Onboard Your Fans

You've run a contest at a show, or a shout out about that new

song they can upload. Or maybe a post on social media, telling fans about your new web app. And fans are responding, texting in. Last night, 30 new fans opted in!

Once a fan has opted in to receive your text messages, you don’t want to wear out the welcome mat – or go dark on them. Just as you would welcome your email subscribers with a series of welcome emails, your mobile messaging strategy should help your new fans get to know you, and it can take anywhere from 10 days to 2 months, depending on the journey you want to take them on.

Onboarding New Fans

Remember that fans expect communications that speak directly to their behaviors, preferences, and history with you or your band. As you welcome new fans, keep in mind your targeting criteria – to make your welcome message valuable from the start.

You can use your welcome message to help your fans learn what to expect from their relationship with you. For example, send them to your News Page with an article about what they can expect when they get texts from you. Or, send out a voting contest asking them what they want to get from you – four choices. Run the voting poll monthly, sending a text to all the fans that opted in last month.

When onboarding new fans, pay attention to the time of day. Remember, texts usually come in with a sound on their mobile device. So watch the time zones, and don’t send texts from, say 10pm to 10am.

With the Adva Mobile text service, onboarding new fans is easy. Mark in your calendar twice a month (or once a month). On the Fans – Your Fans page, run a filter of everyone who joined in the last 2 weeks (or month). Send them a welcome message in your text, and point them to a page on your web app that will help them learn more about you (not the merch/Store page, for example, on the first few texts.)

You may not be onboarding thousands of new fans each month at the start, but a “big list” is not the measure of success here. These fans that have chosen to hear from you regularly via text are a smaller, but more engaged group – your superfans. So make it your goal to show them a rewarding, relevant mobile experience from the start.

What's the proper budget for Mobile Marketing?

If you're treating your music career like the small business that you are, you're likely spending some time right now planning for 2015. You're setting goals, making a schedule of activities and trying to predict revenues and match them to a budget of expenses. Marketing is certainly a line item in your budget, and so it's a reasonable question - Mobile is here, what's the right number to dedicate to mobile marketing?

 While the circumstances of small businesses are as varied as the products and services they provide, a very common rule of thumb for small businesses is that about 4% of revenues should be devoted to marketing - all the expense efforts you need to undertake to get new fans and keep existing fans. Promotion, publicity, getting airplay, web site, social media, etc. all are marketing expenses.

What about mobile? Mobile Marketing offers unprecedented ways to reach fans and engage them, leading to a propensity for the fan to support you with purchases. Mobile optimized web sites / Apps, text based campaigns, mobile coupons and offers, QR codes, and other marketing tools can be effectively deployed to acquire and engage fans.

Here again, generally, the 4% rule is applicable. Four percent of your marketing budget should be targeted to Mobile Marketing activities. Here's a brief guide:

Band Revenues Marketing Budget Mobile Budget

$100,000      $4,000    $160

$250,000      $10,000   $400

$1,500,000  $60,000   $2,400

$5,000,000  $200,000 $8,000

Use these percentages as a guide to model your own marketing budget for 2015 and PLAN your way to success! And, if you have other ideas about how much of your budget should be dedicated to mobile marketing, share them here!

The Annual Mobile Readiness Survey

It's time again for our Annual "State of Mobile Readiness" Survey to the Artist community. This simple survey - takes about 1-2 minutes - will help us assess and measure the progress being made within the music industry toward the adoption of mobile marketing . With more and more fans engaging their favorite bands on mobile devices, we're interested in learning whether Artists are thinking about - or using - mobile technologies to connect with fans.

We'll run the survey through January and publish the results in the next Newsletter and here. We conduct this survey annually (this is the third annual survey) to gauge trends and movement in mobile adoption.

If you enter your email address at the completion of the survey, we'll send you the results of the survey and also enter your email into a random contest to win a $25 iTunes gift card.

Besides, it's fun. Go here to access the survey. And Thanks!

 http://goo.gl/forms/OBTDIrpvR1