Adva Mobile at Mass Innovation Nights

Here in the Boston Innovation Economy we regularly brush shoulders with innovative individuals, start-ups and groups who are looking to launch a new idea into the marketplace that could completely change the way we think and act.

Adva Mobile is one of those companies.

One event in the area that does a phenomenal job of gathering such innovators together is Mass Innovation Nights (MIN).

Launched in April 2009, the monthly event showcases ten companies, and the community turns out to visit vendor booths, promote the products via social media and sit in on pitch presentations. In the last two years alone, MIN has helped launch more than 475 products and connect many job seekers with hiring managers.

Adva Mobile was one of the companies presenting our technology at the 51st MIN at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (better known as the NERD Center). There's a brief interview with ME (Adva Mobile founder Jack Kelly - put a face to a name) you can watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KNIOLnyqQ0&feature=youtu.be&t=4m54s .

We're proud to be part of the Boston Innovation Community and helping Artists with cool, useful technology.

Stream Music Right From Your Phone

The new Adva Mobile platform we launched in March is getting rave reviews (THANKS!) and one feature especially is generating a lot of energy. It's the ability to stream music right inside a mobile web page. We think Adva mobile may be the only mobile marketing company offering this capability for musicians today.

Here's a screen shot from the mobile site of Adva Mobile Artist Illogistical Resource Department (I.R.D.). All these tracks are uploaded to the Content section on the portal and fans stream these songs by clicking on the Play button.

What's especially cool about streaming inside the mobile web app is that the fan doesn't leave your mobile site to play music. The way our old system worked, and the way most other mobile web sites work, is that playing music causes the phone to open the music player app on the phone (iTunes on the iPhone, for example) - so you're off the site.

Another terrific benefit to our new streaming feature is that fan's DON'T get to download this music - they can only stream it. So you can put a song up for sale and the fans can buy it and download it if they want to own it, or just stream it if they want a streaming service.

The analytics on all this is also great. We're capturing which fans, are streaming which music, and how many times, so you have terrific vision into which of your songs are getting the most play.

Use The Shoutout to Attract More Fans

The Adva Mobile platform provides Artists with a terrific tool for capturing fan data at their moment of inspiration - your show! It's the SMS SHORTCODE and KEYWORD we give you to let fans text you. This is So Much Better than collecting email addresses at the merch table because it's immediate, virtually error free, and fans are 99% likely to open a text from you - only about 20% will open your emails.

A refresher - the SHORTCODE is the number fans text to. For all of you, it's 88704. The KEYWORD is your personal text word - usually your band name (but can be anything available) It's the Message fans send to 88704. Most begin with GET. So, fans get to your site by texting getbandname to 88704.

But you have to tell them to do that.

How do you do that? Well, you can make Facebook Posts and Tweets, and that works. But by far the best way is at the show, from the stage - The Shoutout.

Mobile is so new, you have to teach your fans about it. You'll come up with your own style. During the show, you can tell your fans they can get a song for free by texting GETbandname to 88704. After a few shows, it will be completely natural, and part of your show routine, and you'll be building up your fan base.

There's a great Shoutout on this YouTube video here. Try a Shoutout at your next show and watch your fan base grow.

Adding Content to your Mobile Web Site

The new Adva Mobile marketing platform for Artists makes it easy to offer content for your fans to enjoy. This content includes pictures, music and videos and are always fan favorites and often the most visited pages. There are a number of different tools you can use to get content to your fans, including Exclusive Content, which offers something in exchange for an email address, and the Store, where you sell your content. But you can also let fans stream your music, download pictures, and watch your videos, and that's set up on the Content page.

It couldn't be easier. From the Portal Dashboard, you select Content from the menu, and that brings you to the content page. Each type of content has it's own creation page - Add Music, Add Video, and Add Photos. For Music and Photos, you're going to upload the content and give it a name. For video, you're going to enter the URL to your video - YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

On your mobile site, your Home Page has a Content link that brings fans to a page where they can choose Music, Videos and Photos. For now, our service supports an unlimited amount of content, and you can continue to change it out to give your fans a fresh new experience when they visit your mobile site. We also keep track of which content is most popular with your fans -helpful info as you target and market to them.

Mobile - Centric Marketing

Bands continually find their way to Adva Mobile for mobile websites and Apps, and discover something else – a marketing platform to acquire fans, engage them and sell to them. That’s marketing (at least the acquire and engage parts). Mobile marketing has become one of the most popular ways to promote your band to your fans. It works when fans opt in to receiving text messages from you and by you sending messages to your fans mobile phones. This can be a great way to find and keep fans buying since studies have shown that people pay far more attention to messages on their phone than they do to things like email. That being said, mobile marketing is just a small part of the total process of making sales. You have to integrate mobile into your total marketing campaign.

Just so you know, mobile, as our way of understanding, reaching and engaging with fans, is the life-giving sun around which we craft the orbit of our marketing campaigns. And the idea that mobile marketing for musicians is the most likely candidate to become the beating heart of your brand will soon be self-evident. 

That’s the message of big brands today. And it’s coming to small businesses, and Artists. 
Just like the big brands recognize:  The promise of persistent availability, the promise of personal treatment and instant outcomes, real-time targeted fan benefits. The at-your- fingertips quality of a whole new kind of always-on Artist – fan experience. 

I remain astonished that the music industry continues to fret over whether “mobile” is really about CRM more than it is acquisition, or “mobile” is simply an additive media channel, or how “mobile” is really about applications (sigh …). 

Artists that “get it” are transforming their brands themselves, as all around us a single, stunning fresh fact of life becomes clearer every day: mobile is changing everything.

If you are responsible for marketing your band, I propose you need to pay a new-found attention to something you may have been missing completely: the simple yet profoundly insightful behavior of people interacting with their mobile phones – and each other.  

Real marketing seeks to attach to the existing behavior of your fans by offering up and inserting perfectly placed instants of value, maybe even magic, into the mix of mobile behaviors currently in play with your fans. 

This article proposes it is time to not simply move mobile onto center-stage of our Artist to fan relationships. It is time to completely rethink the nature and effect of every inch of your brand within the context of mobile. 

The context of ubiquity and transparency. The context of near-frictionless distribution and reach of message and content. The context of empowered devices in the hands of people already transforming their lives in ways that could never have been foreseen. 

The context of stronger Artist to fan relationships, that lead to paying fans.

Some Great Press about the Adva Mobile Launch

HTML5 ARTICLE
March 22, 2013
Adva Mobile Relaunches Free Mobile Sites Helping Musicians Connect with Fans
By Steve Anderson , Contributing TMCnet Writer

While the music industry has changed somewhat in the last few years, with some acts emerging to earn livings strictly from their own efforts, one key point in the concept is still the sheer power of marketing. For Adva Mobile, offering a little help on that front looks to be at the head of the list, and to that end, it's recently undergone a complete redesign and an accompanying re-launch of its mobile sites and its primary website as well.

It's not just aesthetics that brought Adva Mobile to change its sites up; it was also a point of improving functionality. Following the original launch of Adva Mobile, some believed that the feature set was certainly worthwhile--especially for a free offering--but the design needed some help. To that end, Adva Mobile launched a crowdfunding effort in late 2011 geared toward getting cash in on a redesign. With that proving successful, Adva Mobile could then turn its attention to not only a redesign, but also toward adding extra features.

The mobile sites, for example, are all now built in HTML5, making them accessible from any mobile device, while also allowing them to be distributed as native apps on the main app stores, still where many get their apps. That's a great start, but the Adva Mobile platforms also boast SMS text messaging at no charge, as well as a text messaging system that's part of the analytics features.

This allows for an interesting scenario that starts when a fan sends a certain text message to get access to the band's material. The incoming number associated with the text message is stored as part of the artist's own database, which can then be re-used to send followup messages and identify those users who send in. Fans that buy content are also logged accordingly so they can receive further messages about the band's operations and about any new content to follow.

What's more, artists can start to identify "core fans" based on the activity logged, and in turn start providing special incentives for these important parts of any musician's career. This kind of "fan engagement," as it's often called, can help bolster a career.

Though many of Adva Mobile's services are available at no charge, some advanced functions are available on a for-pay basis. Adva Mobile offers a set of e-commerce services at no charge, with artists setting prices for digital content that is then fulfilled with a 10 percent fee. Basic designs are free, and custom designs are available at $1000, with a wider range of designs expected available in the future. Adva Mobile will even handle the submissions process on HTML5 mobile Web apps for a $400 setup fee and $500 per year, or $50 a month.

Adva Mobile has a lot of room to build outward, and the best part is that it already has a sound stock of features to begin with, thus any development it does will simply be augmenting what looks to be an already solid experience. Good marketing is central to any artist's career. It's never enough to simply have a good painting or a good sculpture or a good story or a good song; if no one hears it, sees it or reads it, what good, inevitably, is it? Part of art is its impact on other people, and without that impact, art is largely useless. Adva Mobile looks to put marketing more in the hands of artists, and in turn, get more art out in front of people.




Edited by Brooke Neuman



http://www.html5report.com/topics/html5/articles/331525-adva-mobile-relaunches-free-mobile-sites-helping-musicians.htm

Adva Mobile Portal Launch Press Release

March 15, 2013

Musicians Gain Fans and Revenue With New Adva Mobile Marketing Portal 

Driven by Feedback from Artists and Labels, the new Mobile Marketing Portal is more efficient, relevant and useful

Adva Mobile, the leading mobile marketing portal for Artists using mobile technology to acquire, engage, and sell to fans, delivered a redesigned website and Artist portal today, aimed at helping Artists connect to fans on mobile devices more efficiently. The new design - over a year in the making, with teams from Argentina, Pakistan, India and the US – includes improvements in how Artists reach fans on mobile phones and integrates mobile commerce into their fan engagement efforts. 

The improvements to the Adva Mobile Portal were largely driven by requests from Artists and Labels, who seek to take advantage of unprecedented new opportunities to create loyalty and drive sales through the mobile channel. In addition to the new design, increased functionality was added, including enhancements to the Artist Mobile Store to help digital sales direct to the fan and new capabilities through HTML5/CSS3 – for example, an embedded music player.

Jack Kelly, Adva Mobile CEO, oversaw the redesign and directed the international teams that designed the new website, Artist portal user interface, and new Artist mobile sites and Hybrid Apps. “This should be a huge advantage for our Artist users who will benefit from a better experience as they manage their mobile outreach efforts. Fans will also appreciate the new, clean designs of Artist mobile sites & Apps and new features that engage them with their favorite bands.”

Regarding the new site design, Kelly said “It has a great look and feel. The portal is more personalized and easier to navigate. For example, the new Dashboard is organized to simplify the Artist’s management of their fans, mobile assets, campaigns and activity analytics.” Artists using the new platform have found it more useful, fun, helpful and relevant.

In addition to simplifying the Artist Portal experience, new mobile web and Hybrid App template designs provide a better experience for the fan. Fans that opt in to the Artist site receive personalized experiences that become more relevant as the fan increases his or her engagement with the band.

“We have been aggressive in acquiring new Artists and helping them use our platform to make money.” Kelly said. “Still, I always want to go faster.”

About Adva Mobile
Adva Mobile is a marketing services and technology company dedicated to helping Touring Bands, Recording Artists, Labels and music industry professionals reach, market and sell to their fans on mobile devices. More information can be found at www.advamobile.com