The Music Business Association (Music Biz) is a not-for-profit membership organization that advances, promotes, and invests in the future of the music business through events, education and engagement. A quintessential part of today’s music industry, the Music Biz membership represents over 90% of the industry at large from the commerce, content, and creative communities. Music Biz’s members include players from all facets of the music business such as Universal Music Group, Spotify, The Orchard, Songtrust, as well as Bauer Entertainment Marketing. For a full list of members, click here.

Music Biz’s annual conference in Nashville hosts over 2,300 music professionals from across the globe for four days of meetings, networking, learning, and celebrating both business and creative achievements. 

BEM was initially engaged to provide an Onsite Social Media Command Center during Music Biz’s 2018 conference. Based on our marketing effectiveness, Music Biz then hired us to establish and maintain high-performing social media marketing year round.

Challenge: Music Biz has always prided themselves on the fact that their membership and event attendance is mostly comprised of management and high-level decision makers. They sought to implement a social strategy that would reach more of those professionals and best engage member companies and their employees. This would help build the right audience on social platforms to promote member benefits and event registration, as well as showcase member news.

After we reviewed their prior approach to social media content marketing, it was clear there was too much quantity and not enough quality. Music Biz’s content was being diluted by a high frequency of posts, and missed promotion of member news and new member callouts. By publishing unfocused content multiple times a day, Music Biz was not reaching its target audience and their followers eventually tuned them out, leaving a social community of non-decision makers.

Solution: BEM leveraged our experience from providing marketing support for other similar conferences including IEBA, EAMC, INTIX, National Sports Forum, and FestForums. We know the ins-and-outs of conveying a message to the right audience at the right time. For Music Biz, we employed several tactics. Here are a few of the most effective:

1. Know your audience. BEM conducted a data-driven analysis of Music Biz’s audience to determine who was actually engaging with them online. Equipped with these figures, we then developed specific social media content for their target audience.

2. Maximize perceived value. BEM crafted purposeful social posts that tied back to Music Biz’s business goals. We also leveraged software to determine optimal publication times and frequency for their content.

3. Pick the most productive platforms. Based on our analysis of Music Biz’s target audience, we focused only on their customers’ preferred social media platforms. This included LinkedIn, which had been previously inactive. By creating unique content for this social media channel, we were able to more than double Music Biz’s LinkedIn followers.

Results: BEM successfully helped the Music Biz team implement a social media strategy that highlighted new Music Biz members, existing member news updates, and “throwback” posts highlighting the accomplishments of past Music Biz conference speakers and award winners. This campaign drove greater engagement from Music Biz’s followers across all platforms, and also increased referral traffic to Music Biz’s website from social media by 66% year over year. Driving more leads into Music Biz’s sales pipeline contributed to the conference’s overall growth in registrations by 11% over 2018, with the largest influx coming from newly engaged employees of member companies.

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