There Is No Such Thing As Overpromotion
McDonald’s is a brand name that seems to be ever-present in modern pop culture and the public consciousness itself. Despite that, they are relentless about running ads on TV and other places, without the slightest break. One might feel that they are going overboard with those efforts, but in reality, it is thanks to that unchanging insistence on keeping the name of McDonald’s in everyone’s plain sight as often as possible that it is able to preserve the status of the most well-known fast-food restaurant in the world. As they run their ads, McDonald’s attracts new customers, keeps in touch with existing ones and offers information on its latest special offers.
The same thing applies to DJs and their fan base. They shouldn’t avoid actively promoting themselves out of fear of being annoying. Instead, the promotion itself must be made interesting and relevant enough not to seem annoying to fans. Every DJ must always have something new to share about their work and life. They need to promote themselves often and heavily, or they risk falling out of the music scene and being forgotten, which is much worse than coming off as annoying to a couple of people.
Get yourself out there
The most important part of your promotion is probably notifying your fans of any upcoming events you might be throwing or participating in. If the event will take place in your city, it makes sense to only target your local fans. A very important event can justify some extra promotional efforts, but all of them need to be diversified to achieve maximum results.
An effective promotion strategy involves many different techniques and approaches. Printed promotion is always a welcome part of it. In fact, you should always do some if you hope to succeed, but there are not too many options. Moreover, all of them are well known and won’t surprise anyone, so you need to think of something that will.
It would be a good idea to focus more on electronic ways of promotion and spice it up with something that’s unique to your event or your music. It’s not always necessary to always be one step ahead of everyone in absolutely everything, but you definitely don’t want to fal behind and misrepresent your event.
Use text message marketing
Already discussed in detail before, text message marketing is a useful tool for any DJ to have. Like with all other types of promotion, people who receive your texts should be able to opt out of the service. To keep those kinds of requests to a minimum, don’t overdo it, make your messages relevant and keep them short! Even the most loyal fans won’t have the patience to read walls of text. And why should they? They might not get angry with you over it, but the length will diminish the impact of your text.
Promote yourself online
If there’s any place where your promotional talents can go loose unchecked, it has to be the Internet. Not because you can’t be held accountable for your actions (you can), but because it’s just as easy for your fans to unsubscribe as it was subscribe and people who don’t like or care about you won’t get caught up in your promotion.
Of course, it doesn’t mean you can get careless. You still don’t want half of your © Copyright fans to unsubscribe because you sent them 100 messages in a day. The main idea is that if you’re applying common sense and doing regular promotion, people who wouldn’t welcome it won’t be seeing it.
This is why there should always be an option of unsubscribing from your emails, which, by the way should make up the core of your electronic promotional efforts. The rest of your efforts can go into taking advantage of social networking sites, music forums, blogs, uploading your latest tracks and maybe some videos, if you’re up to it. Event feature on Facebook, for example, is one of the easiest and sometimes effective ways of letting your fans know about your event.
Promote yourself the old way
With all that fancy new media promotion you’re pulling for your event, don’t get too confident and forget to throw in some good old-fashioned promotional tactics into the mix. Before, during and after every event you have the unique chance of interacting with your fans directly, in real life. When you meet them off the dance floor before or after the even, that’s your chance to make an impression and share some information. If the date of your next event has already been set, there is absolutely no excuse to not having a flyer and a spare mix CD prepared just for the occasion. Maybe they'll just get rid of the flyer later, but chances are they will read it, giving them something to call back upon when the date’s coming up and they’re looking for places to hang out with their friends. No Facebook mass-messaging efforts can promise this kind of result, so don’t let it go. Grab your chance!
Target your promotional efforts
The Internet has given us the ability to reach every single contact we know with no extra cost, tempting some DJs to go loose on all the people they’ve ever added on Facebook and sent emails to. This is not a good way of interacting with your audience, even hard-core fans. You’ll have little use of promotion that’s distributed across every single person you know. That’s why it’s best to put more effort into targeting particular groups, instead of sending out extra messages that won’t serve you any good. You may have some loyal fans in Germany, but there’s little reason for them to know about the next event you'll be throwing in Chicago, let alone be personal y reminded of it, by email or otherwise. The world will appreciate your updates on upcoming mix CDs and new tracks, but it’s best to leave local news to the locals.
Things to watch out for
There may be no such thing as too much promotion, but too much useless promotion will hurt both you and your fans. You might be willing to keep them informed about every little development in your music career, but try to keep the updates within reason. You could also unintentionally annoy people by sending them texts about events they won’t be able to attend. If it’s a onetime thing, of course, there was no way of knowing that, but if you consistently send messages to people who live just out of town about every event you are throwing there, they are bound to opt out. On the other hand, by reducing the frequency of your updates, but showing you’re still active and kicking, you will maintain those fans and might even see them over a couple of times.
Build a reputation for yourself
Promotion doesn’t have to be limited to the people you’re expecting to see on the dance floor when you throw an event. You might not be aware of this, but your name can reach even the most distant ears and Facebook accounts through your fans, including other DJs and promoters themselves. It may not seem like a big deal now, but at the right time and place, it can play a role in doing something good to your music career or being invited to a high profile event. If you happen to be in another town and there’s an event that features your music style, you should try reaching out to the DJs and promoters behind it. If some of them happen to recognize your name, you might be in for a pleasant surprise! Good promotion can get you into a position you weren’t even aiming for. Even if it doesn’t, indirect results of your promotion will just win you more fans. As it happens, there’s no lose in this win-win situation.
Most people don’t really care or know about your dilemma of “To promote or not to promote” and the deep-rooted fears of coming off as pretentious, so don’t act like it matters! If you get an idea that you think will spread the word about you and your event even further, don’t make a predicament out of it. Just do it!