By Mark Stoddard, author of Marketing Singers, a business and marketing guidebook written specifically for singers.
No amount of good marketing advice can improve a bad product. Marketing only gets the singer a chance to sing. After that, it is, in the words of Rossini, “Voce, voce, voce.” Only three things get you where the great stars are: perform, perform, perform.
But here’s a piece of marketing advice that has helped hundreds of singers I have coached. The principle is the law of concentric circles.
In April, 2007, I received the following e-mail:
You played a role in changing the course of my life 17 years ago. I was at home having my “29-year-old mid-life crisis” when I got tapes of lectures you’d given.
I spent hours walking the country roads and railroad tracks around our house listening to those lessons … concentric circles, the growth matrix, etc.
Cutting to the chase … The material “clicked” something inside of me and I contacted a former sales training client about their marketing. I walked in, and using the principles in the lectures, generated an extra $30,000+ for an event.
Recently I was thinking back on those early days and wondering what ever became of Mark Stoddard and I found you listed on Classical Singer.
I hope you are well and let me say it one more time … Thanks!
Robert Stover
Look at the cover of my book “Marketing Singers“:
Notice the ripples caused by dropping something into a still pool of water. From the central point of impact, ever larger circles are created. These are concentric circles. They illustrate a profound marketing concept: the Law of Concentric Circles. When most people begin marketing anything, they tend to think the potential buyers are people they have never met. Not so. The most effective marketing you will ever do will come from people who see you as credible.
If you take a new product to a new market you have zero credibility.
If you sell an existing product to a new market, you have the credibility that someone has tried the product before. That helps, but it is a long, difficult task ahead of you to become profitable.
If you take a new product to people who either know you or know about you, your credibility will allow them to brush aside their skepticism about the new product and give it a try. This is a good place to be.
Even better is if you take an existing product and invite people who know you, or know of you, to a concert that features you. That existing product could be songs they know or songs from a composer they respect. Chances are you will succeed.
This all stands to reason.
It follows a natural law.
Any time you want to sell a CD, find students for a voice studio, sell tickets to a concert, find donors for your cause or a sponsor for your talent, begin with your inner circle. Record the name of everyone you know, i.e., family, extended family, friends, neighbors, soul mates, church mates, civic friends and so forth. This is your inner circle. You may not think they like you. It does not matter. Even those people can become fond customers.
It is to your inner circle that you send your first marketing piece.
Then you use other marketing methods to suggest ever so gently that these people invite their friends. You make it beneficial for them to do this. You incentivize them. This is the next circle.
You might even offer a reward for them to sell blocks of tickets to their friends. Let them volunteer to be responsible for 10 tickets. Either they sell them or they pay for them and give them away. Of course you will be keeping track of all of these names and they will go into your house file for future events.
Each layer beyond this is reached via the previous layer. The further you extend from the center, the larger your world of prospective customers becomes. Your reputation grows. You utilize these new connections to obtain more press coverage and to gain contact with the right people in the right houses at the right time, thus expanding your influence.
All the while you are getting paid, finding more jobs, and establishing a perpetual job machine.
Simultaneously, you are doing what you love – singing for wonderful, supportive people who are paying you because you are giving them something of great value.
Such is the Law of Concentric Circles.
Mark Stoddard, author of Marketings Singers, is a business leader, professor, marketer and consultant who has been helping singers get jobs for more than 20 years. On the singing front he staged more than 100 professional shows aboard cruise ships that employed classical singers, pianists and strings. He’s also coached singers on how to sell their CDs and other products, use the social media and how to negotiate contracts. Email Mark at mark@mjstoddard.com.
