Unconvention (3): Zero budget marketing

Finally, it is time for the third and last episode of my Unconvention Groningen report. You can read the first parts here and here.

This panel addressed the issue of zero budget marketing and had the following people on stage: Niels Aalberts from the blog EHPO and manager of the recent Dutch sensation Kyteman, Ruth Daniel from Fat Northerner Records (and one of the founders of the Unconvention concept) and Rense van Kessel from Friendly Fire.

The talk was like a continuous stream of interesting experiences and tips about marketing your music with a limited budget. I have tried to gather the different topics in three clusters.

1. Be creative and interesting
To start, you must grab the attention of your audience by being creative and interesting. The first thing to do is, unsurprisingly: create new, good music. If you don’t have great music, you can stop right away, as Lefsetz keeps telling us. But you can also be creative in other aspects of your artist identity. The panel came up with some good cases in this respect. Kyteman did an original action during the 2009 Eurosonic conference, by sending every music professional attending the conference an sms message to convince them to attend the Kyteman show. Kyteman delivered a great show and that was the start of a very successful year. The sms action cost only € 56 and that was in fact the only cost in the marketing plan of Kyteman.
Another creative case originated in the minds of the Dutch band ‘Jurk!’, which is the Dutch word for ‘dress’. They did a guerrilla marketing action by dressing up a couple of statues in Amsterdam with their own branded dress.

Ruth Daniels also showed us a video about the band The Ironweed Project making an original video clip with Sony Ericsson mobile phones.

What is really important, is to tell a story about your artist or music and to have someone to tell this story (Niels is a very good example of somebody telling the story about the marketing strategy of Kyteman behind the scenes). That even doesn’t mean that you should tell lots of details about your personal life on Twitter or Facebook. That might be the story, but creating a mystery around the artist is also a viable story.

2. Understand your audience
Your fans are your most important asset and it is very important to understand them. In the beginning you should always act locally. Your local fans will do the marketing for you and that is the best marketing you can get. It is also important to reward your best fans. Finally, Niels advised that you should pay for some monitor tools to understand and analyze your fans. Of course, you might use Motion Music Manager for that…

3. Some practical points
The panelists (and the audience) also came up with some practical advice.

The first couple of things are more related to dealing with people in the music industry.

• As a starting artist, you should first try to to do all tasks by yourself: promoting, booking concerts, negotiating deals,… The main advantage is that you have a feeling what it should cost if you start paying someone to do it instead of you, because you experienced yourself what the work is like.
• In relation to the case of the guys who shot the music video with the Sony Ericsson mobile phones, it was stated that brands are nowadays more approachable for creative ideas like the one mentioned. They actually gave them phones to record the clip, because it was good promotion for the band and the phone manufacturer. However, we were also advised to not focus on such deals, because you should always be careful about what your fans think.
• Somebody asked whether you should still send CDs as a promo package. Most panelists said that they preferred links to MySpace or Soundcloud above promo CDs. There was some discussion about the dreadful interface of MySpace and it was stated that it is better to use something embeddable like Bandcamp. However, for many people MySpace is still the standard for listening to and discovering new bands.
• In dealing with music industry people, you should always be friendly. Mail back within one day.

Finally, there were some practical tips about dealing with fans:

• Regarding merchandise, there was strong support for the pay-what-you-want model. Some bands experienced that they sold a lot more merchandise with this model than with a fixed price policy. Andrew Dubber came up with the results of an experiment. It is a good idea to work with three prices: € 3 is the minimum price, € 5 is the suggested price and € 8 is the maximum price. Apparently, people pay € 10 at the end of the day.
• There was also a question about working with memberships. Instead of (or subsidiary to) the traditional album model, you provide memberships via your website, where fans can get exclusive content for an annual subscription fee. The model can work, but the panelists warned for one pitfall: you should keep your website also interesting for non-members.

When I look back at my week in Groningen, I must say that the guerrilla-minded Unconvention was more engaging, inspiring and fruitful than the actual, far more expensive Eurosonic conference. When I read the raving comments about the Topspin and Hypebot drink in Cannes, during the Midem conference a week later, it makes you think that the unofficial gatherings on the sideline are more interesting than the actual, traditional and expensive conferences. Maybe it is a good idea to organize an Unconvention during every important music industry gathering. And I just go couchsurfing and don’t pay the ticket for the actual conference.