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!

Successfully Growing Your Mobile Fan Base

Take a look at these two charts. They are fan growth statistics from the same Artist, successfully growing their mobile fan base by promoting their mobile site and Apps at shows, on posters and their social media. The charts tell a very instructive story about the effort needed to steadily grow your fan base.

This chart was captured last year around the end of September 2011. The Artist joined Adva Mobile in March 2011 and we spent time creating and organizing the mobile site, building the Apps, and preparing for the launch. When the mobile site was announced in June, there was an immediate rush of fans who joined their site, and a steady growth of fan signing up throughout the year. This chart shows they had about 350 mobile fans after about four months of promotion.

This is a capture of the fan growth chart for the same Artist about two weeks ago. It's very instructive about growing your fan base. This Artist, through a combination of not touring and not promoting their mobile site and Apps, saw fan growth stagnate for the first half on 2012, and then dramatically grow to over 1800 fans once they started telling fans to connect with them on mobile phones.

Growing your fan base takes a consistent effort -it's not hard, but you have to do it every time you're in front of an audience, and regularly post that fans can connect with you on their mobile phones. This Artist has a fan base that is energized about them and regularly engage them on mobile, and can market to these special fans with show tickets, merchandise and music.

HTML5 Frameworks and Hybrid Applications

The one and only solution to develop a native App that runs on different platforms is to develop a separate native application for each different platform, with proper interface, and a specialist developer with skills for the operating system and coding language. Contrast that development environment with an HTML web application that can be read by any phone that includes a web browser.

However, there are some applications that need both:

The ability to be used on any OS- Android, IOS, Windows, Blackberry, etc.
The ability to access Smartphone or Tablet native features, such as microphone, camera, calendar, contact list, accurate geo-location, etc.

In these circumstances, it's possible to use an intermediate solution - hybrid applications.

A hybrid application is based upon the same technologies as web applications - the code is built using standard HTML, CSS and Java Script. Thus, it has the same performance and qualities as web applications.

The code is then incorporated into "frameworks" that allow access to native features of the operating system.

Therefore, like a native application, a hybrid application can access all the hardware devices (camera, microphone, GPS, etc.) and be listed on the corresponding Store. Moreover, a hybrid application takes advantage of its HTML code - easy to update, develop, there's greater design responsiveness, and has long term stability regarding the language used.

There's an argument to be made about whether a musicians app needs to access any of the capabilities of a native OS. The web apps and hybrid apps developed by Adva Mobile in our upcoming HTML5 releases include an HTML5 music player, so even the music player of the smartphone isn't needed. This design choice gives us the flexibility to access native OS capabilities as new requirements for Artist - Fan engagement arise, but for now, we're hard pressed to find a feature on a smartphone that's needed by an Artist to acquire, engage and monetize your fan base.

Thoughts?

Content That's Worth Paying For

I found this terrific INFOGRAPHIC that explains a shift in our buying behaviors.  For the preceding decade, content has been available for free online, both legally and illegally. But people are now buying content because technology is making content more convenient, attractive, relevant and emotional. From iTunes to Amazon, from Netflix to the New York Times.


The infographic is really an advertisement for an upcoming trade show / industry event put on by Business Insider. It's relevant to Adva Mobile Artists because monetizing your mobile fan base has always been the cornerstone of the mobile marketing platform we offer. Here's what the infographic says about content purchases, and how it relates to your Adva Mobile marketing platform:

1. Paying for Content is more convenient: We'll pay for flexibility across devices. We've learned to make micropayments, and pay from our phones. The Adva Mobile Storefront makes it easy for fans to purchase your digital content and physical goods right on their phones. 

2. It's Attractive: the visual web is here, so we can see what we're buying online. Freemium models have taught us to accept higher quality when we pay. The Adva Mobile Storefront lets you distinguish between content you want to give away and content you want to sell, and images associated with the product are presented on your store.

3. Your Content is more Relevant: Your data is everywhere. But options for your fans are scarcer as the big content providers scale back their free services. That gives Adva Mobile Artists more power to engage fans with free and paid for content and products, tailoring bundles to drive revenues. 

4.   We're buying on Emotion: With so much information, and the deluge of choices, we choose purchased based upon how they make us feel. Your Mobile connection to your fans is personal to them and their phones are always with them.

Although mobile purchases are billions of dollars today, we're just at the beginning of a revolution that will see more purchases being made using your mobile phones. Adva Mobile Artists can take advantage of this trend -whether through linking to iTunes and Amazon or using your Adva Mobile Direct to Fan Storefront. Every Artist should have items for sale on their mobile site and Apps.

You can see the infographic in more detail at  http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-content-40-and-ignition-2012-8#ixzz24ORjyS3c

Nuggets from the "Meeker" Report

We've been followers of the Mary Meeker Report for a number of years now. Mary used to do this report when she was at Morgan Stanley and is now at Kleiner Perkins. Think of it as a State of the Union address, but for the Web.

The report, co-authored by Kleiner digital team member Liang Wu, is an in-depth exploration of the global population online: what they’re doing, where they’re going and how they’re consuming the bits and bytes of the Web. This year’s version was released at the D10 conference in May.

It's 112 slides, but you can go through it fast, especially the interesting middle section on re-imagination.
http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends

Some of our favorite nuggets:


Mobile use is exploding, and it can be leveraged for revenue.

Who’s online: According to Meeker’s presentation, there are 2.3 billion global Internet users in 2011 — an 8 percent year-over-year growth rate since 2008, largely driven by emerging markets. Meanwhile, there are 1.1 billion global mobile 3G subscribers. Of the top 10 countries addding users to the Web over the 2008-2011 period, China ranks first and India second — with the U.S. coming in 8th. However, the U.S. comes in second in terms of total Internet users in 2011.

Apple: In terms of mobile device sales in the Apple universe, the iPad left its “siblings in [the] dust,” according to the report, with sales growing at three times the pace of the iPhone and all but obliterating iPod sales — the device that started the iRevolution in Apple’s mp3/mobile product universe.

We're noting this also at Adva Mobile, and our soon to be released next version will deliver HTML5 mobile sites to render correctly on iPads.

Android: The report finds that global shipments of phones on the Android platform have grown four times faster than iPhone over the past 13 quarters. But mobile phones still dominate smartphones, with 6.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, relative to 953 million smartphone subscriptions.

This is why we're bigger proponents of Mobile Web than Apps - you need both, but there are 6 times as many people who can engage you if you have mobile web compared to just an App.

The tablet market grows: In the U.S. tablet ownership is on the rise, with 29 percent of U.S. adults owning a tablet — up from 2 percent less than three years ago.

Mobile, mobile, mobile...: The good news in the report? It’s all about mobile, which accounts for 10 percent of Internet traffic. (In December of 2009, mobile accounted for only one percent of Web traffic.) And with this growth comes cash, with mobile monetization “growing rapidly.”  And when it comes to getting the biggest bang for your advertising buck, the Web — particularly mobile — is where advertisers should turn. Where not to go? Print (of course).

Lot's more nuggets in the report, including the re-imagination section. And thanks to the fine article by Emi Kolawole in the Washington Post for organizing a summary of the key points.

Living the Mobile App - Mobile Web Debate

Nary a week goes by when those of us in the mobile marketing space are not confronted with the continuing Mobile Web vs Mobile App debate. Even if it's overdone, the conversation is healthy. The latest, and directly applicable to musicians, is included in a new Podcast service from called The Upward Spiral Podcast, promoted by Hypebot. You can check it out out here.

It's worth a listen to, if only to get a sense of what the issues are. They make a number of confusing points, like "Artists should make their own HTML5 mobile web sites if they's already making web sites" (are Artists really interested in making web sites?) and a statement that musicians are behind the curve compared to businesses when adopting mobile web (go to any business url on your phone and, just like musician sites, 99% it's not mobile optimized). But they make very good points about millennials experiencing the digital universe on mobile devices, the "market your brand vs. sell your fans" discussion, and promoting your mobile presence from the stage.

I recommend the Podcast. It's the first 20 minutes of their 40 minute podcast - easily digestible.

Thinking About HTML5

An Adva Mobile friend was at a conference in London a few weeks ago and he saw a demonstration of HTML5 capabilities. The demonstration showed a website on a desktop pc, and as the demonstration applied different screensizes, from iPad(tablet) to iPhone (mobile), not only did the content render correctly but the content also changed based on the screen size. The webite was running a javascript program that captured the window size of the requesting device and told the back end server what content to send.

 So, this is real cutting edge stuff. It's absolutely the future, so those of you thinking about a single HTML5 website for your desktop/tablet/mobile experiences are right on. The "requirement" to change content, however, speaks to our position here at Adva Mobile that people engaging bands on desktop and mobile are doing different things depending upon the device. You may have read earlier posts from us that label "snackable" content when referring the the fan's mobile experience. Also, it explains why companies that offer a service to "mobilize" your web site are not successful (these companies arbitrarily eliminate content from your main website), and why a single web site for a band that simply adjusts for screen size won't be effective for your audience.

 As part of our portal redesign we're also creating new mobile website templates, and these will be coded in HTML5. What's needed next are "wireframes" that show the layout - on a web page - of the different content your fans want on different devices: desktop, tablet, and mobile. Once that work was done, we'd be comfortable providing you with a complete digital experience for your fans across all devices, that maintained your brand everywhere.

 We'll get right on it.