With his payment from The Flute Squad, Rick was able to buy some platinum fronts with a few bucks to spare!A few months ago we introduced our fans to The Flute Squad Affiliate Program. If you want to be compensated for introducing your friends to The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, contact us and we’ll hook it up.
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Why Paper Advertising Is Worthless
Every few months, I get an email from a salesperson at a semi-popular music magazine. She tells me a story about how luckily (for me) some knuckleheaded band dropped out on their purchased ad at the very last minute. She tells me that now she can offer a great deal: a quarter-page for $700, no wait…, a HALF-PAGE ad for $500(!)
She swears that I will gain a ton of exposure and promises that new fans will beat down my door to buy a copy of Die Humpin!. But, I have to act NOW because:
- This deal is too good to be true. If I don’t act now some other savvier, and perhaps better-looking band will swoop it up!
- Her manager will kill her if he finds out about this advertising snafu!
- The magazine is going to press, TOMORROW!
I love this sales tactic. It involves two crucial elements of the quick sale: an unforeseen incident that opens up a mind-blowing opportunity and an immediate need for action.
As you can tell, I’ve never gone for this offer. Not only do I think paper ads are a waste of money, I can’t possibly ever know because their results just aren’t trackable. People who sell paper ads know this, but still stay in business (barely) because companies think that there are no other options. Bands will rationalize that if the big record companies are still buying ad space then somehow it has to be effective. Nonsense.
Pay-Per-Click Works But It’s Expensive
So what about another option that is trackable, like a Facebook ad?
Facebook ads are a viable option for creating a trackable advertisement, but how effective are they? We experimented with a Facebook ad, and were pretty underwhelmed with the results.
We set up an ad to get friends of current fans to become fans themselves. We set the bid at the recommended amount of about 50 cents-per-click. This click means they are taken to our page where they decide if they should become a fan or not.
We kept the ad up for a week. Facebook showed the ad to over 70,000 people. 20 people clicked. And of those 20, about 5 became a fan. Cost per conversion: About $2 per fan. Ouch.
Facebook stats are great. They give you a clear assessment of exactly what is going on with your ad. And I would even say that the results were about as an effective as an ad can get. If we left it up for several weeks we would probably gain alot of fans. We’d also spend a ton of money.
How To Only Pay For Results
So how do you effectively advertise without breaking the bank? Well, lets look at Amazon.com. Sure, they do a little bit of traditional advertising. But a big part of their advertising model is their affiliate program. They put the hard work of book reviewing in the hands of customers and bloggers. Then they enable these writers to get a piece of any book they sell.
Keeping this in mind, I asked one of our fans to make a call to action on his status. He could say whatever he wanted about us to drive people to our site and for anyone who became our fan I’d give him 25 cents (by the way, that’s half of our Facebook bid).
He chose the most honest approach:
Within 2 days we had 80 more fans. I gave him 20 bucks. Win-win.
The thing that concerned me most was the retention rate of these new fans. Would they simply drop off after they realized we paid for their fandom? It was a legitimate concern but it really hasn’t mattered much. In fact, we keep gaining fans. I guess its because we tend to give cool shit away all the time.
CROSSOVER BREAKTHROUGH
Keep this in mind the next time someone tries to get you to work or gig for free by promising “exposure”: In one week’s time our ad was shown to over 70,000 people. That’s literally asking a stadium full of people to do something very simple that requires no monetary transaction. Only 5 people actually did.
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If you like this post, then check out:
STUPID ADVICE: Day-Trade Your Band’s Money: Our experiment in trading all of our band’s money on the stock market.
The Power of Instant Marketing(?): Our failed attempt at using viral video to advertise a show.
Now the challenge is convincing people that becoming a fan on Facebook is actually worth it.
To be honest, I personally receive so many Facebook invites to events, shows, pages to like, links to visit, etc. that the only thing I ever pay serious attention to these days is the Birthdays section that comes up. If you become a fan of every band you like, you’ll receive hundreds of invites every month…
With such a glut of talented musicians and bands and other events, the strategy here is to become such an integral part of that particular fan’s consciousness that if they ever become fed up with all the invites and want to purge their account of pages they don’t check anymore, your website makes the cut and remains. That’s the tough part, I suppose.