View Entry

Company: Beatsuite.com Production Music Library
Project: New Music Podcast

http://www.beatsuite.com/newsdetails/104/

Dates: Jan 2007 to Mar 2008

Attachments:

How did the project start?

We did a trial to see if podcasting would be an effective marketing mechanism for our business. In essence we license royalty free music through our website Beatsuite.com and wanted to promote the site worldwide. Since we are a small start-up company we had a very limited budget. Since we had to reach large amounts of customers worldwide it seemed a cost effective and relevant platform. It also had the ability to communicate to our audience by utilising voiceover, music, sound effects, visual logos and slides alongside weblinks. We were really trying to get around the problem of letting our 10K members know what content was available on the website and highlighting some of the best music in the library by taking it directly to them and automating the process. We were also keen to communicate via rich media rather than outdated and in-effective text/image based web-pages which we find useless in terms of effectiveness – people do not react or read the text and therefore remain confused about what and how we operate.

What options did you consider?

We already did monthly newsletters, blogs and news pages alongside PR releases each month. Podcasting was really the only option to execute the type of campaign we had in mind - video was very much second place since it was expensive and time consuming. Podcasting as a platform allowed us to expose our content online in hundreds of new places and get in front of potentially hundreds of thousand’s of new customers. Since we already had an established website (beatsuite.com) we really just wanted to get the content further out and infiltrate new areas on the internet where we normally get little exposure.

What help and expertise did you receive?

The majority of the production was done in-house. We did use some voice artists and also external graphic designers to assist with the development of the logo as well as some custom voice jobs for different podcast episodes.

Did you face any challenges or learn any lessons?

Yes, the first podcast was very difficult to get working. It was fairly technical and our servers had to be tweaked and re-configured, we had to call in server engineers to help us get started. Also we had to work out new ways of working with images and graphics in terms of resizing and proportions etc. We got some brief training from our graphics team so we could take control where we needed to. In the end we wrote a manual on how to produce our podcasts because they were so many elements to create and manage. We now use this each month to help minimise the time spent.

What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?

Initially we hoped to expose our brand and content to new parts of the Internet. Over the last 12 months the podcast has exceeded our expectations and has driven thousands of new customers and potential customers. Since launch the ‘New Music Podcast’ has been charted monthly in iTunes Music Store where it has received more than 13 thousand downloads each month – that’s over 150,000 individual downloads from potential new customers and user’s of Beatsuite.com Music Library. The result has been an increase in sales of around 20% that would have not have been achieved through standard paid advertising or other marketing techniques. It is in fact THE single most effective marketing tool we have used to date – although we still continue to use all available tools (newsletter, blog, PR releases). The podcast platform is very suitable to our content and our target audiences, it allows us to communicate via audio rather than web text-based pages.

What are your plans for the future?

To continue to develop our online marketing campaigns. The podcast is always distributed every month and continues to be improved. Overall the website and all of the marketing techniques we use are reviewed, analysed and improved where possible and we continue to research new ways of reaching our audiences. Future plans – increase sales, turnover and profit - ideally through cost effective digital technologies and cunning rather than budgets!