Boost music sales: innovative, digital techniques

Teddy Goff, digital guru, innovative maketing consultant.

Great business ideas come from unexpected places. Say you are a musician – you want sell music, or you want more people to come to your show. (Or, any business: non- profit, selling widgets, church.)

This being the elections season, a lot can be learned from political campaigns. Politicians and political parties have hired tech-savvy young people who have created ground-breaking techniques on identifying voters, how to get out the voters to the polls, and how to raise money.

Business schools call these techniques marketing and the techniques can be used by anybody or any business. These innovative techniques involve using the internet and social media and some of their buzzwords are ‘data’, ‘micro-targeting’, ‘targeted communication’, ‘analytics’.

What they found effective is to hire people who are not involved in politics and have not run campaigns before. These data geeks, techies and digital gurus get experience by reading and studying the data and working on the campaign. At the end of the election, they form companies and during the next election cycle the new political candidates hire the companies to run online marketing.

The candidates hire pollsters, ad-makers, researchers. They give people titles like digital director, chief tech officer, chief innovation officer, director of analytics, and they hire software engineers, number crunchers, digital designers, video producers.

Of course, American politics is a multi-billion-dollar industry; a musician, a nonprofit, or a small business may not be at that scale. It might be more feasible to consult with a single marketing point person or maybe even a university student in a related field.

The politicians and candidates have been able to collect voter lists, donor lists, volunteer lists – this is what is called the data. These same people on the lists can be found on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

How does that translate? Say you are a musician, for example, you have a list of people who buy tickets to a show, list of people who buy CDs. These same people might be found on the musician’s Facebook friends’ list.

By ‘mining the data’, musicians can increase turn out to shows and sell more CDs, nonprofits can increase fundraising. The possibilities are endless.