[Editor’s Note: This article was written by Alper Tuzcu.]
Connecting and building strong relationships with your Superfans will get you a long way in your music career. You might not have heard the term before, but Superfans are the people who not only listen to your music, but they also come to your concerts, buy your merchandise, follow you on social media, engage with you and they actively enjoy making your music part of their lives. The better your relationship is with your Superfans, the more word of mouth marketing you will benefit from. This relationship can also directly impact the revenue you will generate from your music.
In order to maintain and expand your Superfan base, nothing beats exclusivity. Providing exclusive material to your Superfans is not only great to thank them for their loyalty, but also to further strengthen your relationship with them. So, in this blog post, I would like to provide some examples as to what kind of exclusive content you can provide to your Superfans.
1) Preview Brand New Songs
Nothing says ‘exclusive’ like giving your fans the chance to listen to new songs before anyone else. This not only makes them feel informed and even a little special for following you, but it can also help you get some early feedback from your latest work. While you can test out your new songs and videos, previewing brand new material is also an easy and effective way to engage with your fans. All you have to do is upload a private link on YouTube or SoundCloud and send an email for your Superfans to let them know! (Ed. note: this is where having an email list will come in handy!)
2) Create Exclusive Merchandise
Limited edition songs, t-shirts and other merchandise are great ideas to engage with your Superfans as well. For instance, let’s say you just released an album with ten songs. For your Superfans, you can create a 12-song special edition with two extra exclusive songs. In terms of merchandise, tour merchandise, exclusive pre-sale tickets and limited edition goods are also great ways to generate extra revenue for your Superfans.
For instance, you can create a special edition t-shirt that is not normally for sale on your website and only available to your Superfans. These kinds of special products will drive your branding and your relationship with your SuperFans forward.
3) Share Behind the Scenes Videos
Some of my favorite pieces of content to share with fan Studio content tends to be especially valuable, because this way fans can see the creation procedure of their favorite songs. Seeing your favorite musicians in their natural environment makes for some very cool content.
Touring can also help you provide very important content, as you can document the touring process by capturing video footage and photos. This is a cheap and effective way of creating content. Using touring content is also a great way to announce fans when will you be in their town next time. All in all, sharing behind the scenes content is super helpful to engage with your Superfans.
4) Engage with Fan Hangouts
‘Meet and Greets’ are industry standard events that many artists utilize. In the digital age, you can take this a step further by doing digital hangouts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Moreover, you can also do video hangouts, where you can meet with multiple people at the same time and take any questions that they have. Hangout events can be done sporadically, or on a regular schedule.
For instance, you can create a Patreon page where you could not only get to know your fans better, but you can also create extra revenue as well. If you would want to get even more ambitious, you can create a weekly or monthly podcast where you can take fan questions, play some of your recent new music by other artists, and talk about your upcoming projects and events.
These are a few ideas to share exclusive content for your Superfans. The most important thing is to keep on generating content and seeing which one is more effective is for your fans. Unfortunately what works for one artist might not work for another, and the best way would be to see is to get as much as content out there as possible. There are no guaranteed formulas, and it’s all a bit of trial and error to find the best methods that work for you.
These four ideas should give you a nice starting point, but if you come up with more ideas feel free to try and see how they work. The options are limitless when it comes to creating content, so I would highly encourage you to try things out and see what works best for you and your Superfans!