Why Music Fan Data Matters

While it's been established that most online sites are collecting as much of our data as possible, artists and bands would do well to adopt a similar strategy, as carefully utilized fan data can benefit both the fan and the musicians.

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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Every site and social network online is collecting our data, and while that might seem sinister at first glance, in most cases there’s a good reason – to more precisely send us either content or advertising that’s most personally relevant to us. Why get hit with 99 things that we don’t care about just to get to that one thing that we do? That’s why artists and bands should take great care in obtaining and maintaining their fan data. It’s the key to keeping the relationship going with the fan, and keeping you one step ahead of the competition. This excerpt from the 2nd edition of my Social Media Promotion For Musicians handbook outlines a distinct example where that fan data can come in handy.

“It’s difficult to read a tech-related story these days without a reference to user data, metadata, or the latest popular term “Big Data” (large data sets controlled by mostly large companies), but there are a number of good reasons why this has become a major concern for artists, bands and businesses everywhere.

The biggest reason is that the more data you have about your fans and customers, the more you can take advantage of it for promotion as a result. That’s because we’re moving into a new era of marketing and promotion.

The future of marketing is micro-targeting.

The more you know about your fans, the easier it will be to send them only the information that they care about. Why inform a fan in St. Louis that you’re doing a gig in Boston? There might be a time that you’d make that information available (if you’re as big as Dave Matthews perhaps), but a few days before the show you just want to concentrate locally, and micro-targeting allows you to do that. What if you have a piece of merch that’s aimed at your female fans in cold weather territories? Do you think the dudes care much about it? Do you think your female fans in Florida and Texas care much about it? Micro-targeting allows you to adjust your campaign accordingly.

And it makes measurement easier too. With a more precise user sample, it’s much easier to tell if and how a campaign is actually working. If you shotgun a post to 3,000 fans and 15 respond, it looks like a response rate of only .5%, but if that same campaign was more precisely aimed at only 30 of those fans and you found that 12 responded, that’s a whopping 40%. In the first example with a .5% response, you’d think that your campaign had a serious flaw in it. In the more targeted second example, we can see that the same campaign worked smashingly well. It all depends on targeting the right fans in the first place.

Thanks to fan data, the old advertising days of “50% of advertising works. We just don’t know which 50%,” may soon be over, thanks to micro-targeting and better measurement techniques. It’s all part of social self-promotion.”

You can read more from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.