To Market We Go | Power To The People
Stuck In The Middle With You
See that lad smack dab in the middle of the image above? That’s Andrew. I wrote about him way back when. I have had the good fortune to continue to work alongside him {well he and I have been Zooming way before Zooming was a thing} to this day on many projects with our clients. But today, I’m featuring him and his wealth of knowledge about digital marketing. He practices what he preaches, especially when it comes to his pride and joy, musicto.
The heart and soul of musicto is people. Andrew and his “people” have created a global community of music curators who only add tracks you won't stop listening to.
My Q & A With Andrew
A Scotsman comes to America with long locks and a guitar, what happened next?
He meets the love of his life and they live happily ever after. (it was a piano, not a guitar.)
Why is music important to you?
I can’t imagine life without it.
As Nietzsche said, “without music, life would be a mistake.”
But why?
Why does this thing that isn’t essential for life in the way that food and water or sleep and sex are, find itself in every culture in every society and in every civilization that has ever lived?
I’d posit that it comes from a very simple explanation, that is - music has the power to make us feel good with no negative side effects. I don’t need to understand the how of that or even the why, all I need to know is that it’s true, not just for me but apparently for you too.
You founded musicto with a mission to be people powered, please elaborate.
Humans are great at creativity - they make unique, weird ass connections in a way that the algorithm can’t yet replicate. As of August 2020 - I’m trusting a person over an algorithm with my time.
Speaking of people, you rely heavily on your community of curators to push out content. How did you set this in motion?
You have to have the idea first and then you have to work at it until it gets to a point where other people can believe in it. The idea of “music to…” first came to me around 2006 but that was built around me as a musician marketing my own music. It wasn't until 2016 that the penny dropped and the idea of having other people publishing on the same platform started to make sense.
I spent most of 2016 paying beta testers to make playlists for the site in order to determine procedures and protocols that once established, could be replicated by new curators coming on board. I spent significant sums of money on the domain name, the logo and trademarking everything so that we looked legitimate. I reached out to friends and family that I knew loved music and would probably enjoy making playlists and then I nurtured them.
Finally, I spent a week scripting and shooting a 1 minute video where I shared the vision for musicto and what it could mean for someone who loves music and would love to one day earn their living from it. I used Facebook Ads to put the video in front of different audiences and we had our first “random” curator application in August 2017.
Nowadays we actively work to develop our community, we established our core values and our community identity, we have an active Facebook group, a Slack channel, we use email automations for on-boarding new curators, for learning how to share and use social media and we pair new curators with more experienced ones. We generate a couple of new curator applications a day and currently have a backlog of over 100 applications to review.
Talk about the power of the musicto brand in terms of the logo and domain.
The power of a brand is all in its perception. If I don’t know you, I’m making immediate assumptions about your ability to deliver based on how you look on my phone: is your website fast and easy to understand, do you make it simple for me to find the information I’m looking for, do you look competent?
It’s that last bit that separates the people who get the call from the ones that don’t.
As of August 2020, looking digitally competent is a minimum requirement.
Your website can’t look like your brother-in-law did it back in ‘03. You can no longer say “I don’t do Instagram”, ‘cos your competition does. If you’re not articulating in a super accessible and prominent way - why I should choose you - I won’t.
Between years of experience with your Simply Friday clients and now musicto, you’ve acquired a wealth of knowledge about many digital marketing platforms. What have you learned to be true?
That you can’t do it all - you just can’t.
That each platform has its own groove - you might resonate with a few but you won’t resonate with all and that’s OK - better to pick just one platform and do it well than spread yourself across multiple ones and do them poorly.
That you can't pay someone to “do” your social media - if you’re going to play it has to be you - or at least the pure authentic representation of your brand.
You’ve done a deep dive into email automation, what’s hot there?
Email automation really is the killer app when you’re trying to educate someone with something complex, as well as being a huge time saver for you as the business owner. And yes, it took months to write the sequences, shoot all the screencasts and videos and set up the optimal email flow, but it dramatically improved our retention rate and has saved me a huge amount of time.
Sure, most businesses aren’t building community but I’m betting that for most SMBs you could construct 3 to 5 emails that would deliver great value. People are wary of handing out their email addresses, if someone has decided that they are interested enough in your business to give you their address, there’ll never be another time where they’re more curious as to who you are and why your product or service is great.
If you're building an audience by email and you don’t have automation setup - you should probably talk to Molly.
An outreach strategy is key to the success of musicto. You’ve stuck with tried and true methods, why do those continue to work?
‘Cos they’re tried and true and they work :-) There are plenty of tools like Ahrefs, Diib or MOZ that aren’t that hard to learn and can help you identify websites that might be interested in linking back to you. But the most important aspect of outreach is that you must bring something of value to the recipient; there are no shortcuts when it comes to link building - I’ve yet to find an online template that gets anywhere near being effective. Effective outreach comes from you spending the time to research the target and constructing a unique email that is right for them.
Link building sounds really scary. Is it?
No :-)
If you have a lame product or service that you don’t truly believe in - then yes - it’s really scary.
If instead you can’t wait to get out and tell someone about what you do - if you value the target’s time as much as your own - then link building is an amazing gig.
Give It A Go
If music is your lifeblood, how about becoming a musicto curator? Find out more info here. Or if you simply want to give a listen to playlists with “Music To” do just about anything to, click here.
musicto is on several different platforms, but if you are a Spotify fan you can find them here and you can learn more about the curators here on Instagram.
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Images: musicto