your email that I’d posted something new. Whatever the case, it most likely was not that you just can’t wait to get out of bed everyday and type DEANEOGDEN.COM into your browser’s location bar. You got here through what we call an “outpost”.

Outposts are things like your Twitter feed, your Facebook wall, your Pinterest boards, Google+ page, Quora profile, or LinkedIN account. Outposts are platforms that, if used strategically, can drive traffic to your home base. SO, here is what I do: I keep everything that is of a certain high value at my home base. The goal being that I want people to come back to my home base as much as I can possibly get them to. Why? Because that’s where all the things I’m selling are. My music! Until release, my Eastern Chronicle updates all flow from my home base. All of the projects I’m involved in have pages at the home base. This blog is at my home base. All my photos and event activities can be found at my home base. My bio and an explanation of all the secondary roles I fill (the ones we discussed in the first section) are described and displayed at the home base. EVERYTHING I want potential clients and/or customers to see and experience is at the home base.

Then, I have the “outposts”. The outposts are fun, but they aren’t the home base. Facebook is trying like hell to become people’s “home base”, but I don’t believe that will ever happen for artists. It will for the Average Joe, but not for artists because all artists really have going for them is “individuality” and a platform like Facebook is too uniform and constrictive. That said, Facebook is arguably the greatest outpost on the Web right now. As far as traffic driving, it far out-performs Twitter in terms of core audience numbers for artists (Twitter still does more overall traffic, but not for audience specific traffic driving — hence the barely breathing Facebook sponsored post programs), and Facebook also was never even dented in by Google’s efforts to compete with their Google+ platform. In many ways, Google+ was DOA. Facebook is still the one to beat for musicians, especially if you have a large following on your personal page. Fan Pages are hit and miss for a variety of reasons, but an active personal profile on Facebook is just really tough to beat as a traffic driver to your home base.

Outposts are super important because of what I said earlier — people are conversationalists, not curators. They won’t wake up in the morning, pour their coffee and cozy up to read your blog or listen to your SoundCloud postings (unless they belong to one of those groups that just ass-pat each other about their music, which, believe me, are no good to you). There are too many blogs clamoring for people’s attention and too much music being posted online for two ears to handle on a Monday morning. You need your outposts to the do that work for you. You need your outposts to be the sentinels that go out and get people’s attention and return them back to home base where YOU want them. You need your outposts to be the “town crier” of Internetland, out there doing your bidding for you without you having to do something gross like constantly email people and goad them into buying your latest score on iTunes. Let your outposts do that kind of thing for you. This way, if you have loyal followers who lap up every table scrap you drop, they’ll get all the alerts… But if you have people who don’t necessarily need every single thing you are selling but rather just the “important ones”, then they can adjust their outpost settings accordingly and not be bothered so much by your posting schedule.

In closing, most people do it exactly backwards from how I just described. Their Facebook page IS their home base. Or their Twitter is. They’ve got it bass-ackwards. They are treating their outposts as their home base, and their home base as their outpost. One problem with that is that outposts are extremely limited. That’s why those platforms are so popular. Twitter… 140 characters or less. Facebook… quick and alert happy. Pinterest… don’t even need to leave the page you are on to pin something. Quora… Get answers in 10 seconds from huge minds from all over the world. Outposts are easy and quick. But you really cannot sell yourself on any of them. Not well, anyway. And those companies know that. You think Facebook is interested in selling you? Think again. Why do you think they won’t let you use a text-heavy graphic as your Timeline photo? (Check the fine print… It’s true. They’ll erase it if they find it’s too “branded”)

The other problem is that outposts, eventually, are a dead-end. They only go so far. Once you read a status, it might be funny and clever and make you laugh, but if there’s nothing left for you to do after you read it, what happens? You move to the next person in your feed and read their status. For an artist, that’s bad juju! There is a thing in business called “retention”, and if what I just described is happening to you, guess what? You don’t have any! You aren’t retaining any potential buyers. You aren’t “asking for the sale.”

So, it sounds tricky, but it’s really not. It’s not hard to get this strategy planned out and working properly. If you are the kind of artist who is going about your online presence haphazardly, you might want to re-evaluate because I promise you are being lapped by people who have their shit together. You are getting beat. If you do want to compose music for features or TV or games and you don’t indicate that anywhere in your branding, you are leaving gigs on the table, I can almost guarantee it. The crappy part is that you may not even know it. People may be fighting hard to find you, but you are locked behind a closed Facebook page with pictures of your cat on it.

That might be a problem, dont’cha think?

EASTERN CHRONICLE is my new album that is available worldwide on T-ABC Records. You can download it here on the website in any uncompressed format you can think of. You can also get it in AAC format from iTunes, on MP3 from Amazon.com and in various formats on just about every digital carrier that is out there including Spotify and MOG. If a physical copy is more your speed, the CD is available at retailers throughout Asia and North America.