04/10/2024
Welcome to another week at blackhat. It’s been slow folks. Lots of benefit and memorial shows these last few weekends. Our hearts broke with our friends over and over these last few weeks/months/years. We’ve lost so many vibrant souls in our local music community since 2019 (and before) it’s hard to really process all of what is missing. I won’t single any specific people out in this blog, but we love you, our dear friends, and we support you.
Since there are no shows to report, no releases to discuss, and no major projects in the art cave let’s talk Audience Building. We aren’t a massive label with tons of money and clout (yet) so like our clients we still need to work on building our own social media following and growing our brand recognition in the right markets. How the heck do we do that, you ask? Well, lemme read a few articles and I will tell ya…
What I gather from the articles I’ve read is that:
- Create a Strong Brand Identity. Your voice and your brand personality are HUGE here. Adding your personal flair to your content is the biggest thing that will help you stand apart from other creators in your category. You need to let your personality shine in your content, but be consistent with your brand’s message and your posting schedule.
- Consistency is key. This is true of most businesses. If you went to the Bucks every day and got a caramel macchiato you’d want them to taste the same no matter which location you had access to that day. If they were wildly inconsistent you’d stop going to the locations that don’t meet those brand standards on a regular basis no matter how convenient the location. If you want people to recognize your brand and interact with you regularly, you need to give them consistent, brand-relevant content to interact with.
- Reels, Reels, Reels. A significant number of creators have more success with interactions, likes, follows when posting regular reels across platforms. What the heck do you post reels about? Good question. What are you marketing? Your comedy? Music? Skits? Art? Crafts? All of these things are easy enough to make short reels for. Follow trends and throw your own twist on them using your brand, merch, etc. Audio trends on tiktok and reels are an easy way to get started without having to come up with entirely new ideas.
- Keep going. You may feel a bit discouraged if you don’t get much interaction right away, but remember that it takes time to build foundations. If you don’t keep going to build up that base of content and find the type of content that works best for your brand you will be doing yourself a disservice.
- Don’t be afraid to pivot to what works even if it wasn’t your first, second, or third idea. This is related to the previous point that you should keep going and not be afraid to be flexible. Sometimes an idea that seems the most absurd ends up becoming your best content. Always remember Semper Gumby. STAY FLEXIBLE!
- Hashtags… These are still huge. These are what make your content searchable and if used correctly can get your content in front of your audience more easily. This takes a bit of research because you need to know your audience, your brand, and the core hashtags being used by your audience that are relevant to your brand. Once you find those, follow them, use them regularly, and interact with related content often.
- Collaborate with other creators in your market or relevant to your brand whose audience you are trying to reach. You can do this by making videos, doing photoshoots, or collaborating on other projects relevant to both creators.
- Run Contests and Giveaways… Since blackhat is one big collaborative group anyway, this was what I decided to try first rather than commandeering our social media accounts and flooding them with the only kind of content I can currently generate on my own…art videos… While somewhat relevant to what we do, my parts of blackhat are only a small portion of what we really are. A music studio should make content relevant to music fans right? Well That brings me to the results of last week’s art giveaway…
Art Raffle Results…as of the end of the contest only three people entered the raffle. There were more shares and likes, but not as many comments as I’d hoped to receive. I am not deterred, no. In fact I’m actually determined to draw all three requests. Blaze, you will get a death metal Donkey, Patricia gets a tasmanian ska devil, and Lyrae gets an alternative rocktopus. I have actually already finished the base sketches of all three. I will share the finished doodles this week on our social media pages. These themes were so fun I might actually just keep going and make some of these silly designs available as stickers in our merch shop. Enjoy my audacity, buy some merch. Here’s the base sketches of the goofy animals…Don’t judge me, they aren’t done.
Did we gain a ton of new followers from this contest? No. I did still manage to get us a few new followers by sending invites to everyone on my personal friends list that hasn’t liked our pages yet. We are learning, we are finding our brand’s voice, and we hope you get to learn something useful along the way too. Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and subscribe to the blog if you haven’t already. We have big plans and we want to keep you all in the loop! Until next week!
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