The creative process is exciting and challenging for Artists. To sustain a career, however, marketing is one of the most important activities that a creative individual can focus on in today’s world. Artists and musicians that make the best use of modern marketing strategies are the most likely to find success in their fields, no matter what they are.

Over the past few decades, the landscape of marketing has dramatically shifted in a variety of ways. Mobile devices and the massive effects of the internet have changed huge aspects of how musicians connect with their communities and find new Fans. 

Music marketers and marketing teams that support Artists have looked into new ways to reach out to Fans in ways that will actually make impacts on them and using tools that the Fan prefers to use. As a result, text marketing has become one of the most powerful tools that Artists have available to them today. Text marketing makes it possible for Artists to remove the middle man of advertising and truly make personal connections and impacts on their target audiences. Because of the relative newness of the medium of text marketing, it’s hard to determine exactly how to use text marketing to its full potential and effectiveness.

So, what is the mobile advantage? 

Text marketing is the cornerstone of the mobile advantage because it allows creative Artists to reach their target market directly over text messages. In the past, Artists may have relied on promotions, advertising, or guerrilla marketing as the primary methods of making impressions on Fans. Text marketing creates more direct and effective interactions, because the fundamental truth of good marketing is good communication, and that’s based upon direct contact and relationship building.

A primary advantage of mobile marketing over other marketing channels is that you, the Artist, have proactive control. Text marketing reaches a massive number of people without needing them to go to different places on the internet or the physical world. You go to them – directly, on their phone. Over 98% of people in the United States have access to sending and receiving text messages, which means you, the Artist, can reach almost everyone from the devices that they carry with them in their pockets. Email marketing and advertising have open rates that are measured in the single digits. Text marketing typically has open rates around 95%, or even more. And conversion rates are also much higher than other similar marketing strategies.

To make use of the Mobile advantage, you will need to use a text marketing platform. These are specially designed pieces of software that allow you to send massive amounts of text messages at once to a huge number of people. Sure, you can send texts individually to all your Fans from your own phone. However, texting at scale, as your Fan database grows, is far simpler and more efficient with a platform like Adva Mobile. 

Using a quality text marketing platform like Adva Mobile also typically provides a lot of complementary tools in addition to outbound Text Blasts to large numbers of Fans. Most importantly, Text Marketing is highly regulated by the wireless carriers, and it’s cumbersome for individual Artists to manage these rules on your own. The Adva Mobile platform takes care of all these rules for you, managing how Fans opt in, and opt out, of your mobile marketing database. 

The Adva Mobile platform also identifies which Fans are SuperFans and Which are casual Fans, through Insights and Analytics. Segmenting Fans into groups that can be precisely targeted with the right message is also an important capability. No one wants text marketing spam, and that what a text message looks like if you are promoting an upcoming show in Houston, and you’re sending that message to a Fan in Seattle. Your texts need to be effective and personal.

Now that you know what the Mobile Advantage is, and why it’s so powerful, how do you use a text marketing tool and what are the ingredients of effective mobile marketing messages?

Read in next week: Part 2 of The Mobile Advantage.