Marketing by the numbers

Working with musicians, you hear a lot of “oh no, my fans would HATE that …”  Venues do it too.  And managers often assume an understanding of what their artists like or dislike.  On nearly every count, they’re wrong.  This is never more apparent than the world of technology.

Last night, I saw a grandmother proudly pull out her iPad to show off pictures of her granddaughter.  I’ve seen a musician (age:  60) reach for his iPhone while simultaneously saying that his fans (of the same age…) wouldn’t bother looking online for him.  It’s just not how they think.  And so many venues have either dated or just plain boring websites, that they confuse people rather than selling tickets.  Quite simply, this doesn’t make sense.  It also shows you probably don’t understand your audience.

As a marketing professional, I like to do what’s called “marketing by the numbers.”  Look at what your online traffic is telling you:

• Are people looking at those photo galleries that took you a month to get online?  No?  Hmm … maybe it wasn’t the best use of your time.
• Does traffic get past your homepage?
• Are they reading blog posts — which ones and on what topics?
• Where is your traffic coming from?  (Local?  Linked from other places?  Mars?)

Let the numbers guide you! They shall set you free!  Mountaintop!  Exclamation points!!!  (Ahem)

For a lot of marketing folks, this is pretty basic stuff.  Problem is, a lot of places don’t have solid marketing professionals.  They just assume that since the content is on the website, people will find it.  Or worse, what if your audience is on Facebook and you’re not?

Here’re the steps you need to follow:

1. Put up your website and profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc…)
2. Be sure to run GoogleAnalytics and look at any onboard stats programs (Facebook Insights, etc)
3. See what info they provide and act accordingly (qualify content, re-design underperforming pages, follow entrance/exit paths)
4. Repeat.

Obviously there’s a lot more to this, but if grandmothers are using iPads, then they’re probably hip to that whole Word Wide Web thing — whatever that is…