I was at a Bridal Show recently. Not very surprising considering that I'm a wedding guitarist. The surprising part was that I was the only musician there. Truthfully I don't really like the business side of my work. And at the bottom of things to do is selling and marketing. I know it's necessary, but finding ways to tell strangers how wonderful I am is distasteful to me.
The other vendors all had very slick advertising stuff. Banners and other glossy printed material, powerpoint or videos on a continuous loop playing on their laptops, etc. There I sat with my guitar in my lap, a handful of business cards, and a pile of hand-made brochures that looked like a 7th grade class project. Actually that's not fair to the 7th graders. Theirs would probably have been nicer.
One of my colleagues there is a photographer. He also happens to be very good a marketing. He saw my set-up and offered some advice. He said nothing that I hadn't already thought of, but I needed to hear from someone else. A gentle kick-in-the-pants. I will make some additions for the next one.
We also discussed marketing in general. I was about to implement a pretty big change in mine so I told him about it. His opinion is that I'm way off base. So the conversation was interesting and informative. He mentioned a couple of things that I was unaware of and brought a new perspective to a couple of others. He also forced me to simply give my reasons out loud. It's amazing how a brilliant idea in your head, when spoken aloud, can sound so stupid. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I'm definitely thinking about it some more.
In addition to playing at weddings, my business is also teaching. Because most of my teaching is done at a music store, I'm not involved in the marketing end of things. These decisions are made by others. But lately I've been giving some online lessons. I would like to do more of that but have very few ideas about marketing. I've been trying to do some research, but the world moves so fast today that the ideas that I find are usually out of date by the time I find them. The trick is to get in front of the traffic, not behind it. But I can't even find the on ramp.
I've also recorded five CDs. I turned those over to CDBaby.com for worldwide distribution and then sat back and waited for the money to pour in. And waited......and waited.... It turns out that even though they are available through a couple dozen different major sites worldwide, like Amazon and iTunes, so are lots of other recordings. People actually need to go looking for mine. Oh some have randomly stumbled into mine, but that doesn't happen nearly as often as I had hoped.
If and when they do find my music they don't buy the CD or even download it. In today's world they simply stream it. That means that, although I still get paid, the amount per listen is very low. Imagine, if you will, a period..... followed by a bucket of zeros.... followed by the number 1. I made five bucks last week but the total number of streams was the equivalent of the population of three mid-Western states.
I find that marketing is a lot easier when I'm discussing someone else's business and coming up with ideas about how they should spend their money. It's not so easy when it's my money on the line. And, even worse, spending time that could be spent working on other things. Money can be recovered, but not time.