Running Competitions to Gain New Fans - How to market musicHow to market music

In my post “How to get 10 Times the Number of Shares on Facebook” I talked briefly about introducing a competition element to increase share numbers, but here I will go into more details of the competition we ran and how it drove new fans and delivered an 80% track download success rate.

So as I previously mentioned we asked FB fans to share a post for a chance to win a framed Linkin Park print (we did this honestly knowing that more people would share a post relating to a huge band than for an up and coming one – but we also knew LP fans would probably like the band we were promoting too). For double the chances to win we asked people to visit a webpage where they needed to answer 2 simple questions. Now remember most of the people who are entering are LP fans and maybe know nothing of the band we were promoting.

So the trick we used was to have these “prospective new fans” answer questions on 2 music videos by the band we were plugging!

The LP fans HAD to watch both videos all the way through to be able to answer the questions.

This gave us 6 to 7 minutes where all they were concentrating on was our band!

Once they had entered they were taken to a “thank you for entering page”.

This page also said, if you enjoyed the tracks you have just heard, you can download them for free at www….etc.

A truly massive 80% of all the people who entered the competition also downloaded the free tracks and album sales spiked right across this period too.

Remember as well that by the time we offered people these tracks, there was no “reason” for them to download, other than the fact that they clearly liked what was on offer.