Grow Your Fanbase With This 5-Step Marketing Funnel

Struggling to reach potential fans or need a new way to guarantee income because you can’t play gigs for a while? Whether you’re a musician, DJ or producer, you can use what’s known as a marketing funnel to gain fans and make more money. Guest-blogger and musician Mirjam Sieben from Onlightning is here to explain the 5-step process.

Gigs vs Fanbase: A ‘Chicken or the Egg’ Dilemma

A lot of musicians try to grow their following through playing gigs which, if circumstances allow, is definitely an option. However, if you’re just starting out, it’s also a kind chicken-or-the-egg dilemma since you’re gigging to gain fans while bookers demand that your fanbase is already a decent size before they book you. So what do you do?

Direct-to-Fan Marketing

The answer lies in online marketing aka direct-to-fan marketing, which allows you to grow your fanbase yourself using a marketing funnel. At the same time, this approach will yield acclaim from complete strangers and boost streams and merch sales.

Marketing Funnel

Marketing jargon often sounds more complicated than it actually is. With a marketing funnel, you want as many people as well as a specific group of people entering the top of your funnel so that, as they funnel through, they’re essentially filtered. The goal here is to reach potential fans that already love your style of music (e.g. indie-rock, jazz or dreampop) and put them through a fan-filtering process so that you end up with a dedicated group of people that are most likely to become super-loyal fans.

Fan Journey

Whether you’re operating online or offline, the same psychological concepts apply. This means it’s important not to skip any steps. You don’t ask someone you’ve just met to marry you. First, you want to find out what they’re like and if they have shared interests and views.

Marketing Tools

There are a number of things that you can do to stimulate people to continue their ‘fan journey’. For the first three phases (discovery, foster and close), the following five tools are perfect for funnelling your potential fans.

1. Social Media Ads [Discovery, Foster and Close]

Social media ads are a great way to mimic offline music discovery and introduce people to your music. If people are interested, you can follow up your ads with a tit-for-tat deal where you offer something in return for their email address. You can even go one step further with anyone who’s seriously interested in your music and serve up something they can buy. Needless to say, you don’t want to ask a complete stranger to buy your merch or music because you’d be skipping important fan journey steps.

2. Lead Magnet (Freebies) [Foster]

A Facebook follower isn’t a fan (yet). Your Facebook following is at the top of your funnel and only a small percentage of this group will turn into a super-fan. At the same time, you don’t want to build your fanbase on something as volatile as a social media platform. Giants like Facebook and Instagram can and will do as they please, and you have no choice but to accept the rules they set. Email, on the other hand, is something you have full control over, which is why it can be smart to offer potential fans something in return for their email address — and there’s more to this than a mere prompt or request to ‘sign up to my newsletter for regular updates’. A free download or a peek behind the scenes can be a good way to convince people to go or stay on the fan journey you’ve planned for them.

3. Email Autoresponder

With an email auto-responder like Mailchimp or Mailerlite, you won’t have to send any freebies out manually. Set up automatic replies that are triggered when someone performs a certain action (e.g. signing up for a newsletter) and you can save yourself a ton of time.

4. Relevant Content

Regular social media posts are crucial if you don’t want to be forgotten. Relevant content also includes posts about interests you share with your followers, in other words, don’t just talk about yourself. Treat your social media channel like a magazine. People buy magazines because they feature interesting articles and don’t mind the occasional ad (in this case, that’s you occasionally promoting a new album or single).

5. Webshop

The great thing about the internet is that you can reach people all over the world and gain followers from countries you’ve never even played gigs in before. If you set up a webshop, you can easily promote your merchandise all over the world too.

Meer fans? Volg dit online marketing-plan in 5 stappen

In Sum

As you can tell, there are various ways you can grow your fanbase and, if you do it right, you’ll also gain some super-fans in the process. ‘Likes’ are nice, but having people come out to see you play is what every musician really wants.