Why Artists Should Focus on Their Top Supporters
By Tyler White, Artist in Residence at DMM
Imagine you wake up on your birthday to a text from your favorite artist:
These tiny, powerful moments create lifelong super-fans; the ones that buy your limited edition albums and trek cross-country for your shows, bringing their friends along with them. These super-fans are why Taylor Swift’s Red tour grossed $30MM (plus $17 in merch per attendee), making her the highest earning musician. They helped Ryan Leslie earn $2MM off his last album with no label and no promo.
And, if you’re a growing artist like me, these fans will make or break our careers.
We’ve all heard about the importance of growing a social media following. And many of us have been frustrated when, after all the effort, our latest post still gets single digit likes. What’s the point of building a following if we can’t convert that into real buzz, concert crowds, or more fans?
The fact is, most artists waste time engaging the wrong fans in the wrong ways.
Not all of our current and prospective supporters are the same. A smaller group of our biggest super-fans will generate the lion’s share of our revenue. In fact, super-fans spend up to $420 per year on music and account for more than ⅓ of all music spend, according to a Neilsen study.
Super-fans have even more power to grow your fan-base. Without radio play, your best source of new fans are the friends of your current ones. Who’s most likely to promote you to their friends?
Here’s something critically important for artists to understand: Less than 5% of your fans will get any of their friends to listen to your music on social media (Engage Sciences). This means that almost all of your new fans will be the friends of an extremely small group of your current fans: your super-fans.
Our relationships with our super-fans are the most important relationships we have. In order to succeed, we need to identify and engage those relationships in personal ways. Here are three ways artists can engage their top supporters to build their fan bases and their bank accounts.
1. Keep track of how your fans support you
You’re most likely to find your top supporters among the people who’ve supported you before. People who bought your last album are most likely to buy your new one. People who brought friends to your last show are the most likely to bring friends to your next one.
Note the people who buy your music, attend your shows, bring friends, or share your posts on social media and make sure you have their contact information. This way, you can prioritize reaching out to them with future opportunities to support you. It’s well known in sales that selling to existing customers is much easier than selling to new ones.
SuperPhone lets me know which of my fans have spent money with me on Gumroad and other platforms, in addition to what products they’ve bought. For example, I can message everyone who’s donated to my songwriting club with a new track I’m working on. Artists with more texts than they can handle can even filter for fans who have spent money with them, and prioritize those messages first.
2. Collect insightful information about your fans
For most artists, a “fan database” consists of stray email lists and nameless followers scattered across different platforms. Even artists who rigorously collect emails after every show haven’t learned anything about their fans as people. In order to build a relationship with your top supporters, you need to learn about them. You can’t wish a fan happy birthday if you don’t know it.
Invest in collecting fan information that will help you connect in more personalized ways. For example, if you know where a fan lives you can let them know directly when you’re in town for a show. Knowing what other artists your fans are into can help you decide who to cover next on Youtube and which fans will most want to watch.
I track my fan information in SuperPhone; all I have to do is give out my number and the first text fans receive is a request to add their contact information to my phone. I can tag people as fellow artists, super-fans, and more information as I learn about them. This way, I keep all information and communication with my super-fans in one place.
3. Engage with your fans 1–1
Even with all of the social media tools at our disposal, nothing beats 1–1 personal communication. Oprah has 28.8 MILLION twitter followers, yet she usually gets less than 1000 engagements on her posts; that’s a .003% conversion rate! On the flip side, 50% of the fans Ryan Leslie messages 1–1 on SuperPhone go on to spend money with him.
Make time for regular conversations with your top supporters. Try texting them for feedback on an upcoming tracks or giving them a phone call on their birthday. If someone buys a VIP package, handwrite them a note. Simply replying to comments people leave on your Soundcloud or Instagram posts goes a long way.
SuperPhone makes it easy for me to communicate 1–1 with my fans through SMS. Every morning I check my dashboard to see how many new supporters I have so I can thank them personally. I can also see who has a birthday today and make sure I shoot them a personal message.
Wishing a super-fan happy birthday takes at most 20 seconds of your time. If you have the right information, you could wish your top 1000 fans happy birthday for the rest of your career while you brush your teeth in the morning.
We’ve designed SuperPhone to help you identify and engage your top supporters so you can best leverage your most important asset: Your time.
Does this resonate with you? How are you engaging your super-fans? Leave a comment or hit me direct: +1-646-798-2441
