Build, manage and promote your band/music website with these resources

I recently hooked up with a new company to start up something in the wine business, but continued to do some freelance work on the side. One of the projects I’ve been working on is for a guy who leads a band that just released a new album. They don’t have a facebook page, twitter account, and the website is in rough shape to say the least. I’ve been pouring over some resources and thought I should gather them into a post. I have zero experience marketing a band and don’t want to explore it too deeply but I can advise this client enough to get them pointed in the right direction.

Quick links:

Top picks for music/band templates and WordPress themes

Music players for your website

Intro videos for your band

Flyers for promotion

Themes you can use

Below you’ll find a collection of some of the nicer themes that you can use to create your music or band website.

Rockwell

Rockwell comes packed with great features to get your band or music site going. It’s simple to customize with the WordPress features it uses and you can modify it extensively to get that look you want.

Magzimus

Magzimus is a blend of lifestyle/music theme which could work for some. It’s definitely geared toward more informative type content though.

Stereoline

Stereoline comes with numerous layouts and colors to choose from out of the box and fits the blog/lifestyle/magazine style format.

Music Club

Here’s a great theme designed for a radio station or band that has a nice modern layout with a fullscreen image as the background. It comes with great features like a floating music bar that plays music and automatically pulls artwork from your album.

Jam Session responsive music theme

This theme comes packed with features and is fully responsive so it looks good on any device.

Muse theme for music/bands

This theme is a top seller and brings a lot of great features with it to help you manage songs, albums, concert dates and other media for your band. It’s fully responsive too.

Pendulum

A modern music/band template made with a lot of attention to detail and thought about the needs of a band.

Bolster

An easy to modify theme made specially for bands and music websites.

CLUBIX

Clubix is a responsive nightlife, music and events WordPress theme.

Muzak

Meet Muzak. A WordPress themes for bands, musicians, djs and everyone involved in the music business.

Ironband

IronBand is a complete solution for bands, with its built in HTML5 audio player, integration with Youtube, and other features to help manage your music.

Tuned balloon

Tuned Balloon works for anyone looking to get a basic site up to promote their band and can be extended to be as functional as you need.

Keronchong

Keronchong is a great choice for a band website and comes with all the basic features you’d expect.

Flycase

Flycase is a professional and easy-to-use music WordPress theme. It is highly and easily customizable, ready for all devices, simple to set up and e-commerce ready.

Party Night

Geared more toward night clubs and parties, this is a theme that could also fit the needs of a band.

Acoustic

This WordPress theme offers great flexibility for any solo artist, band, or group looking to pull together a professional looking website for themselves.

MusicPlay

Banda

A music magazine theme with a counter for events, a HTML5 audio player and video background, unlimited colors and light and dark skins.

Bandzone

Unlike the “friendzone” the Bandzone WordPress theme is something you might actually want and comes with everything you need to get a nice looking site up to represent your band.

Soundstage

You want to make a good first impression and this theme will help you do that. It’s a professional looking template that has everything you need to put your best foot forward.

Gig

Here’s a robust theme for your music that comes with features to manage your band members, your music, events, blog and even crowdfunding for your musical projects with support for the Ignition Deck premium plugin.

Music players for your website

If you already have a website and simply want something to elegantly display and play music, these plugins might help you out.

Responsive music player

This slick player lets you play any music you upload or selections from shoutcast. It has a neat feature that lets you drag the record to slow down or speed up the music, kind of like a DJ mixing.

Responsive HTML5 music player

This player has some great features that separate it from others, including an API that you can use and an XML database capability for dynamic streaming. It also hooks into Soundcloud and can be used for podcasts.

Audiobox player

This music player degrades nicely into older browsers that don’t have support for HTML5 by using Flash. It pulls image artwork and meta data perfectly and displays the songs and album covers beautifully.

Vinyl styled music player

This might be my favorite player simply because of how it looks. Much like the first one I linked to, it shows a vinyl record, the album cover, and obviously your music. It’s touch optimized and responsive so it works on all devices.

Intro videos for your band

If you want to pull together a short video to introduce your band to the world, these will get you started. Using Adobe Aftereffects you can make some simple edits to the file and easily swap your own images, text and audio into a slick presentation to show of your band. Upload it to Youtube, use it for marketing, and so on.

Meet the band

Music band presentation

Flyers and promotional materials

Every band needs to promote its latest gig and what better way to do that than by printing out some flyers and posting them around town? These flyers were designed with a band in mind and can easily be tweaked to include your own photos, fonts, colors and so on.

Show night

A clean layout that could work for just about any musician, this flyer focuses on showing off a single photo of the artist with some other basic information about the show details.

Indie gospel flyer

This might sound like it’s only for indie bands that play at churches but this flyer could easily be used for any type of music to promote any band. It comes in a fully editable .PSD format with organized layers and is easy to customize.

Dirty rock

Here’s a flyer with a bit of an edge to it. Fitting for hard rock or alternative bands that want a grunge look and feel to their promo.

Other resources

These resources should get you started if you’re trying to build a website for your band and get some promotion going. There’s an entire world of services out there to help you and a new era of streaming music that’s dominated by companies like Spotify and Soundcloud. I recommend looking into CDbaby, a service that helps distribute your music digitally across a number of sites from iTunes to Spotify. It pays artists royalties on sales and they also have an informative blog that’s worth checking out. It’s a great place for emerging artists to place their work and get discovered by the general public.

The post Build, manage and promote your band/music website with these resources appeared first on Mike Meisner.

Creative Display Banner Templates for Remarketing Ads

I wrote about using Perfect Audience to set up an effective remarketing campaign in my “8 remarketing tips to get visitors back to your website“, and wanted to follow that up with this post that highlights some banner ads you can use. Remarketing works great when you do it right, and a hugely important piece of setting up a campaign that’s effective has to do with the look and feel of your banner ads. Not all of us have sick graphic design skills, but luckily there are plenty of templates out there designed specifically for banner ads. You can use these to get a jump start on your ad creatives and save a ton of time and money when it comes to designing a professional looking campaign.

When you’re running display ads, it helps to have a repository of good creatives you can refer to for various events, times of the year, products, or other styles that fit your needs. Larger companies and advertising agencies might have the luxury of an in-house graphic designer, but what about the rest of us? Designing a display isn’t really ad difficult as it seems, and perhaps the biggest hack you can use to save time is purchasing pre-made templates that you can customize fairly easily assuming you have some basic Photoshop skills.

I love Graphic River for their huge selection of very high quality products. For as little as $4 you can have a nice package of display banners in Photoshop format. All it takes is a bit of time on your part to decide what image and copy you want to use, and perhaps some color changes. You can then post a simple job request on Elance, Odesk or some similar site to get the design finished.

Vintage Web Banners in 15 Sizes

These banners have a vintage look an feel to them, and would be great for a bohemian clothing store or anything else where you’re trying to capture a clean retro feel without being too “out there”.

Retail Ad Banners

This set of banners offers a clean design that’s suitable for just about any ecommerce shop. For a few bucks you get 18 different sizes, complete with vector shapes.

Multipurpose Glamourous Banners

Here’s a set of banners designed with a slick, modern feel that might be better suited for fashion, makeup, or glamour stores.

Fashion/Multipurpose Banners

Another set designed with a whimsical look and feel that’s suitable for fashion, clothing or artistic sites.

Email marketing/Tech Banners

These banners have a clean look and feel that’s best for tech sites and B2B sites looking to get a few simple points across.

Multipurpose travel ad banners

Christmas ad banners

It’s always smart to design ads for the context they appear in, Although these come ready made and designed for Christmas, the layout can easily be modified to work for a variety of other holidays, winter sales, and so on. This set comes with 18 sizes so you have a ton of options for placement.

Professional display/product banners

In my previous post on remarketing strategies I touched on using product-specific ads to deliver the most relevant display ads to your customers. This set of banners would work perfectly for highlighting single products and the look and feel is generic enough so it could work for almost any site.

I recommend checking out the full collection of banner ads on Graphic River. There are plenty there to choose from and the ones I included above barely skim the surface.

The post Creative Display Banner Templates for Remarketing Ads appeared first on Mike Meisner.

The future of online wine sales [Infographic]

A while back I posted a decent infographic showing the state of consumer direct wine sales, and how the industry has grown over recent years. Using data from a variety of sources, including Silicon Valley Bank, I pulled together some relevant pieces of information to show how the industry is growing in various ways. Stay tuned for the updated, and much better version!

Grab the code (small)

<img src=”http://www.mikemeisner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/direct_to_consumer-319×1024.png” alt=”direct to consumer infographic for wine” />

Embed code (full size)

<img src=”http://www.mikemeisner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/direct_to_consumer.png” alt=”consumer direct wine sales infographic” />

The post The future of online wine sales [Infographic] appeared first on Direct to Consumer Wine Marketing - Blue Dog Solutions.

Sink or Swim: Marketing Wine in 2013

New, “inbound marketing” strategies are more effective, cost less, and generate measurable results.

If your wine business relies on traditional PR methods to gain traction, you’re in for a harsh reality check moving forward in 2013. Gone are the days where copywriters and executives huddle together to craft the perfect message, and then broadcast it from the rooftops and attract hoards of interested customers.

As Bill Lee of the Harvard Business Journal points out in his article, “Marketing is Dead,”

“First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the “buyer’s decision journey,” traditional marketing communications just aren’t relevant. Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.”

Are you attracting enough visitors to your website to convert leads?

The old model where customers learn about your product from television ads, magazines, radio and press releases is deprecated. Consumers wield the power to decide what they’re exposed to; they fast-forward through commercials, listen to streaming radio, and signup for do not call lists. They read consumer reviews, share their interests on social networks, and look to other peer experts for advice. They do not wait for your PR agency and executives to tell them what to think. They value privacy, and do not want overt

Power up social media

It’s up to companies to cultivate their brand image from the ground up by fostering brand-advocates and interacting with their customers directly through social media. Here are some tools that might help you:

• Followerwonk – Find targeted Twitter users by keyword, location, and sort by their influence/reach.


• Topsy – This powerful tool searches various social/blogging/web channels for keywords you enter. Use it to find current conversations about your brand, similar products, or even competitors.


• Quora – A great place to find collective “thought leaders” for any number of topics. Users ask questions, and the answers are cultivated and scored based on their helpfulness.


• Twitter lists – Do you segment your followers? You should. Create lists for certain customers, bloggers, or other groups in your social circles. Google+ has a similar feature as well. For example, create a list for wine bloggers, and another for influential local residents, and one for your wine club members.


• Twitter search – Use Hootsuite to set up a monitor for a particular term. If you’re goal is to attract more tasting room visits, you could track things like “napa winery recommendation” or “Visiting Napa” – then reach out to any users who mention an upcoming trip to Napa.

Wrestle your data to win

You can gain a ton of insight into your customers with the right data – but sorting through it all can be challending.

In 2012 there was a lot of buzz surrounding “big data” and for good reason. It helped our President win an election, but without the right tools and help, it can be difficult to sort through the massive piles of information we have at our fingertips. But the insights are there, and you can find what you need to further your lead nurturing process if you look in the right places.

In 2013, understanding your business data will be more important than ever. One of the biggest complaints that C-level executives have about tratitional marketing firms is the lack of accountability and measurement. With today’s tools, we can learn way more and make better judgement calls about marketing campaigns and their effectiveness. Traditional marketing firms blow a lot of “brand equity” smoke, but this sort of talk has less substance than ever.

Leads from inbound marketing cost on average 61% less ($135 vs. $346) than outbound marketing leads. (Earnest Agency)

Identify goals and track performance

Begin by asking the right questions. Understanding your business goals is paramount to success, and can help pin down the best performance indicators to track. You are measuring things like newsletter signups, add-to-cart clicks, cart abandonment, and landing page conversion rates right? Do you know the value of your branded vs. non-branded keywords to your bottom line? What about the per visit value of your latest email marketing campaign? Or what cities you’re attracting highest converting visitors from? You may even venture into multi-attribution modeling, which is becoming more important than ever in understanding how sales channels interact and assist each other.

79% of marketers measure website traffic from social media, and 68% track engagement metrics on social networks, but just 26% measure the relationship of social media activity to leads and sales. (Marketing Charts)

More content results in growth, leads

It’s been said before, and I’ll repeat it again: content is king. Every brand should focus on creating quality content to share on their website, blog, and with other outlets. It’s not enough to have a five page website, with a simple “About us” page. People want details. They want to read about specific, personal things like how you came up with a label name or design, or what a particular vineyard brings to the wine.

More content = more leads. On average, companies “with 51-100 web pages generate 48% more traffic than companies with 1-50 pages.” What’s interesting though is the differential is larges for very small companies (those with less than 10 employees), likely because larger companies make greater use of lead gen tactics like tradeshows, webinars and video. (Polaris B)

It’s not easy to create compelling content that engages your audience. But you can’t win if you don’t start somewhere. If you don’t have time to write, hire someone to help. There are plenty of options for copywriting, blogging, and infographic creation. Once you get a solid amount of content connected with your brand, new inroads open and you can attract traffic for new keywords. Today’s SEO methods rely heavily on content creation, and a small website with little copy simply won’t rank well in search engines.

49% of B2C marketers rank SEO tops for impact on lead generation, followed by pay per click (26%) and social media (25%). (Marketing Charts)

Bridge the web and real world gap

You don’t need to hide behind the computer screen in order to build your following. In fact, one of the best things to do is get out into the real world and share your wine with people. But here’s a tip – skip the pour events. Instead, head to Meetup.com and look for local wine tasting groups. The San Francisco Bay area has tons of them, with some numbering in the thousands. Bring a few bottles of your wine and some business cards to an event. Which do you think will bring you closer to new consumers – being one out of a hundred other labels at the next Ft. Mason event, or a more intimate one-on-one interaction with a smaller, tighter knit social group?

While you’re at it, spend some time getting closer with your wine club members. They are your existing brand ambassadors, and wield powerful influence. Come up with creative ways to entice them to share your brand with friends, and reward them for their loyalty.

Consumers are increasingly skeptical of advertising, and while 76% of marketers believe “they know what their consumers want” in terms of social media content and interaction, only 34% have actually asked those buyers. So get out there and start asking them!

At least on the B2C side, there is a disconnect between what marketers think consumers think is important and what consumers actually value. Marketers believe the highest consumer priorities on social media are insights for buying decisions (59%) and customer service (58%). Consumers actually place the highest value on deals and promotions (83%) and rewards programs (70%). (e-strategy trends)

Traditional marketing may not be completely dead, but it’s certainly on life support. Take the time to cultivate your social presence, and build your peer network of brand supporters. Do not lump them into one group; instead, offer incentives and rewards to segments, and create more targeted offers. The rising tide of social influence will lift your brand equity much more than a press release or Wine Spectator advertisement will.