How well do you know your fans?

Oftentimes you'll hear people say that the purpose of business is to make money, but that's not true. Making money is the result of a business, and it's essential to keep a business going. But it's not the purpose of business. The purpose of a business is to attract and retain customers. For musicians in the business of making money, your business purpose is to attract and retain fans.

Not all fans are equal, however. You need fans that will buy your music and merchandise, and pay to come to your shows. Your "Superfans", or "1,000 True Fans", whatever. What's difficult, besides making great music and just getting fans, is knowing exactly who these fans are so you can personally reach out to them.

I propose that mobile technology provides a solution to this problem better than any other marketing tool available to musicians.

Check out this screen capture:

(We blocked out the email addresses and names because, hey, it's a real list!!)

This is a fan database from an artist on the Adva Mobile platform. It provides their phone number (for reaching them via our SMS Text Service), and their email address  (for sending them email marketing, either through our service or your own email service like Constant Contact, Mail chimp, or Fan Bridge), details about their age, gender and location. Also, the number of page views of your mobile site / App for that fan. It's incredibly useful to know that two fans on this page (circled in RED) have visited you mobile site pages 204 and 106 times since they joined your site. Those fans are checking you out all the time!!

Mobile can provide so much more, however. Here's another screen capture from our soon to be released new portal, showing enhanced fan data (again, real info, so the name is blocked).

With this information, you can learn more about your fans, how they engage you on mobile phones, and what they are interested in. You can target them precisely - even individually - and you can expect great results from your efforts to market and sell to them.

Mobile is a new world of fan engagement and the ability to data mine fan information and behavior on your mobile site and App will improve your ability to make money with your music.

Postscript:

From Jonathan Ostrow and Music Think Tank

Back in November 2010, Jonathan Ostrow  wrote a blog titled "How well do you know your fans?". It was picked up and re-published by Music Think Tank - you can read it again here. It's a decent attempt to categorize fan types to help Artists spend time cultivating fans that really matter. I remembered this article when I was writing the article above, about what Adva Mobile was doing to help Artists figure out who their best fans were.  Enjoy!

More apps may be coming for feature phones, too

There was a great article in CNN Online International Edition yesterday, which you can read at http://bit.ly/eJOlS5, titled "More apps may be coming for feature phones, too."

We like Apps - we now provide iPhone and Android Apps to complement our Mobile Web and mobile marketing platforms. The article points out that "According to comScore, as of January 2011 only about 28% of all mobile phones in the U.S. were smartphones. This means 72% of U.S. cell phones are feature phones, most of which have a broad array of features, including the ability to run Java-based apps." So we're struck by the hype over Apps for recording artists and bands, since they don't reach 72% of your audience.

Article author Amy Garham poinsts out that "One of the great strengths of smartphones is their fully featured, easy-to-use Web browsers. Increasingly these will support HTML5 functionality, which allows Web pages to work more like apps. Since it's much easier and cheaper to develop for the mobile Web than for several native app platforms, a lot of smartphone services that are delivered mainly via apps today probably will migrate to a mobile browser experience."

One question to ask is if the App needs to take advantage of the smartphone feature set to work. If you need access to the phone book, or camera, for example, then a native App is the way to go go. For bands that want to provide what fans are looking for - music, videos, tour dates, news, social net links, etc., you don't need anything the phone offers except the browser. The Adva Mobile platform leverages this strength, providing a consistent experience for fans, whether on iPhone App, Android App or Mobile Web.

Adva Mobile Analytics - Measure Your Success

A music band's fans are essentially its "customers" and you should make every effort to understand and please them. That include's of course, maintaining close contact through a band-specific mobile web and App and other band-management tools, but sometimes, there's no substitute for good, hard analytics. The Adva Mobile service includes incredibly deep analytics to help you identify fans, measure social engagement, find hot markets, discover trends, gauge attitudes, create in-depth reports and more! The Reports tool - part of your Dashboard - is designed to give bands new insight into where their biggest fans are and what they want to hear.

Mobile allows you to collect so much more information about your fans than traditional media, even the Internet and Facebook.

Fan Analytics
o Collected information including phone number, carrier, location, phone type
o Volunteered information including email, age gender, likes, dislikes.

Of course, location is critical. And also, you can test their likes and dislikes to help you craft the right products and approach. Don't discount info like phone type and carrier. If your fans are heavy smartphone/Verizon - AT&T users, they haver more money to spend than Virgin/Boost/Cricket featurephone fans, and that can help you target price points more effectively.

Behavior Analytics
o Activity on mobile website, most visited pages, content downloads
o Graph, statistics and trending analysis

Being able to test over time and measure what fans want to download from your mobile site helps you figure out what they will buy from you.

Engagement Analytics
o The platform allows you to test positions and fan preferences and measure engagement and response

Behavior Analytics allow you to measure what fans are doing on your mobile website. Engagement Analytics allow you to ask questions and engage in contests that measure the response of offers you make to your fans. This can be tremendously valuable in crafting the right set of products for your fans to buy.

The reports and analytics engine that comes with your Adva Mobile marketing platform are a tremendously valuable tool to augment your efforts on stage, on the web, and in print. Take advantage of these knowledge-creating tools and watch your music career explode.

MP3 or M4A (AAC) - Now Your Choice

We've made an important change to your Adva Mobile service. Now, you can upload MP3 files to your mobile web pages.

Since we started, we've always required uploaded music to be in .m4a format (also acalled AAC) - the format used by Apple and iTunes. Most phones played .m4a, and it was easy to convert most other formats, including MP3, into .m4A using iTunes on your computer. Not all phones played MP3.

Some new phones now accept MP3 and also allow you to save the music as a song or a ringtone. This is a great way for you to offer ringtones to your fans by uploading MP3 files of short duration - 30 seconds - and have fans save the file as a ringtone. Phones that allow this automatically save the file in the right ringtome format and in the correct folder.

One issue is iPhones. The iPhone only plays m4a. Most of your iPhone users know that you can't save a song you uploaded to your mobile site - you can stream it, but can't save it. So one drawback to this new MP3 format choice is that many phones now have flexibility with how you save music, but it doesn't work on iPhones.

Over time, all these incompatibilities will dissolve. Remember early PC days, when you had Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Player, etc. You needed the player for each file type. Right now, phones play only specific file types, but this will standardize.