Hi everyone. Steve Rodgers here from Jamroommanifesto.com and this video is a case study of a simple strategy I was testing with my band’s show posters, to get people from an offline setting to visit my website.

Now I’m making this video for my friends inside of the Music Marketing Insider Circle which is an exclusive community in which serious musicians explore and share advanced strategies for marketing music in today’s online environment.

If you’re not already a member of the Music Marketing Insider Circle and would like to learn more, go ahead and visit www.jamroommanifesto.com/music_marketing_insider_circle right away!
Okay so here are the results of my poster test.

As a reminder what I was testing was a very simple call to action where I instructed people to go and download 2 free tracks from my band by visiting a certain page on my website.

Now I usually will have a link to our music sites on my posters, but this was the first time I ever actually instructed them to take action immediately and download free music.
Now this is traditionally something that is difficult to do when you look at the behavior that you are hoping to invoke:

For one, they have to see the poster.

Secondly they would have to pull out a mobile device with internet capabilities and visit the page or they would have to remember the website and do it when they get home.

So while this is a direct-response strategy, it does not have the instant effect that you would normally expect to see when using a direct-response approach online.

Bottom line is that the more steps involved the lower the success rate is going to be, but in my mind it was definitely worth testing.

So as we look into my website stats, here is what we find for this test:
I posted the flyer on July 31st, 2011 and the show was set for August 6, 2011 (six days later).

So I want to set the date range for my analytics to reflect both dates and see my traffic reports and whatnot.

As we can see on August 1 there were just 5 visitors to the site. August 2nd there were triple that amount with 15 visitors. August 3rd there were 10 visitors. August 4th there were 14 visitors. August 5th there were 11 visitors and finally on the day of the show, August 6th there were only 2 visitors.

So that’s 57 visitors in total. And if you are sitting there and thinking that 57 is not very many visitors, then you would be absolutely right.

You see this is a brand new website which is why I figured it would be great for this case study. I sent no paid advertising to this site. No press releases, no articles and no free classified ads.

The only traffic sources were a couple of status updates from my facebook and the poster itself that we are testing here.

So while we are looking at 57 total website visitors, the real number we want to focus on are visits from the poster only.

So how do we do that? Well, because this is a brand new website, the only people who have a direct link to free music page are the people from the poster. Every other visitor would come from a referring site. Does that make sense?

So what we want to look for is exactly how many people came directly to the free music page by typing the url into a browser of some sort, meaning that they did not follow a link from somewhere else on the web.

My analytics account highlights this type of traffic as “Direct Traffic”
So as we look a little closer at the direct traffic, we can see that there were exactly 19 visitors who plugged the url directly into the browser to visit my site. And as I mentioned, the only people who would have that url are people who actually read the poster.

If you look below here at this stat called bounce rate, you’ll see it sits at 84.21%. Bounce rate means that people land on the page, then instantly either hit the back button or type a new domain into the browser and exit my site.

84.21% is pretty high, but the flip side is that 15.79% did not leave my site and instead signed up to receive my free music downloads. 15.79% of 19 visitors means that 3 people in total actually took me up on the free music offer.

Not great, but not so bad either especially when you consider that it’s 3 more than would have signed up if I had not had the call to action on my poster.

Now if we look at the total visitors to the free music page, from all traffic sources, analytics says there were 64, with 20 of them signing up for free tracks leaving me with a visitor to sign-up conversion rate of 31.25%. Now that’s pretty good considering it’s a new page that has not really been tested yet.

Now just to be scientific about this, I don’t have enough sign-ups or visitors yet to realistically measure the conversion rate of visitors to sign-ups, but from these numbers, without any changes to the page, it is on pace to convert almost 1/3 of the traffic into subscribers.

The next step for me here is to run a split test on the free music page to see if a subtle change to the page increases my numbers for me. But undoubtedly, I will need to drive significantly more traffic to see any real results, especially if the goal here is to actually sell music.
Even at a conservative sales rate of 1%, with the current numbers I still would not have seen my first sale.

But again, the point of this test was to case study the effectiveness of having a call to action and a free offer on my physical posters that I hang in the venue before a gig.
For this test the result is 19 visitors, a 15.79% conversion rate (versus 31.25% from all traffic sources combined).

In my book that’s a win and means that I will now do this for every poster from now on, just to pick up that additional 15.79% and have an opportunity to sell my music to them on more than one occasion. So if you are playing live shows with your bands, you can employ this simple strategy for your next gig and see a little spike in traffic from doing the exact same thing I have done here.

Copy it exactly if you like, that’s why I’m sharing it with you.

Now if you are not a Music Marketing Insider Circle Member and would like to dramatically increase your results in selling music online, I encourage and invite you to join us on the inside by visiting: www.jamroommanifesto.com/music_marketing_insider_circle ,become a member today AND take advantage of $337 worth of Music Marketing Insider Circle bonuses that I am personally giving away to new members who sign up through that link.

For those of you on the inside watching this, please share your thought on this case study and, as always, chuck your own ideas out there on how to improve upon this offline- to –online strategy.

This is Steve Rodgers and thanks again for watching this video!