Tag: marketing

When you want to kickstart your dance career or any endeavour in the dance industry, you will need some marketing. Marketing is a term that is often misinterpreted and misunderstood. I love the simple definition from Seth Godin’s blog:

If you need to persuade someone to take action, you’re doing marketing.

Seth Godin

It means whenever we try to make people take our classes, watch our work or click one of our links; we are marketing. Easy as that. In our daily dance business work, marketing is the equivalent of customer service and customer acquisition. But we hate to call it like that.

You can split it into brand marketing and direct marketing.

Brand Marketing is the way that big brands used back in the days when all the hype and the best options you had were tv ads, billboards and ads in magazines. The concept is to expose as many people to your brand message and establish an image in their minds. When you remember who is behind the slogans “connecting people” or “just do it”, you saw brand marketing at its finest in action. For some applications, brand marketing is still the way to go. For entrepreneurs like freelance dancers, it is not. The goal is brand marketing is to reach as many people as possible. As many as possible means high investment in either cash or time. We don’t have the time, and we don’t want to spend our money on people that will not support.

Direct Marketing is an approach where you try to expose only the right people to your message and ignore everyone else. Another difference to brand marketing is that you want people to do some specific, like book a class. It’s not about your image, but your offer. We are not aiming for maximum reach, but for a good percentage between people reached to people who finally accept our offer.

Some of you may already see that I talk about how we can measure our marketing success in the last sentences of the paragraphs above. We will not dive deeper into this today, but for sure later down the road – first, some more general things about marketing.

When you talk about your work to make people come and watch or participate, that is marketing. When you do it without the intention to market, it is as well.

When you post on social media, that is marketing. When other people talk about your work or post on social media, that is marketing as well. And it is free and reaches people that you won’t reach on your own.

1.000 True Fans

The best marketing you can get is still fans talking about your work. They will praise what you do and recommend you to others. They work as your free army of marketers without you getting involved. Kevin Kelly published the idea of 1.000 True Fans in 2008. It has since then become one of the most used approaches to creating a sustainable income for artists.

The basic idea behind the 1.000 True Fans is that you don’t need to become a star with millions of followers to make a decent living. What you need are 1.000 True Fans (in other places they are called Superfans) that are into your work that they will practically consume everything you release. I am not talking about Followers or Likes. True Fans would travel 300 miles to see the new piece you created. They would join a class or workshop you give. They would also buy a DVD or pay to download a movie. They would attend the events you create, and they would purchase merchandise if you had it. They also would support crowdfunding campaigns of yours because they want to see what you make of it.

Just to support the idea with numbers: when you manage to sell 50 bucks of work to 1.000 people you made 50.000. Remove half to be safe on taxes, and you still have 25.000. Most people can make a living from that, as it is over 2k per month after tax.

So the point of our marketing is to find 1.000 people who love what we do. Those 1.000 will become your stable source of income and act as recruiters for new True Fans as well as regular customers who only consume some of your work.

How will we approach to find our True Fans?
By engaging in work that is meaningful to us and sharing it with the world. Do you remember Your Bigger Picture? Your True Fans share your vision, that is why you need to know it. If you keep working on projects that play into that vision, they will follow. And they will tell others about it.

How to find those guys?

These are the marketing tools that we can utilise, but they are only the transport vehicle of our message.

• Direct Contact. It’s still #1 to find and create True Fans. People who see your work live and enjoy it are likely to check out what you do next.
• Social Media is the #2 way of connecting at the moment of this writing, but not as good for bonding with your True Fans as the next.
• #3 Your Website and Email list are often neglected since the rise of social media. The advantage of them is that they are your property. When any given social media platforms change their algorithm of presenting your content, you can not do anything about it. If they shut-down, all your contacts are gone. That is not likely to happen soon, but you never know. Social Media is also an open experience; anyone can join. For bonding purposes, it is far more effective to create an intimate and exclusive atmosphere.

Far behind those 3 are other methods like print ads, media coverage, tv shows, guerilla (or ninja) marketing ideas and everything else. There are applications where these OTHER methods can help and give your reputation a push, but they are situational. We will deal with all of the above topics in detail.

Crafting your message

No matter what vehicle we choose to transport our message, its content is what matters most. It is our promise what people can expect from us. If we can deliver on this promise, again and again, our circle will grow and eventually we will hit a thousand.

Go back to your bigger picture and think about which kind of people would share your vision. Don’t think about it as a mass of people, think about it as your one perfect fan. If you can see clearly how she ticks, what she wants from life and what she wants from you, you will know what you have to deliver.

What do you want them to do?

The second part is to find out what you want them to do, if they share your vision. In short, you want them to be part of your journey by consuming your offers. You already know what you offer from Your Dance Business Set-Up. If you missed this one, go back and read it now.

Today we will answer two more questions before we move into the nitty-gritty and details of our dance business.
Question #1 is: “Are you an artisan or an originator”?
Question #2 is: “Are you a maker or a supporter”?
Most people tend to answer these questions with Originator and Maker. That is what we want to be, and that is fine. But for most of us, it is also dishonest with ourselves and therefore unfair to ourselves.

To be sure, we are talking about the same things; I will briefly explain what I mean when I use the four terms.

An originator is someone who paves the way for something new. He is the pioneer — someone who either creates a new game or changes the rules in an existing one. In our scene, an originator would be, i.e. someone who created a dance style or at least a proper amount of new moves. Maybe it is a choreographer who developed a new way to create pieces or a coach who has a revolutionary method to train and motivate his students. It’s also the dancer who we can’t classify into a specific style because he does not stick to the rules of someone else.

An artisan is someone who learns as much as possible about his craft. She can also create new things from there, but the impact is not as significant as from an originator. Often the artisan has a broader knowledge than the originator, but it does not reach as deep. In our scene, this would be everyone who learns the roots of a style and how it works. We can classify their dance as a specific style that someone else created.

The supporter is someone who helps other people to reach their goals and rock their projects. In our scene, these would be all the guys who help to organise events, dance in the pieces that others produce and try to be helpful wherever they can.

Makers act on themselves and usually, they rely on supporters to help them. Makers are the ones who start projects when they think something is missing or needs to be changed. They are the motors that keep the scene alive.

Of course, the reality is not black and white, and one can be a little bit of both in both cases. Once again being honest with yourself is the key. If you never started nor finished a project because you thought it needs to be done, you are probably not a maker. When you learn all the details of a given dance style and insist that it has to look a certain way, you are an artisan – no question.

It is imperative to understand that these terms are not judging about the value of someone. Originators and Artisans, Makers or Supporters. There is no one better than the other.

The reason why we ask the question of what we are is that it helps us to understand and create our business. As mentioned in Your Bigger Picture, we use the insights from those questions to be authentic and consistent.

If we are an artisan, we want our message to be about honing our craft and taking it to the next level. As an originator we don’t want to talk about playing by the rules because we don’t – we make them.
The maker’s promise is about making things happen (that’s why we call them maker) and the supporter helps the makers succeed. There is a place and a need for every role.

The thing you want to avoid is to build your promise or your message in the wrong way. Don’t pretend you are someone you are not, because people sense and avoid fake people. Believe that you are needed the way you are.

Answer those two questions! We will create our business and marketing strategies on the answers.

This week we will look into two important questions that help us to make our dance business a thriving one, instead of an exhausting but unsatisfying hustle.

Today it is about “The Bigger Picture”. Usually, the bigger picture comes up when somebody tells us to think again, think about the future or don’t think so egocentric. The Bigger Picture focusses on a greater good. And exactly there is the issue with The Bigger Picture.

The Bigger Picture is a subjective vision of how the world (or anything if we talk about a specific topic) should be. So everybody has a different bigger picture. Knowing your better vision of a future is essential, and it is a shame why so many people don’t even think about it. So take a moment to go deep inside yourself an think about how you would design a better future for everyone.

In my Bigger Picture, people would spend their lives doing work they loved, expressing themselves honestly and appreciate time over money. That is oversimplified, but it covers the key points.

So why do we need to know that? How does it help our business? FraGue, stop preaching, start talking business.

When you understand how your own bigger picture looks like, you can use it to kickstart everything you do. The reason is that your subconsciousness knows your bigger picture very well. It knows what you wish and hope. And it is honest and direct. It will cheer for you and help you work when you move towards your bigger picture. But if you don’t, that bitch will sabotage you at every step along the road. It will do so by presenting a million possibilities to do something else, to procrastinate and it will pull you down into a swamp of distraction or unhappiness. You don’t want to mess with your subconsciousness. It runs the show a lot more than we are willing to see.

And to finally get to the points:
1) Choosing your business components: Your work will prosper more when you have your subconsciousness cheering. So don’t take jobs that influence the world in the other direction or compose your portfolio from activities you despise.
2) Promotion & Marketing: When you start to promote your work, you want to reach the right people. You don’t want to reach everyone. Because not everyone is interested in what you do. Reread the last two lines. The good thing about this is that you can focus on talking to the right people. The ones that want what you can offer. When you start to promote your work, you make a deal with people. You make an offer of what they can expect when they follow your work. People might join you or not. Those who do, follow you because they liked the original offer. If you change your offer, they might go somewhere else. So you should not change your offer without a good reason. The best way to stay consistent with what you do is to work on a future you believe in. Work on making your bigger picture a reality.