Last week we talked about essentials for your marketing plan.
We talked about eight things many people skip – before they complain that their efforts aren’t working.
Today you’ll learn about the second half of my 20-point marketing plan, but you should only listen to this episode after you listened to the first part, episode 142: The Ultimate Guide To Creating Your Marketing Plan: Part 1
Listen now to learn more about growing your business by harnessing the power of friends, family, and yes, even cold marketing.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to retain customers for multiple transactions
- What the most cost-effective form of online advertising is
- How to grow your business via word of mouth
- How to harness your friends and family to get more work
- Why being active on social media is a great idea
- How you can damage your reputation with bad cold outreach
- What the last thing you should do in your marketing plan is
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Quotes
“If you’re not top of mind when they’re ready to hire you, you will never get the gig.” – Brian Hood
Episode Links
Websites
Filepass – https://filepass.com
456 Recordings – www.456recordings.com
Chris Graham – www.chrisgrahammastering.com
Bounce Butler – http://bouncebutler.com
Brian’s workshop – https://thesixfigurehomestudio.com/workshop
Mediawhisper – https://mediawhisper.com/
Perpetual Traffic Podcast – https://www.digitalmarketer.com/podcast/perpetual-traffic/
Courses
The Profitable Producer Course – theprofitableproducer.com
The Home Studio Startup Course – www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/10k
Facebook Community
6FHS Facebook Community – http://thesixfigurehomestudio.com/community
@chris_graham – https://www.instagram.com/chris_graham/
@brianh00d – https://www.instagram.com/brianh00d/
YouTube Channels
The Six Figure Home Studio – https://www.youtube.com/thesixfigurehomestudio
Send Us Your Feedback!
The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast – podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com
Related Podcast Episodes
#4: How To Get More Online Reviews For Your Studio (And Stand Out From Your Competitors) – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-to-get-more-online-reviews-for-your-studio/
#46: Graham Cochrane Teaches Us How One Free Source Of Marketing Can Change Your Business Forever – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/graham-cochrane-teaches-us-how-one-free-source-of-marketing-can-change-your-business-forever/
#47: How Every Single Studio Can Build A “Referral Team” For Free – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-every-single-studio-can-build-a-referral-team-for-free/
#59: How To Build An Audio Career 100% Online From Anywhere In The World: With Austin Hull – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-to-build-an-audio-career-100-online-from-anywhere-in-the-world-with-austin-hull/
#68: Using Instagram Marketing To Build Recurring Income As A Music Producer – With Mark Eckert – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/using-instagram-marketing-to-build-recurring-income-as-a-music-producer-with-mark-eckert/
#88: An Easy Way To Turn $30/Mo Into Thousands Of Dollars – An Easy Way To Turn $30/Mo Into Thousands Of Dollars – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/an-easy-way-to-turn-30-mo-into-thousands-of-dollars/
#105: How To Get More Clients Via Passive Referrals, And Why You’re Not Getting Credited For Your Work – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-to-get-more-clients-via-passive-referrals-and-why-youre-not-getting-credited-for-your-work/
#131: How To Set Up Your Instagram Account For Success | With Brandon Brown Of Media Whisper – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-to-set-up-your-instagram-account-for-success-with-brandon-brown-of-media-whisper/
#134: The 5-Step Process For Go-Giver Marketing (And Why It’s The Best Way To Market Your Studio) – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/the-5-step-process-for-go-giver-marketing-and-why-its-the-best-way-to-market-your-studio/
#142: The Ultimate Guide To Creating Your Marketing Plan: Part 1 – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-creating-your-marketing-plan-part-1/
Apps and Tools
XMind – https://www.xmind.net/
Brian: This is the six figure home studio podcast episode 143.
[00:00:19] Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm again, not here with my cohost, Chris Graham.
[00:00:27] He is back actually, he's on next week's episode, we recorded yesterday, which is really confusing because this whole series is Chris came back in the middle of the series. So whatever, but he'll be back again next week. He was out on vacation. So I've been taking care of a lot of the solo episodes while he's been gone.
[00:00:43] This last week's episode, this episode is a continuation of that. So you do not want to just, this episode is a standalone. This is directly picking up where the last episode left off just to catch you up. If you listen to week ago and you were kind of need a refreshing every memory. This series is my 30,000 foot ultimate guide on creating a marketing plan for your business.
[00:01:03] This is how I do marketing for the six figure home studio. This is how I do marketing for file pass. This is how I do marketing when I teach my students. And so this works for not only studios. And the reason I'm doing this series is because we talk about these individual aspects of marketing. In these siloed standalone episodes all throughout the podcast.
[00:01:24] This is episode 143 now. So we have 142 episodes in our backlog spanning almost three years now. So this stuff has just spread out all over the place on our podcast. So this series is my attempt of going through a market feeding plan, how to implement one from top to bottom in order and the order that you should be tackling things.
[00:01:40] So if you're listening last week, I talk about rating your business on a one to three scale. One means it's nonexistent or it's terrible, and you need to work on it immediately. A two out of three means it's good enough for now. And you can move on in a three out of three means this part of my marketing plan is already in place.
[00:01:56] It's fantastic. And I don't need to touch it and focus on those ones before you start focusing on the twos and threes, and now instead of having to pick and choose based on what you think, do you need for your studio to fix your marketing efforts? Now you can just listen to this episode and I refer you back to tons and tons of episodes.
[00:02:11] This is really an episode to point you in the right direction, depending on what you need in your business. Again, go back to listen to episode one 42. We're already talked about the foundational parts of your marketing plan. This is where we get to part two, where we get to the more fun parts, the top of funnel parts and some middle funnel stuff.
[00:02:26] For getting more traffic to your website for getting more leads in the door for getting request to your studio. This is the fun stuff, but none of this matters until you get the other stuff in place. That's the entire point of this marketing plan. It's not just one part of your funnel. It's not just the fun stuff.
[00:02:39] It's all of it. It's the entire plan from top to bottom. And so you cannot ignore the stuff from the previous episode.
[00:02:50] So part two of your marketing plan, this is just a continuation of last week. We covered the first eight foundational parts. So now we are on number nine and this is my mistake. This actually should have been part of the foundational episode, but I'm working at like 2% brain capacity right now because my burnout, so you have to forgive me on this, but this is.
[00:03:06] So they called your Go-Giver marketing plan. Again, this is foundational aspects. You have to get this done before any of this top of funnel stuff is even going to work for you, but your Go-Giver marketing plan is long story short. How you plan to give value to your ideal customers. This part of your plan being a Go-Giver is non-negotiable in today's age.
[00:03:24] You can no longer just ask, ask, ask, ask, ask you. Can't just spam people trying to get them to record at your studio. This does not work. My wife got a. Spammer on Instagram, trying to get her to join her fitness class or something like that and kept bugging her and following up, even though she never asked for this.
[00:03:40] And it was super intrusive and it really put a bad taste in her mouth and she didn't even know this girl. And so I can guarantee you, not only will she never work with this fitness girl, she will definitely never refer people to her. And if she ever hears of someone potentially working with that girl, she will dissuade them from working with that girl because she has such a bad tastes in her mouth from this, that is someone who was only focused on selling, selling, selling, and in no way, tried to build a relationship or try to provide value or even.
[00:04:06] Honestly, qualify my wife to see if she's even the type of customer that this girl wants for this specific type of fitness stuff. So all that to say, bringing this back to audio or any business for them, you have to be a go giver. You have to give value first and then reap the benefits on the other side of that.
[00:04:22] So go give a marketing plan. We have an entire episode on this episode, 134, the five step process for Go-Giver marketing and why it's the best way to market your studio. If you go through that episode, plan, these things out. This is going to dictate what we put on your site. As far as potential lead magnets or your offer for free test mix or free test master or some sort of lead magnet.
[00:04:42] You do. This is going to dictate what sort of stuff we're doing in content marketing in the future. Spoiler alert. We're gonna be talking about content marketing a little bit in this episode. Anything will dictate what we do in paid advertising. You do or cold outreach or warm outreach or anything to do with top of funnel.
[00:04:55] Your Go-Giver marketing plan is literally the key to making this work. So this cannot be skipped. This is absolutely foundational. This should have actually been number two on the list, but again, I'm working at 2% here, so you've got to work with me. So that's number nine is creating your Go-Giver marketing plan.
[00:05:09] I would guarantee that almost all of the listeners right now at a one at a three, if they're rating this along with me on this episode, you have a one out of three on this. You have no Go-Giver marketing plan. You have a zero three actually. So go back to listen to episode 103 for the five step process for Go-Giver marketing.
[00:05:26] And that will absolutely open up your mind to how you can do a better job at being a Go-Giver. Instead of someone who's always asking and taking and never giving back. So that's number nine. Now we're on to number 10 of our 20 step process of creating your marketing plan. And that is setting up your past customer wins campaigns.
[00:05:44] It sounds fancy. It sounds like marketing jargon, and it really is all. This is as longterm followup with customers. When someone records with you or hires you or pays you any sort of money, if there's a potential for repeat customers. Maybe you sell some sort of hardware as an eCommerce business, if there's ever a chance of them buying your product again, you need to have some sort of longterm followup campaign in place to hit their inbox.
[00:06:06] At whatever point in the future, they may be considering buying your hardware product. Again, if you are a recording studio, you know, there's a potential chance of them coming back to you because they're always going to be writing new music. So I tell people in the audio industry. You want to be in your customer's inbox, six to 12 months after they finished working with you.
[00:06:23] And that really varies based on a number of factors. One of the factors is how many songs do they work on with you? If it was like one song like a single, you want to show up two or three months later, or you just want to get a feel for how many songs they're looking to work with in the future. Are they writing music right now?
[00:06:37] If this is just one part of a 10 song album, are they continually putting out music over the next year, maybe one song a month or one song every few months, find out what the release schedule is so that you can be. In the conversation for every single one of those future songs. If you work with someone on an album, you know, what's probably gonna be another year or so before they put another one out.
[00:06:53] So you want to make sure that you are keeping in touch with them longterm for a number of things. One of those things being, how did the release go when they relaunched it? How did it go? How did the audience respond to the song that you've worked on? It's a really good excuse to follow up with someone, to congratulate them on releasing the song, asking how their audience responded to it and so on and so forth.
[00:07:10] The second time. That makes sense, really, to follow up with people. If you see them going out on tour or you see that they just got home from a tour, ask them how it went. It's just really easy stuff to follow this. This doesn't have to be complicated. Hey, how did that tour go? I just saw you got back home from so-and-so obviously right now during COVID no one has story, but this is just stuff for the future.
[00:07:25] So when you're listening to the episode in 2021, assuming that aliens have not invaded in the world is not turned to Ash and rubble and people are indeed Turing. Then this makes sense. If not, then enjoy living underground. And then obviously you want to be in their inbox when they start writing new music, going, gonna be following up with them when they start the writing process so that you are top of mind at the earliest part of the process as possible.
[00:07:47] Because again, if you're not top of mind, when they're ready to hire you, you'll never get the gig. So, this is crucial. And I talked about this on the last episode. Number seven on this list was implementing a CRM customer relationship management software. This is where a CRM comes in handy because whenever you finish up a project, you can just put a reminder in your CRM.
[00:08:04] Follow up in three months when they've released the music. And then you can just wipe it from your brain and you can focus on other things in your business. And then when that reminder pops up in your CRM three months from now, all of a sudden I get to send an email quickly. Boom, how did the release go so that you put the new music out?
[00:08:17] How did the release go? And you're done, obviously, if you see it on social media or you see a YouTube video where they just let you know they're releasing music. You can follow up then and start the conversation. But at least you have the CRM there as a backup so that you can use that as a thing to spur you, to check social media, to see if they've released it or to follow up with them and say, Hey, it's been a few months.
[00:08:32] When do you guys plan on releasing this song? CRM absolutely crucial for longterm followup. I don't know any other way to do this on a consistent basis. Especially once you start working with a lot of clients, you start working with 15, 20, 25, 50 clients a year, a hundred clients a year. There is no way for you to manually follow up with every one of these without some sort of reminder in place for you to do so.
[00:08:51] So that is number 10, setting up past customer win-back campaigns. It is so much easier to get a customer to come back to you than it is to get a new customer to work with you. I don't have the stats in front of me, but it's something like you have a 60% higher chance of a repeat customer working with you again.
[00:09:07] Then you have a cold person who doesn't know who you are. It's something ridiculous like that. Again, I don't know the exact stats because I don't have it in front of me, but just note that it is always going to be easier to work with someone again, then it's going to be to go find a customer. It's never worked a day before that really doesn't have that relationship built up yet to work with you for a first time.
[00:09:23] So always, always, always put, focus on getting customers to come back to you again and again and again, and your longterm customer went back. Campaigns are huge part of that. And all it takes is some reminders at crucial moments. So the, you are top of mind. Nothing more, nothing less. And it's not hard to do.
[00:09:41] You just have to put in a modicum of effort to set the stuff up so that it is an automatic part of your process. And again, you cannot do this without a CRM, which is why I am so adamant about people working with a CRM in their business. You don't know what I'm talking about. Then you skipped the previous episode episode 140 to go back and listen to that.
[00:10:00] Stop listening this episode and come back to this episode. Once you've listened to that episode. Number 11 setting up retargeting ads when it comes to advertising dollars, this is the number one use of advertising dollars that you can spend on your studio. And I tell anyone to have retargeting setup in your business.
[00:10:17] If you have any number of clients in any number of people coming to your website or your social media pages. We have an entire episode about this. I'll give you the number and the title and all this stuff in a second, but long story short retargeting just means that if someone comes to my website or someone views my instance, the grand page or something, views my business's social media page, or likes a post.
[00:10:35] Or comments on something. I want them to get an advertisement for my business because they've shown some sort of interest and familiarity with me already. Instead of some stranger on the internet, who's never even heard of me trying to convince them to hire or to buy my thing, which is really hard to do by the way, spoiler alert.
[00:10:53] That's why cold advertising is the dead last thing. Number 20 on this list. In the order of things that we do, that's dead last. Cause that's the hardest thing to do instead of that, you do retargeting and this is a very cheap and efficient form of advertising so that you are taking people who already know you.
[00:11:08] They probably like you, they probably have some sort of trust built with you because they've gone out of their way to visit your website, or they've gone out of their way to follow you on. Social media. And so there's some familiarity and all you're doing is saying, I want to show ads to these people. So now, if someone comes to your website and you have retargeting advertising setup, they can get an ad on Facebook and you can limit that to where they see it once a week or once a month or a couple of times a month in ideally it's adding some sort of value to the person's life.
[00:11:34] It's not just saying, hire me, hire me, hire me, hire me. It's saying like, Hey, here's an ebook about how to release your album, how to get placed on Spotify playlist. Here's. How to get your album funded on Kickstarter or whatever. There's all sorts of ways that you can add value that are way better than just saying, buy my thing or hire me for recording or hire me for mixing.
[00:11:52] But at the very least, even if you just did a hire me, hire me, hire me. That's still better than nothing because it at least keeps you top of mind so that if they are indeed considering you. For mixing and mastering or even recording, but it's not going to be for six months from now. Well, they've seen your ad every month for the last six months or twice a month for the last six months, so that you are at least top of mind.
[00:12:10] And so that when they are ready to hire someone, you have a fighting chance versus someone who just falls to the wayside because they were in no way, keeping in touch with them. Retargeting ads are a fantastic way to do this. So that is number 11 on this list. And if you want a full episode on retargeting, the power of it and how to do it, go to episode 88 of this podcast and the title well is an easy way to turn $30 a month into thousands of dollars.
[00:12:35] And that is not an exaggeration. And if you think about it, you've set the stuff up, anything we do in the future, as far as cold advertising or cold outreach or warm outreach or referrals, or any of the other things, things that we do to help grow the traffic that comes to your website or engages with you on social media.
[00:12:50] The more work we put into that this helps keep people from leaking out of your funnel, because any of the effort you put to create awareness for your studio. Now they come to your website because of all those efforts you've done later on in this episode, or we're going to be talking about all those efforts that you did, people are now coming to your website, and they're not going to forget about you because they're going to get ads from you over the next three, six, 12 months.
[00:13:10] Really six months is the cat that most. Advertising platforms have, but that's still a great way to stay top of mind. And it really helps as we start building on more and more to this marketing plan, this is an absolute must. So now we're on number 12. This is part of our warm marketing efforts. And again, I like to get into warm before I ever do cold warm, by the way, just means people who already know like, and trust you, or are familiar with you in some way, shape or form cold means they have no idea who you are.
[00:13:34] They really don't care. And so you have a lot more work to do to make them care so that they want to hire you. There's a lot of effort that goes into that. So we focus on warm first. So this is our first part of this warm marketing and we on active referrals. What does an active referral, an active referral is act of an artist or many I've worked with in the past or a friend or somebody.
[00:13:54] Actively going out of the way and saying, Hey, Brian Hood is fantastic at mixing heavy metal. You should hire him for your album or an easier way to do this. Instead of putting it on their shoulders to go out of their way, to refer people to you, you can make it easy. As soon as you deliver the final files to a client, follow up with them, ask them how they like the final mix or the final master or the final recording.
[00:14:13] In most cases, they'll be very excited. They'll tell you a whole lot of stuff like. Loved it. So, and so it was a great experience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can use this again. This is what we talked about in episode four, where we talked about getting more reviews for your studio or getting more testimonials for your studio.
[00:14:26] They'll give you a glowing review or going testimonial in that email. Now you can take this time to send them a link and say, Hey, thank you so much. Do you mind copying and pasting that into a Google review or a Facebook review or whatever you want to do. That's again, we covered that episode for this podcast and I covered it earlier in this guide because the reviews and testimonials are important part of the foundational aspects.
[00:14:43] But in this case, instead of if say you have enough reviews, say you have enough testimonials instead of using it for that, you can use that momentum, that excitement that they have to just reply. Awesome. I'm so glad that you guys are happy with it. Do you know of any other bands or artists depending on what kind of music you're in or songwriters, whatever your client is, do you know of any other bands?
[00:15:02] That are working on new music right now. So you can leave it to them that if they know that a friend of theirs or someone that just went on tour with is working on new music, they can refer them to you through that email. And now it's off of their shoulders. You've got a name for them and instead of a straight up cold outreach to them, you can do what I call a lukewarm outreach.
[00:15:20] You have. This band that you just worked with, say that, Hey, my friend's band is working on new music right now. They're awesome. I think you would enjoy working with him. Now. You can go to that band and say, Hey, I just worked with your friend. So-and-so we just finished up their EAP. They were really happy about it.
[00:15:34] And they said that you guys might be working on the music. I would love to chat about it. If you're interested, this is a way to spur active referrals out of your clients, instead of waiting around for them to come to you. It is really effective part of your followup process. Once you're done with an album, this should be part of your process.
[00:15:49] Once you get enough reviews, once you get enough testimonials, or you can try to do this at the same time while you get reviews, but it gets really complicated when you try to ask them to do multiple things at the same time, like, Hey, can you put this in a review? And also, can you tell me what bands, you know, that are working on new music?
[00:16:02] It's a little muddled there. So I prefer to work on one thing at a time. So you get reviews first and testimonials, and then. You can start using this method. And this time during the momentum of them being excited about the final mix of the final masters to get that referral, that name of the band or bands that they're friends with, that they know are working on new music, then you can do that lukewarm outreach to those people.
[00:16:20] So this isn't the only form of active referrals that you can do. You don't have to just rely on your clients on episode 47, titled how every single studio can build a referral team for free. That is an episode that you absolutely must listen to. If you want to spur your active referrals, a referral team, by the way.
[00:16:36] Is it groups of bands or anyone it's people that you work with to refer, work back and forth with each other? An example is a graphic designer. Most bands have some sort of graphic designer or graphic designers that they work with to design things like merchandise to design things like album art. If they still do that sort of stuff or design things like their website, or they work with a videographer to do things like music videos.
[00:16:57] And so part of building a referral team is finding people that your ideal customers typically work with the GoTo people in your niche, especially if it's a local area, find those people and start referring work to them and try to build a referral network where you're constantly referring work back and forth to each other.
[00:17:13] This is a great way to build a team of people that are constantly feeding you work and that you can basically just refer work all around constantly. So go back to episode 47, if you want more on this. And that leads us into number 13 on our 20 step marketing plan checklist now, and this is another type of warm outreach.
[00:17:29] This is what I call your natural warm market. Now I teach this in the profitable producer course, which is my flagship course that talked about last episode. And I try to find some sort of podcast episode where I talked about this or a YouTube video. And I don't think I've really talked about this anywhere.
[00:17:43] But I'll give you the brief overview. If you want more, you can join the profitable, but this should be explanatory enough where if you're a go getter, if you're somebody who actually takes action on stuff, this should be a good enough guide for you to get the jest and go and run with this. So again, you don't have to join my course to do this, unless you want a deeper look into this, your natural warm market is anyone that you already know like and trust, or they know like, and trust you.
[00:18:04] And kind of a good litmus test is if they don't know you well enough to lend you five bucks, then they're probably not part of this list. Now that's not a perfect litmus test. Some people are just cheapest shit, and they'll never let you borrow any money, but, or you just may, or you may just be terrible with money and no one's going to lend you any money, but you kind of get the jest.
[00:18:20] There's had to be some sort of foundational trust there already, and they have to like, you. So that's what I call your natural warm market. And the exercise that I get people to do is to create something called aligned map. M I N D M a P. The one I use is called X mind. It'll be in our show, whichPage@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash one, four three for this episode, which by the way, if you didn't know this every episode number, you can literally just go to the six figure home studio.com/that episode number.
[00:18:46] And it'll go straight to that show notes page, but create a mind map. And the easiest thing to do is to just think about somebody that you are a good friend with. So for me, one of my best friends is Trevor Hensley. He is my co founder for the company that I have filed pass he's the software developer for that, and has actually created the actual code for the app.
[00:19:02] If I think about him as someone in my mind map, and I think of anyone I've met through him, I can then create a line from Trevor to that person. And it becomes really easy to create an intricate web of all the people, you know, who already know you like you and trust you. If you think about it in that regard, who do I know that's in my immediate circle of friends and then who do I know through them and who do I know that those people.
[00:19:23] And so when we have people work through this exercise in our boot camps that we do for our students, people send back lists of a hundred plus people constantly. It's really easy to get a hundred plus people on this list. If you sit down and take time to do this, And then I put people in the category of type one type two, or type three type one are people in your natural warm market that are your ideal customers type two are the people that are international warm market that are potential referral sources, meaning they may not be your ideal customers, but maybe they're connected to your ideal customers.
[00:19:50] Maybe they're an influencer in your local scene. Maybe they're a videographer that can refer work to you. And there may be your part of your potential referral team, or maybe they're a promoter in your area who puts on local shows and worked with. Your ideal customer. So that'd be a type two. And then a type three is basically everyone else.
[00:20:04] It's your soccer mom, next door neighbor. It's your uncle who works at the bank and I'm not going to get into exactly what to do with all three of these types of people, but for type one, your ideal customers, you put them through what I call the needs, discovery analysis. This is something I cover my workshop.
[00:20:19] You can go to the six figure home studio.com/workshop. One of the things I covered in that workshop is the needs discovery process. That's what you do for ideal customers for type two. Potential referral sources. We have another process. We put those people through in our profitable, where does her course, but long story short, I just try to have a conversation with them.
[00:20:36] It's hard to do in person right now, which is what I typically try to get people to do is set up like lunch meetings or coffee or drinks or whatever, and just catch up with them. But that's not really possible right now. So social media conversations there in a live setting like Facebook messenger, Instagram messenger, a great way to just spread the conversations with them and ask them if they know any artists.
[00:20:53] That are working on new music type three. I'm not gonna get into right now, but the first two, that should be more than enough for you to work on right now, if you want to work on your natural warm market. And that is as much as I'm going to cover in this episode. Again, if you want to go deeper with that, feel free to join the profitable producer course.
[00:21:06] But what I just taught there should be enough to at least get you started. So you have a two out of three on this ready. You may not have a three, but you'll have a two out of three on my three point rating scale for this checklist. So now we're on to number 14 of our 20 part marketing checklist, and that is social media nurturing.
[00:21:21] I'm going to come back to this phrase a lot. But if you are not top of mind, when someone's ready to hide, hire for your service, if you mastering, for example, someone's up ready to hire masters an engineer. If you're not top of mind, you will never get hired. So social media is a great way to nurture people who are already familiar with you.
[00:21:36] They're friends of yours. Are there people that work with you in the past or someone who is checking out your studio and they just like to see videos of things happening in the studio or whatever. But social media is a great way to drip content out over times of the, you just stay top of mind. I am the last person to talk to about this because I do not warm social media.
[00:21:55] To me, the media is more of a pay to play game. And so I invest a lot of money into paid advertising on social media, but retargeting is a great way to do pay to play social media nurturing, or another way is to just post organic content that is engaging. If you want some better guides on this than I can give you check out episode 68.
[00:22:12] Titled using Instagram marketing to build recurring income as a music producer. That's an interview I did with Mark Eckert, good friend of mine. And the episode one 31, I interviewed another friend of mine, Brandon Brown. He runs a company called media whisper. The episode is called how to set up your Instagram account for success.
[00:22:28] And in that we talk about a bunch of different things, but we do cover some more of the warm, Instagram nurturing type of things that you can do to stay relevant and top of mind so that when someone is ready to hire you, you are one of the people that they are considering. To hire, instead of someone who just fell to the wayside, never thought of again, because you were forgettable and he didn't do anything to nurture that conversation.
[00:22:48] So that is number 14 on this list is just part of the warm marketing is nurturing people on social media. And when we say nurturing, it's just taking a relationship that maybe is new. Maybe someone referred them to you and they don't really know no much of value that came to your website. They found you on social media, they read through some of your posts.
[00:23:01] They look at some of the. Photos or videos of you in the studio and they started following you. And if you post constantly either Instagram stories or Facebook stories, or just constant posts once a week or a few times a week, and they get to know a little bit more about you, they maybe they're reading your captions.
[00:23:16] Maybe they're looking at your photos. And so that is nurturing the relationship. It's taking them from someone who doesn't know much about you at all, to someone who maybe actually really likes your personnel, the real, like your writing style, the real, like the videos that you put out, because it shows your personality.
[00:23:29] It shows how fun you are to work with. This is great at getting someone over the hump of, I don't know about this person too. Damn. This person looks like a lot of fun to work with. I really like his style. I really like a city. I like the vibe there. And I like the sound of the work coming out of it. That is the power of nurturing people over time.
[00:23:43] And social media is a great part of staying top of mind and nurturing those relationships. So that's number 14. Number 15 on our list is something called passive referrals. Earlier. We talked about active referrals. That's where someone is actively referring a band to you or an artist. You are a potential client to you.
[00:23:59] Passive referrals. Is when your work is out on the internet, referring work to you, an example would be a music. Video is released. It gets 5 million views on it. YouTube in the description are the credits for that music video. And in those credits, it should be your studio that is credited for whatever you did.
[00:24:17] So mixing by. So and so mastering by so and so recorded and edited by so-and-so. And preferably has a link back to you. So most of my students already know this and I try to do this as much as I can, but passive referrals. Add up slowly over time, it's a snowball effect. And if you make it part of your process so that after you were done or before you even start, honestly, you make it clear that you need to be credited anywhere that the music is posted.
[00:24:41] You start to get more and more of these passive referrals, people that find your name through credits on Spotify. If they don't set that up properly, you're not going to get credited on Spotify. It's really actually a difficult process. You have to help walk your clients through it unless they have a label that does it and even labels, get that stuff wrong.
[00:24:55] Or when they posted music videos or when they post on social media, they are giving you credit for the work that you have done. Photographers are fantastic at this. So many photographers are anal about making sure they are credited for their photo work. If you post it on social media. And that's because they are so dependent on passive referrals, someone sees a photo.
[00:25:14] It's like a wedding photo. For example, I use our wedding photos as example in past content that I've done or wedding photographer did a great job. And so when we post our own wedding photos of our special day, she wants us to make sure we credit her for her hard work, so that if someone else is about to have their special wedding day and they love the way our photos look, they're kind of moody.
[00:25:32] They're kind of dark. They're not like the traditional, super bright, happy overexposed wedding photos that most people have. If someone likes her kind of moody, darker vibe, that they see her credit in the comments, when we post her photos and she can get hired for her work. That's how we found her too. We find her through someone that gave her a photo.
[00:25:48] Great. So this is important that with your work, when your clients post things online, they are crediting you for that work. And that is passive referral work for every new release you put out into the world, your name is attached to that, and that adds up over time and helps build what I call your word of mouth snowball.
[00:26:03] The more and more people that passively promote your stuff, meaning you were credited in the description on YouTube or in a Facebook post or Instagram post or on Spotify credits. The more and more of those that are out there, the bigger, your word of mouth snowball grows. And eventually you will have your schedule full just from referral work, meaning you don't have to do many of these other things that I'm talking about today.
[00:26:23] You'll just, I have a self perpetuating snowball that's constantly bringing in work from you. So this is a huge part of making sure longterm you're set up because you want most of your work to come from passive referrals. And if you want more info on that, we have a full episode about this episode of one Oh five, how to get more clients via passive referrals and why you are not getting credited for your work.
[00:26:45] It's a must. Listen, if this is an area that you struggle with and you're not properly getting credited for your work. So you're not getting those passive referrals in this action. So number 16 on our list is our first foray into the cold world, the world, where we're reaching out to people who have no idea who we are, we're connecting with people that don't already know us like us and trust us.
[00:27:03] And this is more of a long game in the cold world. I call this social media fishing holes and what this is, is you're finding a place where your ideal customers or clients hang out and you are an active participant on those Facebook groups or those message boards or any other kind of area that your people hang out.
[00:27:20] You're actually participating in adding value. You're being a go giver. So one of the people I work with for their marketing plan is doing guitar pickups. And there are plenty of guitar focused, Facebook groups out there. And he participates in a couple of big ones where he always will chime in on posts of people trying to customize their guitar or do wiring or having struggles with wiring.
[00:27:40] And he has plenty of times where he's gone in and added value. So he is a known person. And some of these fishing holes for guitars or guitarists, which is his ideal customer, the same goes for your studio, your ideal customers or clients. Especially, if you have niched down all hangout in some sort of group, maybe it's a local musicians group and just in your town or your city, or maybe it's a worldwide group of people that are working on pop songs.
[00:28:04] One of our past podcasts has a Facebook group of his own called make pop music. Yes, what kind of customer he works with pop artists. So if you can't find the kind of community that you want to participate in on Facebook or wherever, you can actually create your own group. And when you create the group, you get to create your own rules.
[00:28:21] So you can do things like promote your studio or get clients on there without someone kicking you off again, you want to be tasteful about it, but if you want to get a guide on this, go back to episode 59, titled how to build an audio career a hundred percent online from anywhere in the world. With Austin Hall, we released this on Christmas day, like 2018, and this episode is more relevant now than it was back then, because now you've basically don't have a choice, but to build your audio career a hundred percent online.
[00:28:50] So long story short, he built that make pop music, Facebook group, and now it's like 15, 20,000 plus people. And those are all his ideal customers. And so not only does he get a ton of clients from that, he's also built an entire other business focusing on adding value to the pot community and is crushing it right now.
[00:29:06] Also by the way, we'll be talking a little bit more about fishing holes next week on the podcast episode one 44, where Chris is back, we recorded that yesterday actually, but if you let them want a little more info on that, on fishing holes, then tune in next week, Brian Earley's exam. And we'll talk more about that.
[00:29:21] So that is number 16. Building trust with cold people that don't really know you, you're turning them from cold to warm. You're helping build trust. You're helping to get them to know you because you're participating actively in a community. And the tighter knit that community is. And the more you participate in that community, the more results you're going to get from this.
[00:29:39] Especially if you're the one that can create the community and nurture the community. So now we're on to number 17 on this marketing list, 17 out of 20, we're actually going to lump together number 17 and number 18 because they're very similar. They're just different approaches to the same type of thing.
[00:29:51] But number 17 is cold outreach via social media direct message. And number 18 is cold outreach via email. Now which one do you go with here? Really doesn't matter that much. It's just a matter of making sure you show up where your customers already hang out. So if they're more active on social media, reach out to them on social media.
[00:30:06] There's negatives to that. Where if they don't follow you, you may show up in message request folders. And there's a bunch of stuff around that that kind of gets complicated and email. You can show up in spam folders. So there's no perfect way of doing this, but both of these together work absolute best.
[00:30:18] If you don't go for the pitch first, there's two ways to do this. There's the pitch method and there's a conversational method. The pitch method basic goes for the sale. First in the email. And we've tried that in the past. I've tried teaching people in that past. I've had people do hundreds of emails like that were hundreds of social media messages like that very, very low success rates.
[00:30:35] So it's a numbers game in that. And you have to send out tons of emails or tons of social media messages. And in most instances, you're going to get flagged for spam. If you do that. Not only that you're going to damage relationships because just like my wife experienced with that fitness girl who was trying to get her to sign up for one of her classes or something, there was no relationship built out.
[00:30:51] It was straight to pitch straight up, assuming so much about this person, my wife, about what her fitness goals were and what sort of fitness classes she wanted. Assuming a lot about that that were incorrect. And so it just put a bad taste in my wife's mouth. So you don't want to be that person. You want to be the person that's blindly reaching out to people, not knowing anything about them, not worried about the relationship, not worried about the specific needs of the individual.
[00:31:12] Instead you do what I call as a conversational approach. So with a conversational approach, You're focused on building a relationship. And so if I had to choose between email or social media, social media is actually a much easier way to build a relationship first, because you can do a little bit more to interact with that person before you ever reach out to them.
[00:31:31] This is something I teach in the profitable producer course, but essentially you start following them. You start commenting on things. You start liking things, become a familiar name so that when you actually show up in their inbox, you're not a stranger. They've seen you comment and like things in the past.
[00:31:44] It's not so intrusive. And also when you reach out, you're not going for a sell. You're not trying to pitch them on something. You're just asking about the something that they posted on social media, preferably related to the band or their music, especially if they're posting music online, that's an easy conversation to have, but you're trying to start a conversation.
[00:31:59] And your goal is to kind of get a feel for where they are in the needs discovery analysis. And again, I covered this in the workshop. I talked about it earlier, but every artist is in one of five phases. And like, it could be anywhere from the songwriting phase, which is phase one or the post release phase, which is phase five.
[00:32:16] And there's one to five phases there. You kind of get the gist there. It's progressive from songwriting to preproduction, to recording, to mixing, to mastering, to song release, to touring. Like there's a lot of stuff in there. So if you want more on that, go to the six, figure home studio.com/workshop. I teach the needs discovery analysis in there.
[00:32:31] The goal again, is to find out kind of where they are in that process. See where you can add value and be a helpful person. An example, being if they are trying to demo their stuff at home, they're trying to do home recording demos of their new music, and you are a professional recording engineer. You can do a lot to help them with that.
[00:32:47] See if they're struggling with anything, see if they need any help setting something up or trying something new or what plugins to use on vocals or how to edit drums, or how did program drums or whatever it is that talents that you have that they need. See if you can add value and it's not hard to the naturally roll the conversation from adding value to seeing if they're interested in working with you in some way, shape or form, especially if you have your profile set up correctly.
[00:33:07] If you go back to that episode that I talked about with Brandon Brown episode 131, how to set up your Instagram account for success. We talked about something on that episode of social media landing page or Instagram landing page, where we talked about setting up your Instagram profile as if it were a landing page.
[00:33:20] Really cool concept. So if you start doing cold outreach on Instagram, implement something similar to what we talk about in episode 131, it will help spur that person to hire you or to start the hiring conversation before you even do, because what they'll do is, you know, have a good conversation with someone and they'll be curious who you are because everyone's like, who the hell is this person?
[00:33:40] They'll go to your profile and it's set up in a very strategic way to let them know who you are. That basically it does the sales process for you, so that you don't have to be the salesperson. Your profile is doing the work for you. And so it makes this whole process so much smoother. So you can just focus on the relationship first.
[00:33:55] Have you noticed that when we're talking about cold outreach, we're talking about building relationships, not just doing sales. Not just getting the sale. It's about building relationships. You have to think about relationship first. And that's why the very beginning of the episode, where I talked about go give her marketing plan, which is step number nine on this creating a Go-Giver marketing plan is essential to this because when you create your Go-Giver marketing plan, you understand the challenges people have.
[00:34:17] You understand the transformation they're trying to take. You understand how you can help them before you even reach out. You have an idea of ways that you can help them. So that is number 17, number 18 cold outreach via social media or email. And I want to read a win from our, our profitable producer course community.
[00:34:33] We have a channel called wins and people post in there all the time for different things. And one of our students posted this last week and I thought it was really cool to see this sort of success because again, cold outreach can take some time to materialize because we're focusing on relationship first.
[00:34:47] It can be weeks, months, or sometimes a year or more before some of these conversations turn into customers. And that's a hard pill to swallow for people who want clients today. But I want to read this for you because I want you to see kind of the longterm impacts of taking these steps now and starting these conversations.
[00:35:01] So I'll give the first name of this person, but I'm not gonna get the last name, even though he's shared this publicly in our group. But Toby said, I just landed a $10,000 project. That came out of the cold outreach that I did from AABB last year. So just to clarify, AABB is our accountability accelerator bootcamp, and that is these boot camps that we run within our community, just for profitable producer core students.
[00:35:22] So people who had joined my course, we do these live eight week boot camps. We just finished up our sixth one this past week. We gave out over $10,000 in prizes, a bunch of individual achievement awards. It's like a whole thing. We have an award ceremony. It's a lot of fun, but what are the assignments we have them do is actually do cold outreach.
[00:35:36] And he said from the outreach he did last year, he just landed a $10,000 project from Southern. He did again in 2019, he did this and in 2020, July of 2020, he closed a $10,000 project. And he says, he's also in the middle of a $5,000 project from that cold outreach. And he just finished a $2,000 project from the same cold outreach.
[00:35:57] And he's also in the middle of an $8,000 project, again, from that same batch of cold outreach. So he said four months in the financial year, which actually January, February, March, April, may, it's actually seven months. So I don't know where he's getting the four months, but he said four months into the financial year.
[00:36:10] I've already almost earned more than I did the last financial year. And he says, I feel like a big majority of that is owed to the profitable preacher course and the accountability bootcamp. And he says shit. Yeah. So I don't read this as like a testimonial to push my course on you. Although I do want you to join that.
[00:36:24] I push this on you to say this. Cold outreach takes a long time. He did all this stuff in, I think AB four or five, so mid to late last year. And he's just now in the middle or has just closed 10, 15, 17, $25,000 of projects this year from work. He did last year. So he planted the seeds. The last year he got the work this year.
[00:36:45] That's how cold outreach tends to work. So most people, they start doing cold outreach and they give up because they're not getting immediate success where Toby here has pushed through, has focused on the relationships. And over time he's built those relationships to where it turned into $25,000 plus worth of work.
[00:37:01] It just took time. So now we're on to number 19 of our 20 point checklist here for our marketing plan. This is where we get into content marketing. So we're going down this in a specific order notice we did a lot of the stuff and I'm just now getting to content marketing because content marketing is a long game.
[00:37:16] Again, just like cold outreach. It's a long game and you have to be consistent and it's a lot of work. So this is not for everyone. But if you want to pour fuel on a fire of a business, it's already set up well that you already have twos and threes across the board for the first 18 points of this checklist that I've given you so far, then content marketing is something you can definitely do that.
[00:37:33] We talked about this plenty of the past podcasts are a great form of content marketing. You are participating in it right now. You're an ideal customer for the profitable producer course. You're an ideal customer for file pass.com our file sharing platform. And so this podcast is proof that this sort of stuff works.
[00:37:47] You can create podcasts for your ideal customers, whoever those people are. There's also blogs. There's also YouTube channels. So if you're good on video, your charismatic, YouTube is great. But that's not the only forms of content marketing. So I don't want you to just stop there. And we've talked about those enough in the past where I don't feel like a need to really talk about this.
[00:38:02] I mean, there are entire blogs dedicated to launching a podcast dedicated to launching a blog dedicated to launching YouTube channel. So I can't really give a justice in this episode. But this is where this falls in the grand scheme of a good marketing plan content marketing's near the last, because so much more of this stuff builds the right foundation for content marketing to actually work beyond podcast, beyond blogs, beyond YouTube.
[00:38:25] I want you to think about other types of content. That you can use in your marketing people here, content marketing. They just think those three things, podcasts, blogs, YouTube. But I want you to think of broader term here. Content marketing can be things like lead magnets. So if you create a PDF for your ideal customer or an ebook, or you're doing something that is adding value, so it's desirable to them.
[00:38:45] That is content that you've created, that you can then market to your people. You can actually pair this with things like paid advertising. You can pair this with things like cold outreach. You can pair this with things like fishing holes. So this goes hand in hand with some of the stuff we talked about in the past, you can take well content that you've created and share it and these other mediums, but there are also things like live streams.
[00:39:02] I've seen people live stream. On their pages. I've seen people live stream in communities that help people with problems. So for example, I'm trying to get the person that I'm working with, a marketing that does pickups to do a live stream in some of these communities on how to wire their own guitars or how to install their own pickups.
[00:39:19] Because this is a big roadblock in buying new pickups for your guitars. If you don't know how to install them, or you have to pay some professional, hundreds of dollars to install your pickups, you're not going to buy those pickups so you can create a win, win scenario by streaming live. Talking about things like if you're a mixing engineer and someone self recording and they are struggling with it on the editing side, you can do live strings to help your ideal customers with that.
[00:39:39] Or in times like today, when coronavirus is wiping the touring industry out and people are stuck at home with nothing to do. You can be the person that goes into some of those musician, Facebook groups, or creating your own musician Facebook group and helps those musicians set up home recording rig so that they can start writing and recording their own music from home so that they can hopefully hire in the future for mixing and mastering if you're doing that sort of service.
[00:40:01] But I just want you to open up your mind and think about alternative types of content. That aren't just the generic YouTube channel or the generic blog or the generic podcasts. It's thinking outside of the box, what is some content that is valuable to my ideal customer? And then how can I share that content with them?
[00:40:16] So we have a couple episodes that dig into this a little bit more episode 46 Graham Cochrane. We had him he's from the recording revolution. He's obviously had a very successful career on YouTube, but he has an episode called Graham Cochrane teaches us how one free source of marketing can change your business forever.
[00:40:32] And I think YouTube has been that for him. So that is a definite episode. You wanna listen to, if you want to learn a little bit more about content marketing, but we also have episode 102, why you should start a podcast for your business before it is too late. So these are all about content marketing, and now we are on the final step of our 20 point checklist.
[00:40:50] For the ultimate guide to creating a marketing plan for your business. And that is cold advertising already hinted that this before, if you're not brain by now with all the content that I've spewed on you, I don't know how you were keeping up with this, but I'm brain dead at this point. But call advertising is the Holy grail ads on Facebook ads on Instagram ads on YouTube, the Holy grail, if you can make this work.
[00:41:10] And there are studios that have cracked the code, the advertising code to make this work where you can show your ad to a complete stranger on the other side of the world or somewhere else in the country. And they see that ad and they click on that ad and they fill out your form or they take the next step.
[00:41:24] And eventually the, this is the hardest code to crack in the, all of this marketing plan. But you cannot even get to this. If you haven't scored yourself a two or a three on the previous 19 parts of this checklist, there are very few instances where I will go to cold advertising first. Especially for recording studios or mixing studios or mastering studios.
[00:41:46] Cold advertising is one of the last things that I go to for most people. And that's because of the difficulty involved, how much money it takes to get started, how much money you can waste to even learn what you need to learn. So this is not going to be the episode where I dive deep into Facebook ads or Instagram ads or any sort of paid advertising.
[00:42:03] Because to be honest, I cannot do it justice. If you want the deepest dive possible. Into paid advertising specifically on Facebook and Instagram. There are again, their entire podcasts and blogs and YouTube channels about paid advertising. But I'll give you one easy to listen to resources and other podcasts.
[00:42:20] If you really want to go into the cold advertising world, you feel like you have the rest of this marketing plan in place. Then you can go over to the perpetual traffic podcast. They have hundreds of episodes that are fantastic. For learning paid ads. And I'm actually in the middle of hiring somebody to take over my advertising.
[00:42:36] Instead of working with an agency, I'm actually working with someone one on one so that I can train them and I can get them to do the things that I want to do. Instead of relying on a Facebook ad agency, I'm having him listen to episodes of the perpetual traffic podcast. So that is a hundred percent a fantastic resource for anyone that wants to dive deeper into this.
[00:42:52] So I'm not even gonna try to do it justice. In the grand scheme of things, the people who run that podcast spend more per week. Then I spent my entire lifetime of advertising and over, over a million bucks a week. So over $50 million a year on ads. So the people that run that podcast are people that you can trust to keep you up to date, to steer you in the right direction.
[00:43:10] Not just being people that are trying to sell you a course, how to do Facebook ads, but they've never actually done anything, but promote a course on how to sell Facebook ads. I want to stay away from the meta businesses. So that is the complete overview here. There is so much content in this episode series.
[00:43:25] I am brain dead just trying to teach this stuff. And I didn't really even teach a lot about each of these individual things. I just give you the overall view of your entire marketing plan and gave you resources for each one of these. Again, don't try to do all these at once. You will burn yourself out and I'm surprised if you haven't made it through this entire, both of these episodes in one go.
[00:43:45] And if you did, I really challenge you to stop. What you're doing right now is being a podcast enthusiast and not taking action to stop what you're doing now and go back and actually take action on what you heard today. If you really sat down and listened through these two episodes and ranked yourself from one to three, one being it's terrible, or I don't have it at all.
[00:44:07] Two being it's decent, it's passable. I can move on. And three being it's perfect. If you rate yourself a one to three on all 20 points of this checklist, if you did that, you will find out that you are vastly lacking in many, many areas. And I give you lots of resources entire hour long plus episodes to listen to for every one of these things.
[00:44:27] For most of these things, at least. So you have your work cut out for, you would probably take you two months to properly work through many, six months to properly work yourself through what you learned in this episode and what you learned from the episodes that I recommended in this. So don't just use this for entertainment.
[00:44:42] I'm not really here for entertainment. Chris is our entertainment. Chris is our person. That's. Fun and comes up with dumb, ridiculous things to say, and I have to reign him in and it's a lot of fun because we argue back and forth and he's, we have a lot more banter and a lot more fun. He's a lot more caring than I am.
[00:44:57] I'm the person that's like, go get shit done. And I want you to do, go get shit done. And if that means you don't listen to this podcast for the next three months, while you actually implement what you learn as podcasts. So be it. I want your business to succeed, but I don't want you to just power through all these episodes, learn all these things and never take a damn step of action.
[00:45:13] Don't be that person, that person is a loser. That person is not going to have a successful business. That person is going to just keep listening and keep saying not in their head and saying, Hey, this is fun. I like to know this stuff and never action. And then wondering why they're still stuck in a day job that they hate that soul sucking instead of building the business that they actually want to build.
[00:45:32] This episode contains a lot of valuable information. If you will just treat it as not just a free podcast. That I can just listen to whenever I want treat it like something that is going to disappear. If you don't take action now, not saying it is, I'm just letting you know you should treat it that way.
[00:45:45] But now that I've yelled at you for the last hour or so, I want to wrap this episode up. I have nothing to sell you. Now. I have nothing to pitch to you now. I am brain dead. I am finishing now, but I will be back at you brighten early next Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM with my cohost this time Christopher J.
[00:46:01] Graham. And we'll be talking about how to build and maintain relationships online in the world of COVID, where it's so difficult to keep relationships alive. It's so difficult because you can't be around people anymore. And as audio engineers, we're naturally introverted. We tend to struggle with keeping our relationships alive with maintaining relationships.
[00:46:19] So that episode next week, brightener was exam. We'll be diving into how to maintain old relationships while building new relationships a hundred percent online in the covert era. That is it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and happy hustling.