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]
So, a couple of weeks ago Facebook rolled out its insane and gargantuan limitations on sharing Australian news links. I figured it might be a worthwhile time to talk about different ways to own your traffic which is clearly going to become a lot more important in the next few weeks and months.
Owning your traffic is not as hard as it sounds. It can be as easy as having a mailing list, setting up a pixel and of course having a good network of your own that you can always fall back on. This really matters and in an increasingly corporate-run world, it’s something I think that we can all benefit from.
3. Setting Up Your Email List
I once heard it said that email lists are like calculus homework. Everyone knows that they should do it but no one wants to do it. The thing is when you set up a good email list it’s a way to directly access your fanbase and build a personal connection with them.
Even if you don’t have anything to sell right now you can just start talking to people on your list and making conversations happen with fans. Or you can get them to do actions that are free like subscribing on Youtube or following you on Spotify. These are things that are valuable to get superfans to do because
those numbers matter!
2. Pixels
This is a big one. Pixels are essentially a way to track customer behaviour on your website. You’ve probably heard about the Facebook pixel, but there are also pixels with Google Analytics and other large advertising platforms that anyone can use for free.
This is definitely the most technically challenging thing on this list but it’s also something that can be really helpful because once you set them up properly you can literally track people who left their cart abandoned on your webshop, or even the people who just visited your site or landing pages. You can even
export the data to use on other platforms!
1. Having A Good Network
Sometimes it just pays to go old school. You just need to go out there and make sure that you are connecting with people one on one. Sometimes this hand to hand combat approach is the most effective because it really facilitates personal connections.
This is the thing that no technology company can take away from you – just making sure that you have your own relationships that people see the value in. If you can have a good network and showcase this to your public then people are going to connect a lot more meaningfully and start to engage with you on a
higher level.
So while owning your traffic can sound hard it’s clearly not as difficult as all that. All you need to do is identify ways that you can retarget the people interested in you without leaning on other companies too hard… or at least not in a way you can’t take the power back. This becomes straightforward with email lists, pixels ad networking.
