Learning how to take your existing audience and turn them into a lifelong fan base is an important skill to master both for the music industry and for overall businesses. The reason for this is that it allows you to expand upon your portfolio and can also make it possible to continue selling your work more easily in the future. It also gives you a stable relationship between yourself, your impact, and what you have to offer to potential consumers.
For example, as an artist, you don’t want to do performances or may not do so as often but still have people who wish to buy your CDs, download tracks, or acquire merchandise related to your name.
Many people are not taking advantage of the impact they have with having a large or niche community and scaling it to grow in ways that they can expeditiously. This is where marketing and strategy come into play to advance yourself to the next level. It can be effective as you scale yourself to having an audience that can support you monetization-wise, help build your brand’s credibility and overall give you the opportunity to have genuine fans interested in what you’re doing. We give insight into what makes some people more likely to truly get behind someone they haven’t known very long than others and provide ways on how you can develop these skills of social connection with ease.
Getting Started
In order to use your audience as a fan base, you should create content that is unique to your niche, which helps differentiate your overall mission as you begin to operate your own business. Sharing valuable articles, social media posts and blog entries about topics relevant to your niche and related to what you’re trying to accomplish on a professional level will allow others to identify with what you stand for leading to slowly building a fan base for you.
Coming up with effective ways of marketing yourself based on how you want to be perceived online and what you end up producing (which involves the content creation process) will strengthen this advantage because it strengthens your ability to build the right audience and fan base for yourself perhaps before you even implement an effective marketing strategy.
Execution Strategy
Creating products or services is a surefire way to help your business get further out into the public thus creating interest in what you have to offer. This is a key step for offering something that your audience will appreciate to want to turn into loyal supporters. The problem with this approach is that there isn’t much-sustained value for you and your fan base once the initial product launch has concluded. One great way to improve business development opportunities present in your field is by leveraging an already existing fan base as opposed to building a brand new one made up of people who are entirely unfamiliar with what you do or who you are!
Creating products or services for your audience to want to get involved in becoming a “Fan” (or better yet supporter) will help to accommodate this. There are many people with large audiences that don’t necessarily know that they have the support or even a fan base because of execution.
This can pertain to a musician who may have music projects but isn’t at the stage of other monetization incomes because – say – they haven’t yet decided on merchandise, or created a space where their fan base can interact as a community. Executing ideas you may already have and getting into the creative process of launching something centered around your brand can help establish this which can then pay off to growing your community and monetizing from your fan base.
Resources
Besides getting the word out by creating ways for people to become fans of your brand and what you’re offering, it helps to have a support team on your side. Utilizing things like the media, influencer marketing, and other outlets can help spread the word about what you’re doing. For example, posting updates through blogs and podcasts are great ways to get out information regarding current projects as well as establish yourself as a person worth supporting. If a blogger mentions you favorably in their post, for example, that can certainly leave an impression on someone who sees it. And if you gain support from one blogger or writer, chances are that their followers will then visit your website or some other outlet to see more details about you. In this way: all publicity is good publicity!
