Hi and welcome back. So today we are finally going to get to the issue that we've referenced many times over the last few lessons. This question of marketing, we've talked about defining your product, we've talked about how to define your market and market segmentation. And now we have to put that all together into a process called marketing, which is how we promote our brand with our audience and with our perspective audience. All right, so let's start by just sort of getting into that word. Oftentimes when you say marketing to somebody, the association is a negative one, right. It's like, it's manipulative or it's somehow maybe even fake, that it's intrusive, that it's just about image and not substance, right. And I won't pretend that marketing is sometimes like that, right. I won't try to deny that. But it doesn't have to be that way. And I think in the arts, it became a really important part of how we promote our career, how we build our career. Because if it is authentic and if it is carefully thought out, it is reaching people with the presence of art in their lives, even if it doesn't mean that they become one of your customers, if that makes sense, right. It's just putting it into the community dialogue in ways that I think are really important, but only if it's authentic and only if it is carefully put together. So we're going to talk a little bit about that all today. Now at its heart, marketing is really about relationships, okay. So that's the first misconception that people have and I think of marketing and think of advertising. And advertising is part of marketing, but it's really only a very small part of it and is becoming less and less a part of marketing in this digital age. It still serves a role and depending on who your target market is, it might still play a significant role. But marketing is so much more than that, it's about managing the relationship between you and your existing customers or audience. We'll use those terms interchangeably by the way, customer and audience, same thing and your prospective customers and audience members. So really we have to think about all of this in terms of managing a relationship with individuals. Because remember, the market is made up of individual consumers people, right. And it's important to remember that and not get stuck in a kind of abstract sense about what the market is, the market is people. Now, I'll put a little caveat here at the beginning of the thing. Marketing has become an incredibly complex discipline since it became kind of a thing in the 1950s. It was certainly a thing before that, but it became codified as a field in the in the 1950s. And now, with the advent of things like big data and algorithms and all of the things that AI and technology are putting into the marketing space, it's become incredibly sophisticated in way beyond the scope of this course. Okay, so there may be some business courses here on Coursera that are about marketing and you might want to check those out if this is really fascinating to you. What I'm trying to do here is to give those of you particularly who are solo freelance musicians and are wanting to know how to help build your brand. I'm trying to give you enough tools and information to do that effectively. Or if you are a small arts group, a band, a chamber music group or whatever, that's still kind of in that same category of just ordinary people like you and me trying to figure out how to build our career and advance our course. So, that's what I want you to take all of this in the line of, I am not a marketing professor and I'm going to share with you things that are considered to be sort of standard marketing principles and try to apply those to our musical context. All right, so let's get started. So, I want to start by remembering the entrepreneurs maxim again, this is going to keep coming up. The market will value the product that meets its need or needs. All right. So, we've talked about defining our product, defining the need, articulating the value that we hope our market will experience. And we've talked about actually defining the market itself through market segmentation and through our research. So now the question is, how do we connect this entrepreneur's maxim with our market through the activities of marketing, okay. Step one is to remember your value proposition. So this is again the entrepreneurs maxim put into specific form for a specific product. So what is it that your marketing? What are its key attributes that you feel are most important to your market? The things that is going to create the value for them, okay. And who is them, right? Who is this for? Who is your market and why do they want it? Why are they going to care about this thing? And if they're not familiar with your product that's why those key attributes are so important because you have to communicate those things. Somebody doesn't know you from Adam, you cannot assume that they will understand why what you're offering is of any value whatsoever to them. Okay, so it's more about, it's more than just this is what I do, hey come support me, right. That's sort of the advertisement that's just sort of scatter shot out to the winds and we hope that somebody will connect with it and that's not going to be an effective way to promote you or your group. All right, so you have to zero in on those key attributes. Those are where the five adjectives that we talked about when we were talking about the brand identity. These key attributes are at the heart of that. So I hope you can see how all these pieces are beginning to weave together to create a coherent strategy, okay. Okay, so the second step in creating a marketing plan is you've got to remember what I said a minute ago, which is that marketing is about developing relationships, maintaining, nurturing relationships. And there's a really, really handy tool that marketers use to conceptualize this. And it is called the marketing funnel. So here's a nice illustration of it and we'll just sort of walk through these things one by one. So probably most of these descriptors here on the left are self evident, right. Awareness means this is the first contact with a potential customer, okay. This is somebody who maybe has never heard of you and that first step will be one of making them aware of you, okay. And when we talk about marketing channels, we'll talk about how to do that. Okay, so that's that first one where there's just, there is knowledge that you exist, but that is that is all. They have never experienced you. They've never even done any research or anything like that, okay. So this could be a mail or in the mail. It could be an ad that they see on social media and they are now aware that you exist, okay. Now consideration is where that awareness peaked enough interest in them that they decide they're going to look into this a little bit more closely, okay. They're going to visit your website where they're going to start following you on social media and begin to observe the things that you're doing and maybe they get on your mailing list, okay. And they're now sort of waiting to see if they want to actually pull the trigger and purchase a ticket or take a lesson or whatever the issue is going to show up to your club, where you're playing that weekend, whatever it might be higher for their way. So this is the consideration stages, still haven't done anything other than they are now aware and they are now kind of following you, right? Of course activation is exactly what it sounds like. They have decided, I'm going to pull the trigger here. I'm going to buy a ticket for that concert or I'm going to hire your band for my daughter's wedding, whatever it might be. Okay, so activation is the moment of the initial purchase right now. Hopefully if it's a concert series or playing in a venue or club or a lessons or any of those sorts of things, hopefully they will want to do this again, right? [LAUGH] Not just okay, I'm going to take one lesson with you and decide that I don't like you and I'm never going to talk to you again. That that would be a failure, right? [COUGH] So you really want to hopefully encourage them to do a repeat activity. I suppose in a wedding band maybe, [LAUGH] maybe that wouldn't be so good. Maybe you'd have skip letter D if it's a wedding band situation, but okay, so now they're becoming a little bit more regular customers to you. Now loyalty means a deeper degree of that commitment to you or to your organization, your band, right. These are the folks who, if you have a concert series let's say, they're going to buy a season subscription for this thing, right? They're not just going to come to a concert. They're going to buy a subscription, they're going to buy the ultra. Or if you regularly play at a certain club, your band or something like that, they're there every Friday, right when you play, they want to take in everything that you do, okay. So that's what we mean when we talk about loyal customers. And advocacy means that now they are promoting you to all of their friends. They're not just showing up every Friday night when your band plays at the club, they're bringing all their friends, okay. Not only are they buying a subscription, year after year, after year to your concert series, but they are bringing their friends and encouraging them to buy a season subscription as well. If you are a non profit organization, maybe they decide that they want to start volunteering or they want to serve on your board of directors, okay. And you notice that the funnel is in fact funnel shaped right, particularly in these first few steps the numbers are going to shrink dramatically. Okay, so for every person you make aware, only a certain number of them are going to start considering you and only a certain number of them are going to activate with that first purchase and even if you are going to repeat, right? And then once we get down into that sort of the lower part of that repeat activity, then loyalty, advocacy, those are much more likely to continue at the same, approximately the same number of people, okay? Because once they've gotten all the way down to letter E the continued loyalty and advocacy, they don't take care of themselves, but they're much more likely to maintain. And we will talk about how to maintain those relationships because the goal, of course, is to advance people down the funnel and to advance as many as possible down the funnel, right? And so there's different strategies, marketing strategies for each one of these steps. And it becomes, as we go further down the funnel, especially once we get down into the green, blue and purple zone, it becomes much, much more personalized and personal. So now we're not just talking about managing relationships sort of in the advocate. Now, we're talking about you having a connection with Joe Smith, specifically about their support for your organization or how they might be continued to be involved and so on and so forth. Okay, so this is this idea of the marketing funnel and it's a great way to think about the different sort of stages of engagement with your musical product. And it also means that at any given time you've got people all over the funnel, right? It's not just a single one dose once a year gets poured into the funnel or something like that, this is an ongoing process. And you're going to have people who are just at the awareness level, you're going to have people at consideration, you're going to be right? So you have to be managing all these moving parts at once, if that sounds scary and intimidating it needn't be, but it's not an insignificant task, but it's critically important. Now, as I was saying, how we apply this marketing funnel is going to be different for different sorts of situations. So as we wrap up this first lesson, be thinking about what your particular situation is. Is it running a concert series? Is it being a band that performs in clubs? Is it a teaching studio? Is that an individual freelance performer of some sort, right. And begin to ask yourself, what are the tools that I would use to advance people down this funnel, to create awareness and to hopefully continually solidify the relationship that you have with them? Those tools are what we call marketing channels, and we've referred to that term before but that's what we're going next. What are the tools that you can use to advance people further down this marketing funnel? Tune in next time for the answer.
