Marketing 101…
So, as previously mentioned, we have launched our new Pulp Wildlife photo book (on Apple Books) and, as expected, not exactly a best seller at this point in time! No New York Times listing, no Oprah recommending, no nothing…just crickets. What to do next you ask? Well, time for a little marketing and thus, Marketing 101 is our subject today. A little back story, last year when I was looking to resurrect my music career, I stumbled across an ad for a group called Indepreneur (IndiePro for short) and what they were advertising was various methods for getting yourself heard, developing a fan base, and if all goes well, actually making some money from your music, all through the use of current and existing social media means (that’s right, we’re talking mainly Facebook here with a dash of Instagram thrown in, albeit, Instagram is limited to postings two minutes in length or less). Pretty sure you all know that Facebook (FB from here on) tracks a lot of the things you do, specifically likes and interests, and uses all of that info for targeted messaging (those ads that pop up on your FB page that say “so and so” really likes “such and such” very much. Same goes for music or videos you may have clicked on, the big “cloud” in the sky remembers all of these things and combines it with a series of algorithms to continuously know who to feed promotable information and advertisements to. The good folks at IndiePro realized all of that and have developed a series of lessons and trainings that let you use those same sources and make the system work to your advantage. IndiePro caters toward the independent musician, however, the info, theoretically, should work for anything that you might be trying to promote or sell.
First and foremost, it all starts with setting up your own FB Business Manager account (you can Google how to get that done, fairly simple). The reason for this is to separate any and all you do on the business end of things from your personal FB page (sure, you can still let everyone you know that you just put out a song or book). It also gives you access to the many tools available within Business Manager, including the ability to see fairly real time data on anything you put out there (views, likes, demographics, etc, etc). Most importantly (to me at least) is that it lets you target specific audiences that you think might be more inclined to like your particular content and not send anything to those who basically would never have an interest in what you are doing. Case in point, we did the video for “Innocent” a while back and I wanted to get it out there so decided to run an ad for it. I kind of think I sound a little like Lou Reed on the vocals, so added “People who like Lou Reed” to my targeting group. That netted a few million potential listeners but I wanted to go a bit broader, so added, “People who like old Eminem” to the mix as it is definitely a rock and roll/rap type of song. That brought the number up substantially (like way substantially, Marshall still has it). Did this a few more times using other similar sounding artists names until I got the potential target list somewhere in the 30 - 40 million range. Oh, should also mention that you can include/exclude countries outside of the US as well. Decided on a $5 a day budget (believe you can go as low as $2 a day or spend as much as you like, I am sure FB does not mind that) and ran it for a month. Ended up with some new fans for sure, a bunch of snarky comments from the UK and Nina, from Germany, liked it so much that she played it and danced to it for a whole day. Good times.
That all said, time to advertise Pulp Wildlife. Think I’ll go with that same $5 a day budget and first going to target Wildlife Photography and National Geographic magazine readers (possible audience of about 14 million or so) here in the US for a couple weeks and see how it goes. Fingers crossed!
Posted a copy of the advertisement on the New Pulp Page, plus have some new pics for sale and some recent Pulp Improvements (just started the great Pulp Patio project, much involved) so go ahead and check that out when you can.
All for now and see you next week!
