If we’re being optimistic, one good thing to come out of the coronavirus situation is that many of the laggard industries which like it or not include music and music festivals are finally realizing the importance of content.
We’re grateful for the response we got on our recent blog post “What The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Exposed About Festivals. It’s Not What You Think,” where we talk about how content is the currency of the internet.
Shortly after we published that post, almost on cue, Coachella released a documentary on YouTube titled Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert using archived video footage.
Being one of the longest running and biggest festivals in existence, they pulled many of the corporate power moves- like working with YouTube and publishing the documentary as a YouTube Original, and throwing plenty of ad dollars and promotion behind it.
It certainly is a great piece of content with a ton of views and engagement, and a great move on the part of Goldenvoice (Producers of Coachella).
It is without a doubt a testament to the power and value of content. However, it is NOT an example of content marketing.
And what music festivals and the music industry need to start implementing is a real content marketing strategy.
It’s clear that while everyone seems to grasp the value of content, they still do not understand what content marketing is and the concept of being your own media publisher. More importantly, they do not understand how exactly it helps them. Because if they did, they would all be doing it!
So my mission today is to leave you with a real understanding of content marketing so you can see for yourself why the Coachella doc ain’t exactly it.
Just to be clear, content marketing is something even smaller fests and companies can do. It’s not a strategy reserved only for the big guys.
Let’s start with the definition.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
That last part is very important. Content marketing isn’t just some novel idea to add value to your audience. It’s a MARKETING strategy with a purpose- to help you accomplish goals, a profitable one.
Yes, great content does keep you relevant and engages your audience, but that is not why you do content marketing.
You do content marketing to achieve business goals, and ultimately turn a profit.
And you do want to achieve business goals, right??
One more thing, content marketing is not the same as social media marketing. Content marketing should always come before a social media strategy.
We get asked all the time what the value is for an event company to do content marketing or act as their own publishing company.
The truth is, we can’t answer that question. Or rather it’s not the right question.
If you are wondering what content marketing can do for you, you’re not getting it. You need to start with a goal, Your goal. The goal for your festival. The goal of your business.
Tell us what your goals are, then, we can tell you how content marketing can help you achieve it.
Whether you want to sell more tickets, sell them faster, increase brand awareness, have a long lasting event, or whatever goals you have, the value of content marketing is that it helps you achieve those goals.
Think of content as a car, and content marketing strategy as the engine. The car takes you to your destination only if the engine is in good shape.
For example, if your goal is to increase ticket sales, that’s the destination. Your content marketing strategy that calls for crafting a blog and YouTube videos and posting three times a month targeting keywords your desired audience is using to search, that’s the engine. The content crafted for those posts is the car.
Let’s get more specific on the strategy (the engine) – how exactly you increase ticket sales with content marketing.
Because you are probably wondering, how does blogging and making YouTube videos increase ticket sales? How does content, as valuable as it may be, actually help me reach my business goals?
The game is simple (not easy, but simple).
At its core, content marketing is exactly like any marketing, advertising or business strategy. You have a target audience, a market, potential customers, consumers, festival goers etc., and you need to do the following:
The better you are at finding your audience and communicating with them, the better your results will be. And content marketing does this better than everything else.
If you are absolutely crushing it, that’s amazing! More power to you. But if you’re not hitting your goals, whatever you are doing now isn’t working. You need to consider other methods.
Customers, where you at? Easy, they’re on the internet! While social media is part of the internet, let’s separate them for our purposes.
And you either go to them (i.e. social media, ads) or they find you (internet search engines like Google and YouTube).
While most of you have a strategy for finding them, you’re not very good at letting people find you.
Don’t believe me? Here is an example.
Google is the world’s largest search engine, and YouTube is the second largest. In order for people to find you on these platforms, you need to have content on them.
Do you have a regularly updated blog or an active YouTube channel? You probably don’t. But you’re not alone, almost no one in the music festival space does.
Want more proof? This is where search engines and keywords come into play. “Festival camping setups” is a phrase often searched on both on Google and YouTube.
Clearly people searching that keyword or phrase is a potential ticket buyer for your festival.
But if you search that phrase, the results are dominated by personal blogs and publications (remember how content marketing is like being your own media company?).
You can go all the way to page 10, and no festival websites come up. Well, one actually does on page 2 because they have a somewhat related blog post published (I’m not going to get into it here but that festival just got “lucky”, they’re not really doing content marketing).
You’re not showing up because you don’t have content on these platforms!
So your content marketing strategy would require you to create blog posts and YouTube videos that will match keywords and phrases that people are searching regarding music festivals, exactly like a media company.
I know this part is foreign to you. It’s foreign to the entire industry! This is why it’ll be so much easier for your content marketing efforts to be more effective if you start now. Virtually no competition (Wink, wink, competitive advantage).
For camping setups, how about “7 Camping Setups That Will Enhance Your Experience at [Your Festival].” Of course, you need to optimize your blog posts and videos with effective copywriting and SEO techniques. (i.e. I intentionally chose the number 7 ).
This is really important because you need to beat out all the other content of similar nature out there. Think about why you clicked on this article and why you’re still reading it. It’s because I made it so 🙂
Now imagine how much more attention your festival will have if you posted even one blog post and YouTube video per week using this method?
Communication. This is perhaps the most important part. What you say and how you say it makes all the difference in the world. Without the right message or the right content, your content marketing efforts will not be very effective.
Without getting into too much detail here, your content needs to be relevant and valuable to your target audience. And yes, this is part of the definition of content marketing we established earlier.
Content marketing communicates better than all existing methods.
Why?
Consumers are fed up with in-your-face advertising and sales tactics that feel cheap, slimy, or underhanded.
Instead, the consumers are attracted to authenticity, transparency, and friendliness in a brand. The internet and social media channels help consumers pick and choose exactly which brands they interact with.
The data proves, traditional or we can even call it the old ways of marketing and advertising no longer work. Sorry to be blunt but this is what you’re currently doing. Old stuff.
Because of this, marketers have realized that they need to approach the consumer differently. You can’t serve up the same old ads anymore and expect results similar to 30 or 40 years ago. Instead, you must add value to consumers’ lives to make them want to give us the time of day.
Hence, a marketing strategy that prioritize relationship-building, focusing on the customer versus the brand – was born in response. Content marketing. And oh boy, does it work.
You can’t just push products or events anymore. One way traffic doesn’t fly. If you want value from them in the form of a ticket purchase, you need to also give them value. So if they are looking for festival camping setups, give them that! Keep throwing your lineup in their face isn’t exactly adding value.
Speaking of communicating, I quickly want to emphasize the importance of YouTube and the power of video content. Video has proven to be the most effective communication method. You can download our deck with all the powerful stats here: YouTube Stats You Need to Know in 2020
If you’re not convinced, the deck will convince you, but I’ll give you one stat to start “Over 90% of users say they learned about a brand or product on YouTube.”
I’m not knocking Goldenvoice, Coachella or their documentary. It’s an amazing and smart thing they did. The headline of this article made you click right?
While great copywriting is extremely powerful, make sure you don’t just clickbait your audience.
We just went over how the audience wants authenticity and transparency. The title made you click, but it’s a headline that is relevant and on par with the content of this post. I added real value.
Had I not, then I would just be spamming you. You would be turned off from consuming content from us ever again.
However, I also do mean it when I say that Coachella doc ain’t it.
For bigger companies, one-off marketing campaigns might make sense.
Traditional marketing campaigns are a project – the success/efficiency is measured once it’s complete, like the Coachella doc, even though the project is based around content.
Content marketing on the other hand is an asset-focused investment that if done well compounds in effectiveness and provides increasing value over time.
