Branding is about building consistency across your touch points
When I started Mooncrew in 2016 alongside Jake Swesey, I knew that the name needed to have an immediate connection to it’s imagery. You might ask – why, isn’t Mooncrew a record label? What’s that got to do with visuals?
Everything!
You see – in 2020 and beyond, more and more of our customers, clients, fans, and business partners will be discovering us online. Spotify and Apple Music have already rolled out beta versions of moving visuals to accompany music, and YouTube Music is a secret smash hit solely because people like to look at something while they listen.
Back to Mooncrew: all of this that meant that day one before we even came up with the name, we knew that the name needed to have visual context and vice versa. Hence – MoonCrew Unlimited, or MCX for short. Mooncrew has an obvious logo mark – a simple, filled in circle. It’s nothing ground-breaking and certainly not copyright-able on it’s own.
However, when in context with careful color considerations and font choice, design placements and palette choices; we quickly settled on a variety of iterations over the years that are pleasing to the eye, remarkable for recollection, simple, and reusable.
Below you can see a few implementations of the logo and how it’s evolved over the years:
2016 – On an event poster
Back then the logo was ‘the moon coming up during a sunset on a summer day’; a moonrise with a sweltering, italicized script-like font to complete the logo mark.
2019 – On an album release
A logo mark evolved into a record stamp – emulating the bygone days of ripping the plastic off of the CD before throwing it into your ’98 Ford Taurus.
2020 – In an album teaser
A logo turned into a movie trailer preroll, the circle mark can be easily pseudo animated simply by making it rise and fall.
Social Media is the wild west. Some new services rise quickly and folks will flock; some to sell access (pickaxes) and some to sell services (mining companies).
Gary V. of VaynerMedia recently dropped a nugget: ‘TikTok is the next big thing’ (to him). This caused quite the ruckus on Reddit as anecdotal stories poured in by the handful about efficacy of Google, Instagram, and Facebook advertisements in lieu of TikTok (and SnapChat, as Gary has previously recommended). Much of the Reddit community feels as though TikTok is not the play for the vast majority of people, and they might be right. Life is about nuance; and talking heads like Gary rarely get the time to expound fully on the nuance of their opinion.
So, what’s the deal? It’s just the Pareto Principle at play. Roughly 80% of your social media advertising results will come from 20% of your efforts. It is up to you to figure out what that 20% is.
The responsible and measured approach to this would be something like follows:
Determine total amount of adspend available to use
Note the results, run another month of tests with new adsets and calls to action across all platforms
Note the results again. Take your best 20% of the platforms and your best adsets and run with those! For some businesses, this will be just TikTok. For others, it’ll be Facebook, Snapchat, and Google!
For others, like Gary V, it’s Instagram and LinkedIn. The moral of the story is short and sweet: don’t focus on what the person in the lane next to you is doing, keep your eyes on the road and press down on the accelerator, hard, when you catch wind that you are onto something.
The ease of PPC, PPM, OTT and PMPs have spoiled us when it comes to traditional media. Many outlets like newspapers and TV stations still do not have online portals for placing ads. Billboard providers like Lamar have dabbled in it, but not dove right in.
Enter Blip Billboards – the billboard marketplace solution
Blip Billboards is a company that’s been slowly evolving over the past few years. Recently, they eliminated any sort of minimum billing requirement for placements. This means, with a budget of just $5 – you can get your ad up on a billboard nearby.
When we finished signup on the Blip platform, we were greeted with a Google Maps based inventory selection screen. As you can see from the map below, the locations are rather limited for us here in Iowa (there are none!), however other metro markets offer a few options:
This is still okay, though, especially for a global consulting firm like us! Let’s explore some of the more fun, creative features we can play with.
Blip lets us pick sides of a billboard. This is useful if you only want to hit people going one way (‘leaving so soon? take the next left for….!’), or targeting a specific workplace with visibility of the billboard. We chose both sides, east and west.
Blip lets you put a limit on bid cap by time of day. This is great as we put our bid limits to 0 in the wee hours of the night – we don’t want to target truck drivers on long haul routes. However, you’ll notice that the bid structure heats up considerably from 7:30AM – 9AM and 4:30PM to 6PM.
Blip lets you run playlists. We didn’t choose this option, but you can upload a series of photos and add them to a single campaign, allowing for more dynamic content!
We tested this out by placing a Bodhi Industries billboard just off of I-694 north of Minneapolis, and it worked fantastically! See below for early analytics:
We’re very early on in the stages of testing out Blip, but we are very excited to offer another platform for placement for our customers. For low, low prices; we can combine Blip campaigns with our digital campaigns to provide a holistic and well rounded sales funnel that literally follows your target audience to work, and back again. If you are interested in learning more and placing an ad yourself, click below!
If you are a small business owner, entrepreneur, musician, or similar – we’ve all thought it. You’ve seen the Fiverr Logo marketing. You’ve gotten local designer quotes. Why go through the trouble of paying a designer when I can go on Fiverr and get a logo for $5? That’s a good question, and I’m going to explain my experiences below.
Fiverr Logos as a Customer:
If you are one of the aftermentioned categories, you are a Fiverr customer. You’ll likely go to the graphic design section and run through the nifty Fiverr logo style wizard, finally being greeted by this:
92,360 results for the search team ‘logo’. Yikes. Regardless, we push on. After a couple pages of scrolling, if you are like me, you settle on the most intriguing entry. From here, you discover that the logo certainly isn’t $5, it starts at $30. But the kicker – for $30, you essentially get a small preview file. No source files, no self-edits, nada. See below:
Ah, that’s quite the bait and switch from Fiverr’s marketing! The real ‘basic’ package is actually the Standard package, clocking in at $80 over 3 days. Still, though, that feels cheaper than a real designer, right? Well, that depends on the result. I’ve used 3 different designers on Fiverr with wildly varied results:
Fiverr Logo Try #1:
Uh, yikes. The directions given had asked for a moon silhouette with words over top of it, maybe with some sort of triangle worked into the font. As you can see….swing and a miss! The designer did apologize and submitted 2 more revisions, one of which we accepted. However, the designer never delivered the source files even though we paid for a $60 tier on this one. This was a designer from Sri Lanka.
Rating: 2/10 – They tried. Cost: $60
Fiverr Logo Try #2:
This time we had asked for a DarkGrey logo that would be suitable to slap on an album cover. We asked for the color grey.
The artist, instead, chose to deliver an album cover. Except the cover is just one Adobe Illustrator Raster shape rotated and colored incorrectly. I politely asked for revisions / tried to clarify the request. In return, the designer closed the order and marked it complete. Needless to say, no source files were ever delivered. This was an Indian designer.
Rating: 0/10 – I can’t even use this for social media. Cost: $33
Fiverr Logo Try #3 – The Last Stand:
Sweet baby Draplin, do we have a winner? The instructions we sent on this one asked for a ‘sports league style logo’, we provided two hex colors for blue and green, and two samples of what a disc golf basket looks like.
The designer delivered fantastically, with a couple of minor issues on the first submission. I had no revisions included in my order, but the designer revised the design and delivered it anyways. Source files were included as .ai files, to boot.
Rating: 7/10 – We can use this for branding, especially after some tweaks. Cost: $16
What Did We Learn
We placed three orders over one month for three different designs. Out of these three designs, only one was usable in any way. I’d like to take this chance to utilize one of Bodhi Industries unique thinking strategies – total cost of delivery.
TCoD =Money Paid to 3rd Parties + (Hourly Rate of Coordinating Person * Hours of Research and correspondence) + (Hourly Rate of Local Designer Making Tweaks * Hours required)
Bodhi Industries Total Cost of Delivery
So, in this case, let’s do the math. Our current average logo design rate at BI is $55/hr. I was both the designer and correspondent, so let’s fill in the variables:
I don’t think I need to spell this out too much for you – but presents the following: even if we submitted the same design request to 3 various top rated designers, we estimate it taking at least $301.50 dollars to get something workable and ready for posting and printing.
As I mentioned earlier, Bodhi Industries can design your logo for $55/hour. That hourly rate makes a lot of clients walk immediately – but we have to ask, have you considered the Total Cost of Delivery? What Fiverr provides is a fantastic idea generation tool, getting a unique persons outlook on your requirements quickly and cheaply. There is a use-case out there to use this for storyboarding and ideas.
However – if every dollar matters, and you are a self starter – we cannot recommend Fiverr Logos for your logo design. We can strongly assume that we here at Bodhi Industries can get your logo done for $301 or significantly less, and you’ll be more satisfied with the result, as well. Ready to reach out? Get a hold of us using the form below!
As an independent musician, you get it. The market is saturated. Entire sites exist to vacuum up your money and spit out features. Fortunately for you, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s quit wasting your time writing email submission after email submission.
As you play shows and network, you should start to gather a list of like-minded artists, event promoters, playlisters, and related connections. This list right here is your biggest asset as an artist – you need to let these people know what you are doing, but not overwhelm them. Keep them in the loop, but don’t spam them. Let’s take a look:
The Template
TO:yourself@yourowndomain.com CC: BCC:radio1@bbc.com; darkgrey@warnerbros.com, editors@spotify.com, davie@bowie.com SUBJECT: ObeyGrey – Wonderwall ft. Lil’ Mike BODY: Hey there. I’m releasing my latest tune, Wonderwall, later this week. Here’s a link to stream it privately: [link] And a private download link: [link] Please reply back right to me with any questions, otherwise – have a good one! Charles Smith ————————————- ObeyGrey’s Social Media https://facebook.com/obeygreylive https://obeygrey.com https://soundcloud.com/obeygrey
TO/FROM/CC/BCC:
Okay. Let’s break down the email above. We start off with a to: simply back to the same email address you are sending from. This is an old marketing trick to prevent your recipients from seeing the list you are sending to, a good thing. Because of this, be sure to put your actual recipients in the BCC section.
SUBJECT LINE:
I have experimented with many variations in the past, and the best open rate comes back to the classic: artist name – song name. If you are targeting this email and can offer the track as an exclusive, put that in there to draw attention: ObeyGrey – Wonderwall ft. Lil’ Mike (Potential Exclusive!). We added the exclamation point for spiciness.
BODY:
You guessed it – we are keeping it simple again. Tell them why you are emailing them, when it’s happening, and how to listen to it. Don’t attach a file, most email filters will automatically delete unsolicited attached files. Include a private download link, preferably one with open tracking, and round it out with your real name as well as social media links.
That’s it! No fancy HTML emails, no flashing .GIFs or emoticon filled subject lines. I’ve found it’s best just to cut the bullshit, keep it simple, and start with why:
I am sending this communication to let you know I’ve released something new on this date for your consideration. Thanks.
There. That’s the heart of your message. With this tool in your independent music marketing toolkit, you’ll be slightly better equipped to take the world by storm.
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