The Education phase is characterized as the part of the fan relationship where they get a better sense of who we are, an understanding of our voice and motives, and a grasp on the true span of our art and capabilities. In the midst of all of that, this phase is about building rapport...

A paramount component of everything we teach at Indepreneur is data trackability. In almost all cases, we want to conduct our marketing on a platform that allows us to activate what we call a “return path”. The return path is the method by which we can reach back out to a prospective fan once they’ve come in contact with us for the first time...

Everything that will come up throughout this training is a low resolution analog to actually standing in front of that fan and having a conversation with them.

This is extremely important to keep in the back of our minds. The more we can uphold this as a tenet of our marketing, the more natural and specific our efforts will feel in the Education phase and beyond...

Comments are one of the most immediately understandable and visceral forms of engagement.

First, comments leave nothing up to interpretation - it is a -direct- message from a fan (or hater) saying precisely what they think on the matter of your art, compared to something like a post ‘like’.

Secondly, out of all of the people your ad reaches, the severe minority will be ones that comment. So, these people are particularly passionate!

With this in mind, preparing to capitalize on comments is very important if we want to get the most bang for our buck on our advertising, and ensure that we are rewarding our most interested audience and pulling them deeper into the education phase...

There’s a common rhetoric that marketing your music is harder than ever during the ‘streaming age’ where ‘no one values music anymore’.

Now aside from the fact that we’ve shown time and time again that that’s not necessarily an immovable truth, we’re also in an age full of advantages. One of those is the fact that a ton of social media activity is centered around direct messages...

Like it or not, videos are a major way to push the needle when it comes to marketing. They are far and away the most dynamic and engaging content type in ad creation.

Seems obvious, right? Well, the benefits might be further reaching than you think. While videos are great for the conventional use of ads (aiming to get someone to take an action such as click, sign up, purchase, or message), videos offer so much data that they can be useful without CTAs in the education phase...

I want you to try to think about one artist you discovered that felt like a miracle. When you first heard their tunes, it felt tailor-made to your taste. Once the ball was rolling, you were hooked - you couldn’t stop Googling their name until you thought you had read every interview, every YouTube video, and saw every photoshoot...

Organic reach at its absolute best may reach 8% of your followers on Facebook or Instagram. Not to mention, this number shrinks with every passing year.

As both advertisers and users have flocked to social, social platforms have had an increasingly harder time figuring out “what should show up on a user’s news feed”.

In the midst of all of this, Facebook Groups have become quite popular. These groups have served to help users curate their newsfeed experience by opting into specific communities full of relevant conversations..

Up to now we’ve talked about videos, community, conversations, and engagement a whole lot. If there’s something that really represents the convergence of all of these things, it’s livestreams. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s hard to deny the potential that a livestream could carry for your music efforts...

Since you may be new to running Fan Finders or converting these incoming fans into more interested ones, you may not have the data on your fans that help describe who they are. As a result, you may have made some assumptions about what your fans are like without truly knowing...

If you want to know what your fans want, one of the easiest ways to do this is to simply ask them. For this reason, polls and quizzes have become a mainstay in marketing. They are often used to gather qualitative data or help put a prospective customer on their ideal track...

With social media marketing, a lot of times we are just having low-resolution versions of a conversation amongst comments, posts - and even conversations in DMs. This is why Messenger can be one of the most activating components of the Education phase - it is literally conversation and rapport building...

Being able to generate an audience where purely organic methods are worthwhile takes a well-nurtured audience, tenure, consistent ad spend, and good page/post quality. Even so, organic reach is on the downslope and has been for years. So, relying wholly on organic methods with or without these proverbial winds in your sails is not very reliable as the sole method for our education phase...

In our data hub, we asked a variety of questions that help us shape together our fan avatar. Refer to the final page of your data hub sheet to see what your biggest winners were, and let’s brainstorm what kind of conversations we can put back at the top of our education efforts...

In this lesson I want to show you how you can take these assets and leverage them in two main ways: First, I’ll show you how you can embed ManyChat links into these resources in order to reward particularly interested fans. Then, I’ll show you how we can rig up a retargeting chain to deliver special offers/content to your most educated fan segment.

One way to guide a fan through the education phase is to literally act as a concierge. We can accomplish this by creating a points system for ManyChat in Facebook Messenger or Instagram DMs. In short, this system can allow us to warm up fans to great lengths while engaging them, involving them, and getting desired actions from them that can be capitalized on the down the funnel...

This training and the strategies within can take incoming fans and warm them up to eventually giving us the opportunity to communicate with them directly via email or text (usually).

The thing about this direct communication is that we don’t want to be too on-the-nose about asking for their email or phone number. In fact, rather than simply asking for their contact information, the BEST way to gain this info is to actually offer the fans something in return for doing so...

When it comes to marketing music, the rules change a bit compared to other more conventional retail markets. Your product - your music - is in many ways inextricably linked to who you are as a person. For that reason, it can be wise to look at our own interests, history, and traits to see if we can find any clues for how to best position and talk about our music online...

As a marketer for your own work of art, you face specific challenges that are made harder by the fact that your end product is a purely subjective one. With this being the case, your approach to marketing your own music will take a much more sentimental approach than a conventional market would necessitate. As musicians and marketers, we need to be able to understand what our music does for our fans…

Creating a Fan Community such as Facebook Groups or a Discord can be a great place for fans in this phase to dig into your art and ecosystem without needing to commit to handing over personal information such as an email address or phone number. Since your fans may already have accounts on these platforms (and certainly do if you’ve gathered many of them on Facebook), the barrier to entry is extremely low...