Words by Matt Bacon
Bacon’s Slices is a new monthly column brought to you by Matt Bacon designed to assist and give tips to help you grow your band and reach that sometimes seemingly unattainable next level.
Matt is a music marketer, social media expert, and label exec for folks like Prophecy Productions, Plastic Head, Blacklight Media (Metal Blade subsidiary) and Ripple Music.
If you have any questions about this article please contact Matt Bacon at [email protected]
Basically, every band in the world right now is trying to understand how to sell more merch. This isn’t just because of the pandemic. This has been an ongoing state of affairs for a few years now. So the question then becomes, what are some core actions you can take to sell more?
I wanted to break down three of my favourite ideas to get you to sell more merch fast. These include properly documenting the merch, involving your fans and of course, having a very clear call to action. Once you do these things the merch sales are practically guaranteed to rapidly pick up for you and your band.
3. Documenting Your Merch
This is a big one. So often bands have merch but somehow they never bother to actually tell people about it. If you don’t let people know you have merch for sale then they aren’t going to know there is anything to buy in the first place!
I recommend regularly posting about your merch and ideally making it the pinned post on your socials.
Beyond that, I think it is really valuable to create posts that document the why and what behind the merch. That is to say, post a video of you showing off one of your shirts and talking about some of the cool and unique elements that make it so special. When you document your merch and tell the story behind it you are accelerating your likeliness to make sales.
2. Involving Your Fans
This is one of my favourite things to do with pushing merch that I see not happening nearly enough. People want to be involved in your process, so give them a chance to partake. Let your fans vote on their favourite designs. This gives them a sense of ownership and really will help push sales. Setting up a poll on social is easy too!
Another tactic that I really enjoy with involving fans is making a point of posting pictures of your fans wearing merch. This adds a real ‘guy next door’ vibe to your merch sales. It lets people see that a ton of folks are buying from you making your product even cooler and more relatable. It’s definitely worth using this tactic to push sales.
1. Having A Clear Call To Action
This is a big one. So many bands will post pics of their merch or get their fans involved, but they never directly tell people to buy. There’s a funny thing about telling people to buy. It generally makes them much more likely to actually buy!
Seriously, I know it sounds stupid and it’s a relatively basic psychological trick but it works. I wouldn’t be telling you about it if it didn’t work. Next time you post about your merch then make sure that you consciously tell people that they should be buying. If you don’t make this explicitly clear then people are not going to buy from you.
So yeah – selling merch can really be that simple. You just need to let people know what you have, get them involved and then make it very obvious that you would like them to buy. Once you do that, you are going to have merch sales rapidly rising!
