5 Minute Audit: How do successful Underground Music Producers maximise their Social Presence: Using Solardo as a Case-Study


Social Media presence:

The level to which you are able to effectively create engaging content across Social Media and reach your fans.

In the music industry, Social Media can seem like a daunting world of unknowns for someone who just wants to get on with producing music.

However, Social Media is vital to the success of Music Producers: How else can people find you and your music?

This blog will aim to show three areas which successful underground producers, such as Solardo, efficiently use to maximise their Social Media presence and how you can audit your own Social Media presence, with factors to take into consideration for review and to improve.

Brand Identity/Image/Theme

Brand Identity is vital for Social Media success. Building up an image and personality across Social Media allows for fans to identify with the music as their self-expression aligns with the brand identity (Fournier, 1998). In some cases, fans use brands as an extension and expression of personality: think loyalty to a music scene or a genre and the adoption of their cultural norms.

Successful brand identity requires understanding of what is expected of you; its a two-way communicative flow: what the brand expresses and how consumers respond.

For example, take a look at Solardo, successful UK duo specialising in the Tech-House scene.

“Loud shirts, branded snap-caps and enough big-room rollers to bring down a fighter jet” as DJ MAG puts it, the duo have reached success championing a care-free party style. Boasting big bright vintage T-shirts yet playing dark, moody underground tech house, the juxtaposition quickly found them Social Media success leading to several Beatport #1’s, sell out tours and the launch of a successful record label, Sola.

Having a coherent and consistent brand image quickly allows you to build a story and attract new fans.

But what are the components?

  • Easily identified: Your image should quickly be recognised by fans, consciously or unconsciously.
  • Relevant: Is your image relevant to the music your are producing? Use creatively to create somethings that unique, but also makes sense.
  • Consistency: Brand image can change over time, but not constantly changing and sending mixed signals to your fans prevents confusing, and allows the development of super fans who begin to identify with you beyond one simple track.
  • Memorable: Several factors can make a brand memorable: Imagery, Slogans, Style. But something should make it memorable. Something should make you unique to the fans. What you want as a producer, is for someone to hear a track or to see a flyer and instantly know it’s your brand.

Social Media Consistency & Presentation

Simply adopting a brand is not enough, you have to present this across all Social Media channels consistently.

Again using Solardo, lets take a look at the presentation of their Social Media channels.

Now, this may look relatively simple, but its effective. Using their Brand Identity, they’ve created a consistent Social Media image. As well as this, they have taken the opportunity to market their events through available covers and profile pictures across the networks.

Heres some points to create a coherent Social Media image:

  • Have you used the same/similar display pictures?
  • Have you used available visual space in a consistent manner?
  • Are the colours and themes similar and match your brand identity?

An important yet simple step. Have a look at your Social Media accounts and you can quickly adopt a consistent image across the various platforms.

The success of this step largely stems from Human Psychology: we like our expectations and reality to match up and be consistent. This is known as Cognitive Consistency Theory. Marketeers use this as a subconscious method to increase appreciation; making the entire consumer experience friction-free and the content more attention grabbing and shareable.

This may seem like a big leap, but after deciding and developing your brand, you have to then implement it: that is why the outlook of your Social Media is important; it’s how fans begin to perceive and interact with you.

This area should be constantly reviewed with your overall aims & objectives. Are you trying to sell your tracks? Sell tickets to shows? Whenever you create Social Media content you must consider the overall presentation.

Content & Engagement

This area is huge, with plenty of thoughts and considerations to made. Ultimately, you are providing content to your fans that promotes your aims & objectives: Sales, Bookings etc.

Creating content can be challenging task. Making it engaging even tougher. This section aims to try help and provide tips to help improve this area.

When creating content, you must think what the utility of it is to the consumers? Why are you making this content?

There are many types of content: Videos, Pictures, Articles, Tutorials etc. To increase your Social Media presence, you have to create content that engages your audience.

How do you know you are making engaging content? Every Social Media platform provides analytics to reach and engagement. Use this to your advantage: Track what content has the highest, which is the most shared. As well is this, monitor which content does best on each platform. Instagram is heavily focused on pictures, Twitter lends to jokes, insights and memes. Facebook for videos. Snapchat for daily insights. Soundcloud for track previews. This is just a generic way of using them – mix and match, be creative, be unique!

Here are some points to keep in mind:

  • Does the content provide Utility? In other words, is it interesting? Does it create an emotional response? Boring content will be ignored!
  • Is the content shareable? Shareable content will engage people more and lead to a greater reach. Consider including ‘Call-to-actions’ to encourage sharing. Make sure you content provides the ability to share
  • Is the content consistent with your brand? A constant throughout this blog: Consistency. Keep your brand in mind, make sure you share across all your platforms.
  • Don’t Spam! If you take one thing from this, take this one: spamming links will lead to disengagement entirely. Always posting links to your tracks and mixes without offering any other value will be ignored. Every DJ & producer does this! Think about how you consume music. Do you find it through these links, or through interesting content? Try to incorporate your promotions without being obvious!

Solardo, again adapted an effective content strategy.

“If they knew a particular DJ was into their records, they’d drive the length and breadth of the country to see them play, hoping to hear one of their tracks being played out. They’d then video the track being played (and the all important response from the crowd), and get it straight up on Facebook and Twitter”

“It was how we got ourselves out there so quickly,” says James. “We’d be at the festivals and raves all around the country, and be catching these big artists playing our tracks. We then had this content we could use. We’d start popping up on people’s timelines more and more often.”

They’d find YouTube footage of old school raves, and put their own tracks on top of it. Instantly, they were creating fun, shareable content for their fans, while also getting their music out there and listened to. Artists pay good money for forward-thinking marketing strategy like this, but Solardo have done it all for themselves.” – DJ MAG

Summary

Hopefully this blog provides some useful insight into building your Social Media presence. By using comparisons to those that are successful the audit points through the blog, you can assess and review your progress. After all, its a dynamic and changing market: you have to learn what your audience wants and when it wants it, this is always changing! Mistakes will be made and lesson will be learnt but understanding the impact of these areas can help to improve your overall Social Media marketing strategy.

References

  • Chung K. Kim, Dongchul Han, Seung-Bae Park, (2001) The effect of brand personality and brand identification on brand loyalty: Applying the theory of social identification, Volume 43, No. 4, 195–206 Special Issue: Consumer behaviour.
  • Fournier, S. (1998). Consumers and their brands: developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 24, 343–373.
  • Lau, R. (1989). Individual and contextual influences on group identification. Social Psychology Quarterly, 52, 220–231.

Further Reading:

25 ways to increase your social media presence

DJ Marketing: Social Media Tips

December 1, 2017 Uncategorized 1 Comment on 5 Minute Audit: How do successful Underground Music Producers maximise their Social Presence: Using Solardo as a Case-Study

Estate Agents: Four areas of discussion to kickstart your blog!

For any online company, A blog is an effective way to boost your SEO, establish yourself as a thought leader and create new content for your followers.

Within Estate Agency, blogging wouldn’t necessarily be something you consider critical for your business, however with operating online it becomes a key, cost effective cog at generating traffic, boosting your search rankings and giving a great way to network with others within the industry.

A previous blog showed how blogging is a key tool for SEO, but now you want to start one, what topics can you discuss?

By looking at what other top players are discussing in their blogs, you can understand a quick way to kickstart your blogs, sharing your own unique expertise in each area.

There are wide varieties of topics that can be covered, however by looking through different agents’ blogs, you can see certain topics crop up and provide a great basis for discussion around the industry:

  1. Elements in the local area 2. Resources for Buyers and Sellers 3. Home Maintenance 4. Finance

Further discussion on this topic:

– Elements in the Local Area:

A key topic for buyers and sellers in the local area, looking to gain a full perspective of the local community. This is very dependant on where you are based, e.g. London versus Brighton versus smaller towns and villages.

Furthermore, content ideas are never too far away. Local newspapers and online communities provide great topics that are current and relevant to your target market.

You will still find many areas that can be discussed, regardless of size. Here are some suggestions:

  • Information about local amnesties: Schools, Jobs etc
  • Focus on local businesses
  • Cost of living discussion
  • upcoming events in the area: Gigs, Sport events and other interesting activities

Here are some blogs written by other agents:

Further ideas can be generated by making sure you are keeping an eye on local news. Interacting with other businesses creates opportunities to cross-promote.

–  Resources for Buyers and sellers 

A key area for estate agents. Providing as much useful information to buyers and sellers as possible increases the chances they’ll trust you to use your services. This provides an opportunity to establish the estate agency reputation as reliable and trust worthy. Content ideas should naturally come to estate agents in this area. Particularly consider the blog ideas from the perspective of the customer, to avoid bland and boring blog ideas. Keeping ideas specific with unique insights to each topic should ensure they remain relevant and interesting.

Here are some key areas you can discuss:

  • Checklists before moving home
  • Step-by-step process of closing a deal
  • Comparison pieces explaining property prices
  • Tips for landlords
  • Mistakes people make when selling their homes

 

–  Home Maintanance

Another area that you can provide great advice is in how to maintain your home. Wether this is advice in helping someone sell their home in great condition, or providing after-sales advice. This area helps cover the latest in building trends and safety regulations. Again another great opportunity for synergy by recommending local businesses in each area, like landscaping or plumbing.

Ideas for discussion

  • Building trends
  • Safety in your home
  • Pest Control
  • Gardening tips
  • Energy saving tips

They key here is to ensure relevancy to the readers and share extra insights and know how, to help make better decisions.

– Finance

A huge area for anyone buying, selling or letting in the industry, as well as those behind the scenes in the industry. This is the area to share specialised relevant advice that directly affect the readers pocket. Discussion around mortgages, salaries, budgeting, value offerings of services etc should be well received. It is important to consider the role your blog has in the industry. If you focus on sales you may focus on price comparisons, credit scores and the local job market, whereas a landlord may focus more on home maintenance.

Further ideas:

  • mortgage advice
  • Credit Score advice
  • Tax insights
  • Property price discussion
  • Local cost of living
  • Jobs

These ideas above, with help from establish estate agency blogs, should help create new blog ideas within the property industry. Even if your company does not directly sell property, it can still offer value in each area. Furthermore, the blog acts as an outlet to discuss more than just the industry environment. It can help create discussion around certain topics and be a way for the company to share internal news, or create competitions etc.

Each area chosen is likely to be an area that really interests people, however, further considerations for SEO can be made, to include certain keywords and topics on your blogs.

Widening your blog strategy to create networking opportunities is also a great consideration. Exchanging guest blog opportunities creates connections as well as further backlinks. Reviewing businesses in exchange for services or advertisement placements is also possible.

Overall, these areas should provide a solid basis for content within your blogs, with further consideration and ideas can help develop and grow your networks, reach new customers and grow your business.

Example blogs can be accessed here:

Keatons

Your Move

Hunters

Tepilo

 

April 8, 2018 Uncategorized No Comments on Estate Agents: Four areas of discussion to kickstart your blog!

How blogging can improve your businesses SEO

SEO Image

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of which using different techniques, a business attempts to rank its search listings higher in search results. The aim of which is to create increased web traffic, creating more leads and ultimately increasing revenue.

According to Zhang & Cabbage (2016), SEO has three main strategies: Content, Link building & Social Sharing.

Blogs are an option which helps with every section of SEO, on top of its benefits for content marketing and brand building. Blogs can be adapted to budget and also provide ways to build new networks online and in your industry, creating two-way communications and deeper personal relationships with your target market.

Heres how blogs can help with your content, link building and social SEO Strategies:

Content:

Search Engine algorithms preferentially rank sites which are providing fresh content. A website publishing consistent new content will rank higher than an equal website that isn’t providing new content. By having a blog, you have the ability to consistently add new content to the website.

Googles algorithm prioritises content which can help solve peoples everyday problems. Remember, Search engines aim to provide the most useful and relevant search results. Furthermore, if you’re helping people solve problems, you’re content is more likely to be shared across social media and lead to higher SERPS (Search Engine Ranking positions).

You should aim to create content that can be seen as different or unique in the field you are in. incorporating various content types can help, such as: Photography, Videos, Podcasting or Tools & plugins.


Read more about content here: What kind of content will crush it for your business?

Link building:

For those new to SEO, “link building” or “Backlinking” may be new concepts, but are vital to good SEO. Blogs provide a great opportunity to create natural backlinks to your own content. Guest posting on blogs helps also create good backlinks, as well as creating a natural opportunity to network and share your expertise. You have to be vigilant with guest posting though: Quality content is king. Many guest posts out there could just be used as a way to build a high quantity of links, with little quality. Therefore, when using guest blogs, rather than see it as a link building exercise, see it as a chance to share high quality content then link build. Writing for blogs with higher domain authority could land you a higher SERPS, then with good quality anchor links lead to increased traffic to your site.

Further tips:

Don’t buy backlinks: Google and other Search engines are cracking down on blackhat SEO such as this and will remove you from search results if caught.

Domain authority matters: The quality of the backlink matters, a longstanding high authority link as well as .edu or .gov links will have a massive effect on your SEO.

Read more:

Beginners guide to to Backlinking

How to build high quality backlinks

Using Guestographics for SEO

Blackhat SEO: Techniques to avoid

 

Social Sharing:

Combining your blog with Social Media will help to extend your reach and attract new visits. High quality content will also mean your blogs share ability will be much higher. This means that your ranking will increase as search engines perceive highly shared content as relevant and trustworthy. Furthermore, this creates further links to your site and helps your SERPS.

Different platforms have different best practices, so reading further into that may help. However, in the same way that quality content is king for SEO, it also rules on social media; increasing engagement and therefore how much it is shared. Ensure you’re putting out the best content you can, then matched by a solid social media strategy can provide good results for SEO. Even better, if you have a decent budget for your blog, you could utilise paid social ads on Facebook for example, to ensure the content is seen by those most likely to enjoy it.

There has been discussion on to what extent sharing affects rankings, and whilst its been shown that it has a positive effect, engines are still using links as the long standing method of establishing authority.

Further tips:

Ensure you provide a call to action to share the blog, as this means people will be more likely to do so.

Keep share ability in mind when creating your content

 

Read more:

5 Ways to improve your blogs social sharing

8 plugins to help social sharing for wordpress

 

Other key points:

Each blog posts provides an opportunity to rank for a key word –

Take advantage of useful plugins and tools that can help with your SEO – Here are some suggestions:

  • Market Samurai: See where you and your competitors are getting backlinks from
  • Google Search Console: See how Google views your blog – How it appears in search, what position, how many people clicked the link etc
  • Google Sitemaps plugin: Generates a sitemap you can then submit to Google to help your rankings
  • All-in-one SEO Pack: Multiple little devices to help SEO.
  • There are many other tools & plugins designed to help for SEO. Check out this article to see various types and how they can help.

 

There are also plenty of other useful insights into SEO from other companies and bloggers which can help get stuck into the details of different topics, with blogs such as Moz or the plentiful results of a search (should be the case from SEO specialists!)

Overall, its best to keep in mind Google and other search engines aim to provide relevant and useful content to its users, therefore its algorithms will be setup to find those. Ensure the content you provide is top quality first in order to drive results, keeping in mind how you can solve peoples problems in your industry.

References:

Sonya Zhang & Neal Cabage (2017)
Journal of Computer Information Systems Vol. 57, Iss. 2, 

 

February 25, 2018 Uncategorized No Comments on How blogging can improve your businesses SEO

How can aspiring Music Producers utilise Instagram to increase Brand engagement?

Brand Engagement: Defining Brand Engagement can be ambiguous; some companies simply define a Like on Facebook as engagement, whereas others only count actual sales as engagement. Therefore it’s important to define your overall objectives, how your brand interacts with these objectives and how you can measure and improve engagement to ultimately reach your deliverables!

Every producers goal is to grow and succeed, sharing their music with the world. With the ever increasing prevelence of social media, it is increasingly vital to have a strong digital marketing strategy in order to make that happen.

There are many roles within the Music Industry for producers, such as engineering, ghost production or being a fully fledged artist. Each provides unique marketing challenges and different target markets (the 18-34 marketing being key for Music producers and they are the most likely to be on social media). This rings especially true for Artists looking to share their music with the world and create a strong brand around what your music. Instagram fits into the equation as a piece to the digital marketing jigsaw (with a strong reach among 18-34 year olds, only second to Facebook), allowing a user to deliver throughout online marketing channels, such as Online PR, Viral Campaigning  or Advertising. The usage of these channels feeds into the creation of a Brand identity, which customers interact with. Engagement is the term Marketeers use to measure how often or how strong customers are interacting with your brand.

What does this all mean for producers and the use of Instagram?

Instagram is a strong option for artists to consider to engage fans. With the competition fierce (Over 18 million posts for the hashtag “#DJ”), optimising your brand can help you standout: With nearly 500 million users and a unique platform for sharing visual content, it provides an opportunity to create a deeper connection, strengthen brand identity and create personal insights. This means that the customer journey is enhanced and more engaging, meaning fans are more likely to come to your shows and buy your music and therefore get you more bookings. as Smart Insights/Dave Chaffey puts it: A digital marketing strategy is a consumer strategy. 

 

This blog will aim to provide a few tips to maximise the usage of Instagram to build meaningful and quality brand engagement, but also some negative points to avoid.

  1. Create quality content -> Create Brand recognition and engagement

Sounds simple, but the first tip is to start by creating quality content. By creating high quality content, fans are likely to continuously re-engage with you as you start to build a strong brand relationship with them.

An easy way to start creating quality content is to create content you’d personally enjoy: think what content your taking in from others.

Instagram revolves simply around pictures and video. For producers, there are many content choices you can share, such as these (Taken from Danny Savages guide to Instagram for DJs)

Content message on Instagram is different than to say Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter relies on how shareable the post is to extend organic reach (share, retweet) whereas these options aren’t prevalent on Instagram. Instagram fits into a marketing strategy to extend your offering simply beyond releases and mixes, to build a relatable persona and brand and engage your fans.

Producers should use Instagram to offer further content to their fans and create a personal connection with them. This means, rather than post continuous promotional content, aim to post content which is personal and engaging instead. This will likely reinforce your brand in a way which when they come across promotional material (maybe on another social media network) they’re are more likely to respond to the call to action. Furthermore, Instagram is limited when it comes to sharing links. This means that promotional material directing them elsewhere (e.g. Beatport) is likely to be unsuccessful.

As well as this, Instagram continues to evolve and allow new content types. Similarly to Snapchat, you can now share stories and highlight them on your profile, or stream live content and interact with fans. Consider using all types of content to maximise its impact and engage with your fans.

 

2. #Hashtag strategy

Hashtagging on Instagram is a vital way to extend your reach and find new fans. It provides a way to showcase your content to new fans who are interested in the overall hashtag topic you’ve selected. In comparison to Facebook or twitters sharing or retweeting, this is your way of extending you reach to new people.

On Instagram you are allowed up to 30 hashtags per post, and its worth using all of them. Here are some points to keep in mind:

  1. Keep hashtags relevant: You may want to include general hashtags on Instagram you may have seen such as #like4like or #instadaily, however these aren’t relevant and will not find you new fans interested in your content. Try hashtags that include location, genre etc. As well as this, Keep to hashtags that people may be searching through!
  2. Engage with the Hashtags you select: Hashtags provide a great way of finding potential fans of your content, think of it like a filtering method. Maybe they are other producers/DJs, maybe they are label managers. Like & comment on their posts and engage with the community. This can lead to them also checking your content out and following you!
  3. Avoid using bots: Organic growth will likely mean a far stronger level of brand engagement. You may come across services which basically seek out similar individuals and aim to convert them to follows, however what you’ll find is instead of engaging others, you’ll disengage them and have less impact from your posts
  4. You can post hashtags in your own comments rather than in the description. This can make your posts look “cleaner” or more “professional”

Read more on Hashtags:

List of Optimised DJ Hashtags

The Complete Instagram Hashtag Guide

3. Create a business profile and use Insights to optimise Engagement

Since Facebooks takeover of Instagram, you can now create Business pages which provide call-to-action buttons and give you unique access to Insights on every post or story. This can help you gather an idea of who is consuming your content and how you can engage them.

Insights allow you to see when your followers are most active, what gender they are and what age range they are. This should give you a strong indication of when you should be posting in order to provide the highest utility to your followers. This data should be reviewed and brought into your strategy and carefully considered. You can monitor how this data changes based on your frequency of posting, or how much your reach varies from post to post. This data can also help you understand what content is particularly effective. Taking note of when your promotional material goes down particularly well, or when you share a funny post, or wether your video received much engagement will be a response to this kind of data.

This section will provide data evidence of wether you content strategy is working. Use it to review what is working, what isn’t working and what you can change

As well as this, you can potentially combine insights from tweets and Facebook posts, to identify you core audience, looking of trends to which they are responding across platforms. This kind of insight can help modify your brand positioning, your frequency of content… anything you choose to review!

Read more:

Short blog on Insight metrics: How to use Instagram insights for Business

4. Don’t ignore Instagram Ads as a Content Strategy

By linking your instagram to your Facebook page, you not only gain insights but you can also create cross platform sponsored posts. These allow you to use calls to actions and links to elsewhere.

Consider the customer journey, you’ve just released a track and you want the maximum amount of people reaching the Beatport order page in order to purchase. You’ve built hype amongst your following by showing previews, artwork, crowd reactions etc now you want to capitalise on this. Consider posting a short clip using your track and using a sponsored post in order to extend your reach and include links.

Some points to consider:

  1. device: increasingly, people are using the mobiles to consume content. In general music may not sound great on these devices (unless using headphones), so will they likely purchase thanks to what they’ve heard?
  2. Cost: if the response or targeting is ineffective this can be costly. always keep in review regardless of budget size wether you are achieving what you intended.
  3. Targeting: if you have used your insights to build an idea of your target market, you can use this customer identity to reach further fans – again review to make sure results are as expected

Find more info on Instagram Ads:

The complete guide to Instagram Advertising (BufferSocial)

5. Use Instagram to cross promote content across social media

  1. You can link your Twitter & Facebook accounts so you can post content across each social. Consider doing this when the content works for those platforms as well – This increases reach as your socials have different bases, but also reinforces content to those who see it again (This can be good or bad, depending on if the content is good or bad)
  2. Link your Facebook to kickstart your followers: If you haven’t already, link your Facebook and follow your friends. Yes, there may be one or two you’d rather not follow, but you can unfollow them after. This method means your are likely to be followed back due to your personal relationships and they are most likely to have the strongest connection when you are getting started with building your following
  3. You can share on key link on your profile page – In the “website” section. This can be whatever you want, but make it the most important link you have (A personal website) or a link you have provided a call-to-action from in an earlier post (such as free downloads)

Conclusion

Brand Engagement is a topic you should be considering throughout all your marketing decisions in order to achieve profitability, growth and success. Marketeers are constantly looking for ways to measure and improve Engagement but this entirely depends on the Brand – Customer relationship.

For producers, Instagram provides a channel of communication which suits the content provided: Music videos, release artworks, live videos, stories… Therefore optimising your marketing strategy to provide great quality content and create a highly engaged Instagram fan base can allow you to cut through the noise and stand out.

References:

Hootsuite Social Media Management. (2018). The Complete Instagram Hashtag Guide. [online] Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-hashtags/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

Savage, D. (2018). A DJ’s guide to Instagram – Danny Savage. [online] Danny Savage. Available at: http://dannysavage.com/instagram-for-djs/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

Socialdraft. (2018). A List of Optimized DJ Hashtags for Instagram to Get More Engagement. [online] Available at: https://socialdraft.com/dj-hashtags/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

YouTube. (2018). Hashtags On Instagram (Secrets 99% Of People Don’t Know). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxcrUeRepNE [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

 

January 7, 2018 Uncategorized No Comments on How can aspiring Music Producers utilise Instagram to increase Brand engagement?