Band Marketing: Driving Fan Engagement with ThingLink

At the recent San Francisco MusicTech Summit, I asked artists, "Next to your music, what's the most important tool in your promotional tool box for driving fan engagement?" Without argument, everyone agreed that after the songs, "photos" are a band's most important marketing asset.

Then I asked, "If you could supercharge your photos and make them 10-50x more engaging for fans, and do it for free, would you?"

Enter ThingLink, a service you can install on your blog or web pages, that turns photos interactive and lets you place a YouTube player, a SoundCloud player, and links to Twitter, Facebook and more -- INSIDE your photos.

Band marketing is all about finding ways to engage fans ultimately leading to a sale or exchange. Groups that fail to engage fans are history. Now a band can use images as a platform for audio and video content, social touch points and points of sale.

Because of the proven power of ThingLinked images to engage fans, band marketing campaigns should include a discussion on the best ways to utilize ThingLinked photos, and in particular, the content that fans will enjoy.

How many links inside an image work best for fans? 3, 5, 7? The more you work with ThingLink, the faster you can discover the most effective ways to tag your images.

Hover your mouse over the image below. Atlantic Records recently used ThingLink to promote Simple Plan's new album, "Get Your Heart On." They transformed the image into a very engaging platform with links to Simple Plan videos, songs, a pre-sale site, Twitter and more.



Thanh Nguyen, Digital Marketing at Atlantic Records, noted: "It’s an innovative way to introduce the album cover to the public and have it be dynamic, not just a static image. To have video and audio accompany the image really helps connect the marketing. And the social tie-in is a big plus."

Here's another cool feature of ThingLink'ed images. The left menu bar on the image has share and embed icons so fans can share images containing your links with 1-click to Twitter, Facebook and email. Grab an embed code and you can publish an image on any blog or web site.

Wherever your images are re-posted and published, the links go with it. So if 10, 50, or 100 blogs publish the embed code for your image, then hundreds and thousands of potential fans have a chance to click on your links to music, video, points of sale, Twitter and Facebook.

ThingLink also gives its users a Social Dashboard with statistics on image views, hovers and clicks, so you can analyze link performance and improve your fan engagement.

Check out this awesome collection of CD covers from the Billboard 200 for great examples of ThingLink in action.

And here's my own concert poster with ThingLink SmartLinks, so you can get some ideas for tagging your own posters.

How will you use ThingLink for band marketing? Get ThingLink installed on your Wordpress, Blogger, or Tumblr blog and website and start engaging fans in fun and effective ways.


(Note: In addition to writing, recording and performing my own music, I'm also the chief marketing officer for ThingLink.)