How to keep and grow an online following with engaging content.

This is an excerpt from a conversation James and Ben had about marketing for classical musicians. Below are some recommended tools to help you create content today!

Recommended Tools – Free Forever

Canva is a fantastic online design tool, free to use and has every kind of template you would need for social media platforms. With Canva you can create professional looking designs to promote your upcoming concerts, any teaching you may offer, or other aspects of your music career.

Unsplash is the best place on the internet for high quality photography, with complete royalty free licensing by Creative Commons allowing you to use and edit any image on Unsplash for commercial or personal use for free forever. There are literally over 1 million images on the site which are all curated by a team of humans (not robots) so the quality is reliable and decent.

Unsplash is perfect to use with Canva. You can download an image from Unsplash, upload it to Canva and design to your hearts content.

Lightworks is video editing software which you can download to your computer and get up and running in no time. The best thing is they have a free version forever, with the only limit on output quality. With the free version, the maximum output quality you can export is 720p HD but for social media content this is more than satisfactory. Twitter, for example, degrades video quality so much so that you may as well have filmed it with a potato.

They have a series of useful tutorial videos on their website to help you and if you’re really stuck, you can always get in touch with us and we’ll help you out!

Creating Content

Your smart phone is more than good enough to get going. You won’t be growing an online following by posting nothing and waiting until you can afford a £10,000 professional audio-visual setup. Ultimately, people want to see the day-to-day journey of what it’s like to be you. People connect with people, not high-end technology, so don’t wait until you have all the best equipment, you can start creating amazing content today with your smart phone, the above tools and your endless talents.

Video Transcription

Tell people about other things within your email marketing and within your Facebook posts and your Twitter posts and so on. Just because being a musician is just the same as being in business of any sort. However, say something interesting. I always wonder to myself, how did somebody get into being a Harpist? I mean inevitably I think there’s gonna be a lot of people who are going to be “my parents forced me to learn”, but then what happened? Why are you still doing it? And who inspires you? How did you imagine your life was going to be? To people who aren’t and are musicians, there is a romance to it.

We were saying this the other day that, no matter what type of concert you go to, everybody at some point is thinking “I wonder what it’s like to be them?”. So that also goes back to my other point about making sure you capture some behind-the-scenes stuff whenever you’re doing anything. So say you are coming to one of our sessions, capturing yourself even tuning up and getting ready but you’re surrounded by microphones, cameras, that’s pretty exciting and other people who aren’t doing that are going to be looking, thinking, “you are having an exotic day!” “You know what you’re doing.”

Take my sister, travels a lot for work, and she thinks it’s mind-numbingly dull whereas I’m thinking, “wow,” “you are living the life…” “hanging around in that waiting lounge at Heathrow.” I think it’s exciting; it looks important. Yeah, it looks important. It feels the biz. However, not all of it is glamorous but that in itself is glamorous. Becuase it humanises the whole thing.