Hello again,everyone. We thought we would celebrate the arrival of June with a surprise second post this afternoon, so below you will fine a column aimed at helping Haulix clients increase engagement with their promotional invitations. If you have any questions about the content of the blog, or if you would like more information regarding the distributional services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Haulix is the most preferred and trusted distribution service amongst music bloggers, but it can often be hard for even the best artists to make writers engage with their promo. As music writers ourselves, we understand that this is not always a result of bloggers not caring, but more often than not is due to a lack of time on the bloggers’ part to properly interact with every promotional invitation that comes their way. We cannot guarantee how many clicks any single promo will receive, but by following the tips below clients can increase the likelihood that bloggers will want to engage with their promos:
Customize Your Promo Design
Over the last several years the Haulix development team has strived to create a system that looks good ‘out of the box,’ but at one point we realized that in order to serve our clients needs promos needed to be customizable in order to grab the attention of distracted/rushed bloggers clicking through cluttered inboxes. With this in mind our team built and released a number of tools and options for promo creation, including color changes, multiple messaging option, image inclusion/placement, banners, backgrounds, and more. That list may seem overwhelming, but we believe our design has made these tools easy-to-use, even for novice publicists.
There are well over 5000 promo invitation sent out using the Haulix platform every day, and that is not even considering the thousands likely sent out on our competitor’s platforms, or the artists contacting journalists through file sharing services (mediafire, dropbox, etc). If you or your client are still struggling to gain the attention of the press, customizing your promo design should be the first course of action to try and spur a few additional clicks. For additional information on getting started with customization, click here for a three step guide to creating eye-popping promos.
Personalize Every Promotional Message
As your contact list grows, it can be very tempting to send the same promo to every single contact, or at least a large portion of your contacts, at the same time. After all, time is of the essence when working on album promotion, and if we’re being completely honest the information shared with one person is almost certainly the information you will share with every person you message. The problem, however, is that no writer likes to feel like they are just another faceless entity you leverage for free content. Like musicians, many writers have fragile egos, and they like to feel as if they are needed and or wanted by the world. Generic press promotions are a dime dozen for them, but personalized messaging in much more rare.
There is no doubt that sending out a generic promo to a large enough contact list will receive engagement, but content delivered with a personal touch will almost assuredly perform better with press. When you write to people and use not only their name, but facts about who they are and/or what they do you convey a sense of caring that forges a much stronger connection than a message delivered with marketing lingo and sales information could ever hope to achieve. If people believe you care for them and take in interest in what they do they are far likelier to want to work with you, regardless of what type of content you are trying to push. Networking is a force like no other, and learning to network well can make a world of difference in the trajectory of not only your career, but the careers of everyone you know as well.
Send out reminders, especially when promos are about to expire.
This may seem like a given, but having spent over half a decade writing about music I can tell you first hand that only a small percentage of publicists/bands ever follow up on the invitations that they send. They might resend that same promo, sure, but actually taking the time to reach out to individuals with personalized messaging to remind them a promo is available or alert them that promos may expire is far more rare.
Make time for reminders. The average music writer receives well over 100 emails a day, and as much as they may desire to give attention to every email that catches their interest there is simply not enough time in the day for such a thing to occur. Many probably tell themselves they will catch up the next day, but then they awake to 100 new messages and the process starts all over. Reminders add to this clutter, yes, but they also reenforce the messaging you are trying to convey. Sending reminders gives you another chance to grab a writer’s attention, and taking the time to personalize the messaging further increases the likelihood of engagement/response.
