Mail-Order Audience

I like this post from Seth Godin - marketing sage.

In it, he talks about how, if you’re in a band, you can figure out how to reach the people most likely to like your music.

His suggestion is that if, for example, fans of the B52’s would probably be fans of your music too, buy a bunch of B52’s CD’s - new - then resell them at a really cheap price on Amazon and when you bung them in the mail, slip in one or many free copies of your own CD as well.

The idea is that those who are passionate enough about the B52’s may well get passionate about your music and that those people are the most likely to spread the word to others likely to also be passionate and spread the word.

Godin illustrates how the idea can translate to any kind of business. Obviously, for filmmakers it would translate into films and DVD’s. How cost-effective (or rather, cost-prohibitive) this might be for many of us, I don’t know, but there are two key things to take note of in this idea:

IT FOCUSES ON CULTIVATING QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

You can have a mailing list of email addresses or a MySpace network of friends reaching the tens of thousands but if the majority of them are not passionately engaged with what you’re doing their number is pretty meaningless - as is what you’re getting out of the relationship. Quality is what spreads the word, increases the scope of your project and, at the end of the day, makes it all worthwhile. Quality audience is the only kind worth building.

There are many ways to target quality audience and understanding who your core audience is is the first step towards it. After that though, the routes to engaging them are as diverse as the many types of audience there are - which leads me to the other thing I like about the idea…

IT ILLUSTRATES THE RIGHT APPROACH AND MINDSET

I like the creativity of the idea in Godin’s post - or rather the creative mindset that came to the idea in the first place. Building an audience takes the right way of thinking and that’s what the how-to seeks to cultivate. Once the basic concepts of what you’re trying to achieve are understood, how you nail it is anybody’s game - as well as half the fun of it.