Today´s post will look at the lessons to be learned from the story of Making April, a band who are one of the major DIY promotion success stories. They managed on their own steam i.e. without a marketing department, to sell over 1000 singles a week on iTunes. So how on earth did they do it? Well, put simply: hard work, dedication and a plan. By approaching their task in a serious manner, setting goals and spreading their work load, the members were able to achieve what they thought they never could. To do it they exploited fully one thing the internet is superb for, reaching out to fans, and oh how they reached!

In an interview with Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity, they spilled the beans and filled us in how they managed this impressive feat. You can read the full details on Ariel Publicity, but here are some of the key factors which contributed to their online promotion success.

Planning and setting goals: Every morning three band members would meet up in what they called the “War Room” to plan their daily efforts and set targets for what they wanted to accomplish. This planning and coordination was key to their success.

A solid Social Networking Strategy: Making April used MySpace to engage with and develop potential listeners and fans. The way they did this was to scope out similar sounding bands to who already had large friends list, and then contact their friends and encourage them to check their own matterial and leave a comment on their profile.

Getting personal: To develop the relationship with their myspace contacts, Makin April contacted all those who left a comment on their MySpace profile and thanked them personally. Importantly, they left their instant messenger details in their signature. Their IM contacts grew exponentially. They would sit, literally all day long, chatting away to fans and giving them information about the band. At this point they would send their fans free samples of their music, which they could share with their friends, giving even more people the chance to check out their tunes.

Contests/Fan participation: Several months later, and thousands of new friends and IM contacts, Making April decided to run a contest to rewards fans by supporting them by helping them generate even more exposure. This involved a selection of fans earning points for convincing people to add their videos on their profile or putting them in their “top friends” list.

With external help they next managed to run an extremely successful t-shirt design contest which created an additional 100,000 hits to their myspace.

Fan Engagement: Another tactic they used, to great success, was posting simple fan bulletins every day or so. These were not designed to promote themselves as such, but were more questions designed to generate responses from fans. They asked trivial things like “Should we get chunky peanut butter or smooth?” They soon saw that these questions generated hundreds of comments and messages to their inbox, driving more traffic and plays to their MySpace.

The Payoff: After building hype via a large, lively and dedicated fan base the band found their song being played on an MTV episode called “Laguna Beach”. They dont know how they ended up on this show, but guess a fan contacted MTV about them. The episode aired 3 times and they saw both traffic to their MySpace page grow substantially and an increase in their iTunes sales.

Knowing when to charge: Until this time, their iTunes sales had been modest, but now they felt it was time to remove the tracks they had posted for free download. Very soon, they saw their sales pick up considerably and before they knew it they had sales of over 1000 singles a week.

So these are the key things that contributed to the success story of Making April, and many lessons can be learned from it. One should not see this examples as a Step to Step guide to online promotion success. With the plurality of different social networking services, music services and the wide availability of on demand streaming there are many different ways to structure a successful online promotion campaign and create buzz. We will look into these more here on the blog.

The key lesson one can learn from Making April is that one must create a plan, set goals and follow them through. This requires time, dedication and a lot of work – but the rewards, if successful, can be truly great.

Tags: advice, ariel publicity, DIY, making april, Music, Promotion Advice

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Promotion advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.