SNHU Owning Your Audience Reading and Analysis Discussion Read Fame House’s white paper and answer the following questions:This white paper was written sev

SNHU Owning Your Audience Reading and Analysis Discussion Read Fame House’s white paper and answer the following questions:This white paper was written several years ago. How do you think the state of direct-to-fan marketing has changed since this research was done? Please address all areas discussed in the white paper.In this white paper, Fame House makes specific predictions on how technology will change the way we experience music. Looking at the current state of technology, what additional trends can you identify that will affect the music industry?Outline three high-level concepts that you feel are relevant to both music artist marketing as well as general music business marketing. Include one example per concept. OWNING YOUR AUDIENCE
Building a Direct-to-Fan Strategy in 2016
APRIL 2016
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
01 .
SECTION I
The State of Direct-to-Fan
06.
SECTION II
Cultivating An Owned Audience
12.
SECTION III
Monetizing Your Audience
18.
SECTION IV
How New Tech Is Changing
Music Experiences
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SECTION I
THE STATE OF DIRECT-TO-FAN
As we addressed in our last white paper, “Understanding Facebook,” the conversation
around Direct-to-Fan marketing has shifted dramatically in the last year. The landscape
around social media—a cornerstone of every direct-to-fan marketing strategy—is changing
rapidly. Existing players’ business models are evolving (e.g. Instagram, Snapchat),
once-great platforms are struggling to create value in the market (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr),
and the proliferation of messaging apps is creating new challenges for marketers trying to
connect with audiences where they spend their time.
While social media is and always will be a critical tool for growing and engaging your audience,
it is only on your own properties that you fully control the relationships you cultivate with
fans. Here, we look at some of the major factors that have led us to this point and what they
mean for artists and brands trying to grow an audience and business online.
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HOW THE SHARE BUTTON IS RUINING SOCIAL MEDIA
Matt Chylak, Digital Strategy Manager
IF YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE ME, your social feeds are a mess right now. A quick
sample of mine: festival flyers, ads for a CRM system, open letters to Donald Trump,
a defense of Kim Kardashian, and ads to join Yahoo Mail. Even without the necessary
evil of promoted posts clogging up the feed, it feels like the initial promise of social
media—a hub of digital connections between physically separated people—is lost.
Fewer and fewer of my friends seem to post something significant about themselves;
meanwhile, algorithms dictate which news articles, photos, upcoming events, and viral
videos appear on my feed. It’s not compelling. And it’s not social.
So how did we get here? Many point to native advertising, the practice of serving users
advertising in a form that appears similar (if not identical) to organic content. There
are some examples of the practice that do well, such as this article on incarcerated
women sponsored by Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. But for every brand that does
a good job creating something new and interesting for their fans, there are a dozen
that are slapping their own hashtag on some Twitter meme or retweeting Beyonce’s
latest single with new, “hilarious” lyrics and a link to their online store. This sort of junk
pervades social media in 2016, and it leads to the obvious argument that in brands’
quest to create “relatable” content for fans, the line between promotional and nonpromotional posts has blurred beyond recognition. Everything looks like an ad.
Unfortunately, this is only half the story. While advertisers might be an easy culprit on
which to place blame, the real problem is also the very thing that’s made social media
so valuable to publishers in the first place: the Share Button.
The Share Button is awesome and vital. It allows you to quickly push things you like
to other people. This is important for big ticket creators too; the relative freedom of
content on the Internet has fostered an environment where publishers need heavy
traffic to survive. But there is also a central contradiction within the Share Button.
It proposes personalization through secondhand content selection while at the
same time devaluing the personal elements of firsthand content. We’ve become
so trained to “share” what we like by clicking a button that we’re putting less of
our actual personalities out into the world. We’re amplifying instead of analyzing,
letting others speak for us through the media we share while our thoughts are
generally segmented into an expandable comment column underneath. It’s a
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game of affirmation, rather than a true starting point for discussion. This way of
responding is also affecting the way content is packaged. Social algorithms and
patterns of online behavior have conditioned us to create things that are more
clickable or viral or upworthy or snackable or whatever other buzzword we’re
using this week. We fit into character counts and chase optimum image spacing
requirements instead of creating interesting media. We generate listicles because
there’s a higher percentage click-through rate on an article with a number in
the headline. It’s just The Way Things Are. But any practice that is justified by
traditionalism (or outright complacency) will always have opposition—or in this
case, a countermovement that claims our current form of media consumption is not
The Way Things Have To Be.
“ WE’RE AMPLIFYING INSTEAD OF ANALYZING,
LETTING OTHERS SPEAK FOR US THROUGH THE
MEDIA WE SHARE.”
We’re already seeing the signs that people are tiring of this ecosystem and leaving,
fleeing to less aggregated and interconnected platforms like Snapchat and VSCO. This
isn’t a trend that’s going away anytime soon, and for good reason. These types of
channels place a much higher value on a first-person experience, in many cases literally
showcasing content from the perspective of friends. In this way, we get back to the
original promise of social media, and to succeed in this atmosphere, brands are going
to have to adapt to it or die on the vine.
Look, I’m a marketer. I fully appreciate the value of getting information about what
you and your company like out to new fans. It’s how we connect with people, and the
direct feedback loop that results is one of the things that makes digital marketing so
financially and emotionally rewarding. But if you want fans to truly buy what you’re
selling (both figuratively and literally), you need them to care about you. You won’t get
them to care with a meme with millions of likes, but instead by telling stories that will
cut through the noise and encourage people to seek you out.
You don’t want a Share Button on your content; you want a Subscribe Button.
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Source: Companies, BI Intelligence. *Social networks: Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram. **Messaging: WeChat, Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
THEY’RE NOT REALLY MESSAGING APPS
for the service decreased the friction for new users to adopt these programs.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST TECH STORIES of the last year has been the rise of messaging
apps—cost-free applications that enable direct interactions between small groups
of people.
Upgrades are the name of the game, from stickers to gifs to sounds to video. And
this competition to create a more immersive experience is one of the major factors
dictating why messaging apps as a category have outpaced the growth of online
social networks. They’ve taken the main thing we wanted from our social networks—to
connect—and streamlined it.
Matt Chylak, Digital Strategy Manager
Massive adoption on a global scale has led to the four largest messaging apps (WhatsApp,
Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber) surpassing the four largest social media networks
(Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram) for the first time, with over 2.2 billion MAUs. The
largest of these, WhatsApp, commands over 1 billions MAUs on its own.
Roughly a quarter of the world is regularly using these apps. Do we really believe
that they’re just to be used for talking with each other? Nope. This is a complete
misunderstanding of both their value and potential.
THEY’RE PERSONAL
The ability to directly connect with each other has always been the hook on which
social media is based, but it’s become evident that we do not need to share every
interaction with the world.
This is representative of a larger trend. “Social” technology has iterated enough that
sharing conversations, pictures, videos, and music is moving from the public sphere
toward private interactions with just the people you care about involving.
This isn’t to say that social media is “going away” or anything like that. There are
plenty of reasons to engage in public discourse, and people will always want to share
what they’re doing with the world. But as platforms like Facebook and Twitter add
integrations designed to bring the entire social experience online, messaging apps are
fine-tuning themselves for the next era of digital communication. So how have they
done such a good job anticipating our needs?
THEY’RE ADAPTIVE
Messaging apps got their first major bump as a way to avoid roaming data charges
while texting, piggybacking on users’ existing phone numbers and address books
before the days of iMessage. They’ve only gotten smarter from there. Improvements
like the ability to immediately see which of your phone contacts are already signed up
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These aren’t messaging apps; they’re communication apps.
THEY’RE USEFUL (BEYOND P2P MESSAGING)
Person-to-Person Messaging isn’t the only functionality within messaging apps. In fact,
the most important growth potential for these apps—and why a massive company like
Facebook owns 2 of the 4 largest platforms—stems from Application-to-Person (or
A2P) Messaging.
A2P messaging is nothing new, but deeper integration into mainstream messaging
apps and the advancement of AI technology has deeply enriched the one-to-one
conversations between brands and users. All kinds of industries are augmenting
their communication strategies and replacing their own branded apps with this more
seamless media experience.
Sponsored integrations are the obvious starting point. We see this every day with
Snapchat’s featured content and stories, no different than the promoted posts that
are already on social media feeds. Comedy Central uses Kik to promote its viral videos,
driving traffic to its online series with direct links.
It gets much more interesting when you customize. Integration between Facebook
Messenger and the customer service software Zendesk allows companies to send
messages directly to their support channels. LINE lets you hail a cab and order drinks.
WeChat partnered with the LINQ hotel in Vegas so guests can check-in and adjust
room settings from their phones. An open API for most of these applications ensures
that the technology will continue to improve and provide uses far beyond even what
their creators originally intended.
Like all potential marketing channels, messaging apps won’t be applicable for every
brand, but 2.2 billion people are already there. They’re talking to each other. You should
consider talking to them too.
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OUR NEW RELIANCE ON OWNED AUDIENCES
Ryan Hall, Account Manager
WHEN YOU LOOK AT HOW the way we approach digital marketing has changed
in the last 3 years, the focus has shifted largely to the goal of growing a brand’s
“owned audience.” The term owned audience refers to those fans who are present
on a brand’s owned media channels—their website, blog, app, email list and any
other platform that they directly control and own the data around. This does
not include social media channels, where your audience is built on a third party
platform that controls how you are able to message your audience.
Digital marketing is much like the stock market. When approaching a strategy for
investing your money, you need to make sure you are diversifying your stocks and
not putting all of your eggs into one basket. When you place your entire focus on
growing your fan base on your brand’s social channels, you are doing just that, as
once you’ve grown those audiences, there’s nothing keeping them with you forever;
you don’t “own” them. If one of the big 3 (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) were to
disappear tomorrow, so would those fans and your ability to reach them.
Not only are these “third party” fans at the mercy of the life of the platform, you are
also at the mercy of the platform in your ability to reach them. As these platforms
become more and more saturated and you’re forced to pay more to reach these
fans, it becomes less and less easy to connect with the audience you’ve worked so
hard to build.
Three years ago, this sort of pay-to-play trajectory wasn’t as big of a factor in digital
marketing. In today’s digital landscape, it is more important than ever to hedge against a
future where it becomes increasingly difficult to reach your fans through current channels.
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To do this, I suggest you use a strategy to grow your owned audience in 2 ways:
01. Inside-Out:
Focus on building channels that grow your owned audiences and use captured fan
data to benefit your social strategy through custom advertising audiences.
02. Outside-In:
Use your social channels to initiate and cultivate relationships with fans, but actively
funnel fans to your own channels where you own the relationship with them—and
their information.
INSIDE-OUT
With an ever-growing reliance on paid media to successfully reach audiences
on social, we must find new ways to reach fans in the most efficient and cost
effective ways possible. It now takes more than just large social audiences to get
your message through, and we’re often forced to reallocate higher portions of our
marketing budget to social ads as a result.
However, there are other ways to reach your fans before putting time and money
into an ad spend. Email marketing is one realm that goes underutilized by way too
many artists and brands of all different sizes. A healthy email audience is one you
can reach directly at the click of a button, straight to their inbox. Not only are you
able to get in front of them, but this audience also historically drives more revenue
for brands and a much higher conversion rate than traffic from social.
Branded mobile apps are another Inside-Out marketing channel to explore if your
situation lends itself to that approach. Depending on the app’s complexity, artists
and brands can pull far more data from your fans than you can on social. (At the
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build detailed targeted audiences when advertising across Facebook and Twitter,
uploading a file of email address or usernames to segment existing fans and find
fan groups that are similar.
An emerging class of new tools for artists and brands make it even easier to do this.
CrowdAlbum, for example, allows you to track specific hashtags across social media
and easily pull in the social data of all users who have used it in a specific time or
in a specific geographic area (e.g. at a music venue or conference). With this, you
are able to build a list of extremely targeted audiences who are talking about items
relevant to your brand, in physical areas related to your brand, and then use that
data to advertise directly to them.
“ THESE ARE ALL WAYS IN WHICH HAVING A STRONG
PICTURE OF YOUR AUDIENCE BUILT THROUGH INSIDE-OUT
FORCES, LIKE EMAIL MARKETING AND BRAND APPS, CAN
HAVE A DIRECT IMPACT ON YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING
CAMPAIGNS.”
OUTSIDE-IN
While the Inside-Out approach looks at how a brand can use information learned
from “inside” owned channels to directly benefit their social strategy, the OutsideIn approach does the opposite. This approach gives social more of a back seat in
regards to the overall strategy and focuses on posting content that drives elsewhere
with the goal of fan data capture.
While large social numbers are a goal for most (if not all) digital marketers, we can
only reach those fans when messaging on the particular platform where they live.
The Inside-Out approach focuses on engaging this audience in a way that captures
their email and external social data to allow us to engage with them in a multitude
of other ways and on a multitude of other platforms.
There are many ways a digital marketer can achieve this goal (first access, exclusive
content, etc.), but one of the most reliable tactics is to incentivize fans through
contesting and giveaways. Send fans somewhere where they can provide their
email and social account info in return for the ability to win a prize or receive an
instant gratification.
There are many digital tools available to facilitate this process, but one of our
favorites is Hive.co. Hive allows marketers to quickly develop simple landing
pages where fans connect their profiles (e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
YouTube, Soundcloud, Snapchat) in return for contest entries or free content. This
solution will quickly turn one Facebook fan, initially only reachable on that channel,
into a fan on all of your platforms. To organize that additional fan data, Hive can
compile a basic user profile that shows geographic and demographic information,
as well as what activations that fan has interacted with—giving you a richer, more
holistic picture of your fan.
very least, your app should require fans to register using an email address so you
are growing your list.)
Similar to email, it’s also easier than ever to reach your full fanbase with a mobile
app. Push notifications completely sidestep the issue of diminished post reach
we deal with on social media. They allow a brand to send important information
directly to their entire audience with the click of a button.
Once you’ve collected data on your audience from owned channels, it’s easier than
ever to use his information to benefit your social media marketing. We can use
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CONCLUSION
In the current state of social media, we are too much at the mercy of the platforms. We
may have a large audience there—and a very important one to cultivate and engage—but
we don’t “own” our connection with these fans, and it is increasingly harder to reach them
both organically and across platforms. We are shifting our focus from social audience
growth to growing owned audiences and in-turn, benefitting our social strategy. Through
a simultaneous use of both the Inside-Out and Outside-In strategy across your digital
marketing efforts will successfully close off your marketing loop, helping to grow your
audience and your ability to reach that audience.
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SECTION II
CULTIVATING AN OWNED AUDIENCE
As artists and brands continue to vie for social real estate against an ever changing algorithm,
focusing on owned properties is again becoming the norm. This approach allows marketers
to break through the repetitive noise of social media and break free of a reliance on paid,
enabling us to drive more meaningful fan connections and to gain deeper insights into who
our fans are.
Only on your properties can you fully control the user experience, crafting more meaningful
and authentic fan journeys with your music, event, or product. But there are many different
approaches to how you craft this experience. Here, we explore a few of the strategies we’ve
seen work time and again, as well as how to begin to map out a plan that will work for you.
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ADELE’S 25 TOUR AND THE UNTAPPED POWER OF OWNED AUDIENCES
Alex Ferguson, Digital Marketing Coordinator
ON DECEMBER 17, 2015 AT 10am EST, 10 million Americans descended upon
Ticketma…
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