Is social media helping you grow your fan base? What can you expect in terms of return on investment (ROI)?

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I share how and why my attitude around social media has shifted, and what I think is the key to digital marketing success.

Podcast Highlights:

00:18 – The king of internet music marketing

00:43 – Shifting away from social media

01:24 – The addictive nature of social media

03:21 – How my thinking shifted

08:11 – Lessons from independent music campaigns

12:45 – “Old fart marketing”

14:46 – Automating your social media marketing

16:31 – 80/20 your marketing

17:53 – The importance of building your website on WordPress

19:30 – Where do you put your focus?

Transcription:

David Andrew Wiebe is the king of internet music marketing and, most importantly, social networking platforms.

That's a direct quote from Scott Kirby of Music Revolt, who shared that with me about four years ago in 2016. It was around that time that I came out with physical copies of my first best-selling book, The New Music Industry: Adapting, Growing and Thriving in the Information Age.

And it's true, back then I had a much stronger focus on social media. Some of you might be wondering, what happened? And maybe I'm just thinking too much here, and you couldn't care less. Either way, social media is deserving of some space on the podcast, at least one episode, right? But I actually am planning a more in-depth review of social media in 2020 later.

So I'll be getting into that in another episode. In this episode, we'll take a fairly surface-level look at social media and what it has meant to me, and how things have changed for me in the last few years. Now, social media is sexy.

People love it and it's addictive. And we know it's addictive because it's been engineered that way. Just like smartphones have been engineered to be addictive, so has social media.

And the two together are a deadly combination. Everywhere you go, it seems like people have their heads in their phones and aren't present to what's going on in the world. They look at the newsreels and the headlines and think that's actually what's going on in the world when they haven't confirmed any of it for themselves.

Now, that might be an entirely different topic, but I still feel like it's pretty relevant. It's pretty important to consider what it is that we're consuming and how we think about it. Because there are so many things that we just don't think about critically anymore.

The smartphones and the social media and our text messages and so many other things have us so distracted that basically we barely think about anything critically anymore. So that is a factor. Just the fact that I know it's addicting and I don't want to spend that much time on a platform as a creator like you are, I'm sure.

Whatever it is you're creating, you might be creating your first book, you might be creating music, you might be creating some kind of info product, or maybe even an app. I know that this podcast's listenership represents a broad base of people. There are all kinds of people that listen in.

And when I hear about the kind of quality of people that listen in, I couldn't be more thrilled. It's just so amazing to me that people who've been in the business and industry for so long and are well regarded listen to this podcast. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for listening in.

I am hugely appreciative of that fact. So I'm going to be going down a million rabbit trails here, just as I have. But getting back to the topic of social media, what has changed? You know, in life, I've discovered that there are some things that you simply can't unsee, such as the time when I read Tim Ferriss's book, The Four-Hour Workweek.

And I know that this was a transformational work for many entrepreneurs out there and probably for most of you listening. And if you haven't read it yet, I would suggest getting a copy. And I don't want to blow it out of proportion, but it might be one of the most inspirational and entertaining books on the idea of lifestyle design.

And lifestyle design is what I've been fascinated by and interested in the last few years, to the point where I am now a digital nomad. And I think I shared that before. However, I'm not the kind of digital nomad that is going to go and sit on a beach and make a video saying, Why the hell haven't you quit your job? That's just not my personality, and it's not how I do things.

The point is that I've achieved a degree of freedom, and it was my goal to do this. In 2016, I started working completely from home. And in 2019, I managed to extend that into becoming location-independent.

So that was a goal of mine. And my next goal is basically to build a six-figure business. And I'm certainly not going to say I'm well on my way, but looking at all of my various income sources, earning high four figures monthly has no longer proven a challenge to me.

So when people say, "Look at me, I am making $3,000 a month from selling stuff on Amazon." I couldn't care anymore. I'm more interested in how I leverage myself such that I can make six figures without like stressing out and having it take up my time.

So I mean, that's where my focus is now. So what changed for me with reading Tim Ferriss' book was that I no longer felt the necessity to be like right on top of my email. And as we know, email is a convenient organization system for other people's priorities.

So other people have plans for you. The thing is, other people's plans aren't that grand. They don't have many big ideas for you.

I'm sorry to say, I would love to say that there are so many people out there that are willing to invest and want to be a part of your team and want to help you out when you're struggling and when things are down, when it seems like you're not keeping up and, you know, you're giving your blood, sweat and tears to your business and you're still not keeping up with all these projects. There are so few people who will come by your side and say,  "Can I help? Can I help?" I would have loved to have heard those words last year. I'm telling you, I would have loved to have heard somebody say, "Can I help?" Because that would have made all the difference.

Just one person, just one person. It would have made all the difference. And this is the whole thing about social media that is encouraging a fairly individualistic society, but it didn't need a whole lot of help.

When you think about it, we were pretty individualistic before social media. And social media has only grown and expanded that trend, which is really one of the unfortunate things. So when I began to look at my email as a convenient organization system for other people's agendas for my life, I could no longer focus on it.

That just became a second, third, fourth priority. It was no longer the main priority in my life to keep my inbox to zero. And at this point now, I just try to unsubscribe from everything I possibly can so that my inbox is not cluttered and I can see any messages that are coming from clients, from my mastermind group, from my inner circle of friends that I care about.

Aside from that, I mean, really, do I have to? I'm going to try to communicate the best I can. And if you send me questions and you're on my email list, or if you're a podcast listener, or if you're a regular reader of the blog, absolutely send me emails, and I will respond to them. You can just go to the website and contact support if you don't already have my email, and they will get in touch with me because they are empowered to handle those types of requests.

And they're just going to send them over to me once they identify that they can't really answer the question. So you are more than welcome to just pass along your messages. And I'm really happy to see them.

And write a note of encouragement or comment or feedback, or anything that you find worthy. Wow, it's amazing how much I can though.

So hopefully I'm not boring you to death or anything like that. So some of the things that I've done over the last few years, I've done a couple of independent musician campaigns, not a ton, but there was a crowdfunding campaign, there was a radio campaign, there was a Facebook campaign, and a few things like that. And I worked on that with either a partner of mine or other team members, or a combination thereof.

So if you hear me saying we, it's not just me, right? There are other people involved in making this happen. What we find the first thing we check isn't an artist's social media following. Now, that might sound weird, or it might sound compelling depending on your experience with social media.

But my experience with social media has inevitably been that a large following can be leveraged, but usually, you still end up relying on advertising. So you have to spend some money to get results out of your following. As well, I still don't think social media is a marketing engine.

Now, advertising is amazing and you can get some great results, but you still have to nail your ad. If you don't nail your ad copy and images and everything that goes with it, it's just not going to be effective. And we marketers, I swear to you, waste a lot of money on ads that don't work until we find something that converts and works well.

So I don't know how a lot of these other providers of information for musicians in the music industry purport to be able to teach musicians how to create effective ads. I mean, I guess maybe they give you templates or something. I don't know, but I'm sorry to say, it's just not going to work that well without a ton of testing.

And you may be a skilled musician, and you may even have a broad base of internet marketing knowledge, but unless you go deep into how an ad works and how it can get you results, it's just not going to go anywhere.