00:23 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show podcast. This is CJ Ortiz, the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. I’m excited to share with you the next two podcast episodes which Leah and I have decided to do something special here. Something she doesn’t normally do. Which is to give you a backstage look at what goes on in our Elite Coaching Program.

Each month, all of our coaches will spend one afternoon with as many students as will attend the online class and we will have an in-depth coaching call related to that coach’s expertise and on a particular topic of interest and application to the Savvy Musician Program. What we’re going to do is we’re going to share two of them. One is mine which is what we’re sharing today in Episode 56. “The secret to understanding social media” and then we’ll do in the next episode, one from one of Leah’s coaching calls with her Elite group on taking teamwork to the next level. I think you’re really going to get a lot out of this.

Again, not the usual podcast format but gives you again a real backstage look at how we approach the in-depth aspects of the application of what Leah teaches in this phenomenal course. Today, we’re going to talk about the secret to understanding social media and I think you’re going to get something out of this that you can apply today. That’s what’s important.

We want you to get into application as soon as you possibly can. What you can do for now also is leave us a review. Please go to your respective podcast player, whether Stitcher or iTunes or Spotify and be sure to give us five stars, leave a positive comment that helps us in the rankings and it helps other people to discover the Savvy Musician Show so that would mean a lot to Leah and myself.

Let’s go into the coaching call that I had with the group on the secret to understanding social media.

02:28 CJ: There’s a tremendous sense of mission and nearly every student that I talk to personally and I could see it in a lot of you and some of the stuff that you post. There’s a sense of mission. You have a desired outcome that you want people to experience with your music. I think that’s great. That is even better when you introduce the elements of social media where we can actually communicate with people on this minuscule microscopic level where the targeting is so focused and you’re able to relate to people that are so perfect for your culture, your lifestyle and obviously your music.

We got to be careful about what we allow in because we don’t want to confuse anything more, it’s challenging enough as I said to learn everything that’s being taught in this group. We don’t want to compound the problem by introducing other voices. Let’s just listen to the voice of the shepherd and in this case, that shepherd is Leah and she’s the one who has proven it.

I’ve been in marketing all my adult life so I know the experts offline, online, I’ve seen them all, I’ve seen a lot of the music marketing people and I was talking to Leah yesterday when we’re doing the podcast and I can honestly say that what she’s created is the most important thing as an answer to what was created via Napster at the of the 20^th century.

Everything essentially changed and I don’t think people are aware of the full extent of how much everything has changed. In a lot of ways, it’s good. In a lot of ways, it’s also a challenge because now, yes, there’s more that you can do for yourself and you don’t have to hire out, you don’t have to get signed by a label, however, that means you’re going to have to deliver, you’re going to have to bring your game, you can’t suck.

04:29 CJ: You can’t have music that’s great but a website that’s crappy, you can’t have a packaging that looks great and music that sounds terrible. You got to be bulletproof so that from whatever angle people look at you, right? Three dimensional, you’re bulletproof, you’ve got your act together.

I see here, Jenifer Lin who I talked to a month or so ago and I remember coming across her stuff and some of these students that when I got the request for the call and I go to look at their stuff and I see everything is together and I’m like, well what do they call for? We get into it, we find out some of the reasons why but in other words, initially when I look at them, the packaging is great. Her stuff was really great and very well thought out, very well done.

These things are going to make tremendous impressions on people. Whatever it takes for you to get all of that squared away, you need to do that and we’ve said this before, this is not a race, you don’t have to keep up with another student, you don’t have to get this all done by whatever in terms of getting it all done. You got to get through the modules and that’s what’s important.

But you may get through the modules and still have to come back and review things. Still have to come back and get on a call. Still have to come back. That doesn’t matter, right? We’re going to get there. It’s not important that you’ve arrived, it’s just important that you’ve left and it’s important that you keep walking.

05:53 CJ: Sometimes I get into these weird interests. I’m curious about it from an information standpoint. Not because I want to do these actual things but I’ve been curious as of late, some I looked at many years ago but I got back into it recently but it’s just the whole thing around ultra-marathon runners, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those but these are these incredibly insane people who they do ultra-marathons which means, we’re talking hundred to 250 mile marathons.

None of this 25.6 horse crap they give you at the Olympics. In fact, these people run that every morning, they run Olympic marathons every morning just for training but they’ll run these 250-mile-long marathons and it will be through terrain. This is crazy stuff. Now, the difference is that in order for them to make this distance, it will be over 36 hours, 48 hours, 50 hours on some of these. 

And again, it’s through terrain. It’s through trails, it’s through long stretches, it’s through elevation, they’re obviously not running the whole time. Sometimes they’re walking and then they’ll have either their own team that drives ahead of them and they stop and they fix their feet and change something and try to gobble down as much food as they can and maybe take a nap for a little bit. Sometimes they’ll fall asleep on the trail.

Some of them will even — they go into sleep running, they literally fall asleep as they’re running which is dangerous when you know, hiking the damn Grand Canyon. However, I find no physical pleasure in anything like that. For them, it’s not so much the physical you know? It’s what they learn about themselves that’s important to them.

07:43 CJ: There is something that happens to you when you put yourself through that much pain willfully, intentionally. Because you get down to the true nature of who you are because you can be at that point so beyond the pale, so worn out, so beyond weary that you don’t have the strength for pretention anymore. 

You don’t have the strength for fake anymore. You know, you’re completely vulnerable, you are completely honest, you are completely moving beyond what you think are your greatest ceilings. It’s very eye-opening. What it teaches you is you can pretty much do anything because if you could put yourself through this 250 mile run on top of ungodly terrain and come across the finish line victorious.

Yeah, you can learn the Facebook ad manager. You know, you can put out more CD’s, you can figure out your micro-niche. You can get that audience finally dialled in. I started running – be careful of my terms after all that. I started running an ad, not literally running. Running some ads, page likes ads a couple of weeks ago.

It took just a few minutes and I let it run for a couple of weeks and it was fluctuating but stayed always under 10 cents per like. It wasn’t a lot of thought, it’s just after so many years of doing this with my particular audience, I just know, you know? You just know. You can’t just cover that in a module, it’s not just a five step thing.

09:17 CJ: You have to get to know your culture, you have to get to know your people and what communicates with them and what really speaks to them, the couple that I mentioned earlier that I talked to, they wanted me to take a look at a post because they were having some challenges with the social media and I said, check out this one post and it has one of the members in the band, it shows a selfie of them and they were just a very simple question they had asked.

They said, “We did this post based on what you taught in the last coaching call. It’s our best performing and most engaging post” and I said, “Okay, well that’s good, I mean, you want the fruit of that.” “We’re just concerned about how we do this again.”

I want you guys to get past that. I want you to be able to just really be one with your crowd, your culture because people are going to buy from you because as they say, they know you, they like you, they trust you. But this means, we said this in the last call. You can’t approach this just like the music industry with the only difference being that we’re marketing online as supposed to in Billboard Magazine, right? Because the previous era of the record industry, that’s what they did.

Signed an artist, made an album, produced the album, marketed it, right? If you’ve ever met any one of your fans, it wasn’t until you went on tour. The label handled everything. No, social media has changed that completely. You can’t get online thinking okay, let me learn all this stuff from Leah and I’m just going to do exactly what the label did. I’m going to produce music and I’m just going to market it out there and Facebook is my Billboard Magazine ad. It’s not going to work.

11:00 CJ: It is not going to work. It’s just not going to work. No, you have to be somebody’s best friend on Facebook who happens to make music. That’s the way it works that’s what we’re dealing with. So look at how some of the thought leaders do it. It’s very much a personal following on social media, you know and like we said before, your post is appearing right above a post from their best friend and right below a post from their mom. 

And so this couple had asked me earlier about why that particular post that they modelled after what we talked about works so well, they had a picture of the girl and she was asking him to go on a walk to run some errands and was asking about what to listen to and so people just started chiming in. Well because her post looks very much like what a post would look like in between somebody’s best friend’s post and somebody’s post from their mother. 

And so it blends, it works seamlessly in this new format. So that is going to be really, really important that you glean these non-technological approaches to things. It’s about the organic. It’s about the personal. You’ll really understand social media when you are not talking about it anymore, right? If you’re a guitar player or a piano player, you are really a great player when you are not thinking about the instrument anymore, right? 

You’re playing, it’s like an extension of you right? You are not giving thought to the gauge of strings anymore. You’ve already chosen those, it is already to your liking. It is already to your fitting. You are used to it, you can see the little areas where you have worn the wood on your acoustic or it’s one with you. You don’t talk about it. You are talking about the music. You are talking about the listener. You are talking about what you are trying to say. 

12:45 CJ: And you could sit there and play something and still have a conversation all at the same time, right? You are one with it. You’ll really understand this whole social media aspect of marketing when it completely disappears and you are not so preoccupied with it. You are just talking to people, that’s all you’re doing and they don’t want to be sold to. They have a resistance to that, right? The idea of a salesman is coming to your door, or do people say “yay”? 

Is that what you do? “The salesman is coming, oh boy get the kids.” No, nobody thinks that, right? You see ads when you go to watch somebody send you a YouTube link and you got ads you have to wait however many seconds. I don’t know, as soon as it is going to be a five-second before I do the skip ad or is it going to have to go through the whole – it depends on whatever they set that at and you just sitting there waiting for it. Do you look forward to that? 

No, you look forward to the fact when you watch a video now on watch in Facebook that when it gets to a certain point, you see that little tile that says “ad starting soon” and you’re thinking, “Oh I am going to click out of it” guess what? You can’t. It won’t let you stop and if you try to scroll down, it’s going to put it up on the corner of your window. You are stuck on that video. So no, nobody looks forward to any of that stuff but we are all sold all the time. 

So we are not opposed. We understand sales is a part of the process. We just don’t want it to be so blatant. We don’t want it to be so obvious. We want it to be more personal, more casual. That’s why you want to see hardcore money being exchanged, go to Facebook marketplace. Well, I got people coming out of the wood just to go pick up to take firewood for me. My son gets on there and he says, “Dad, I got rid of this. I got rid of that. I got read somebody is going to come by to get this.” 

I’m like, “Where did you get that?” “Facebook Marketplace” how long was the ad up? How long is the post up there? “I don’t know, five minutes” right? I mean people understand that. They understand exchange, they understand sales, they understand all of that but it’s the context of it all. The context of a Facebook marketplace, which is basically like Craigslist right? It is based on demand, what people want. They are putting in search terms and it is what people are asking for. 

14:57 CJ: People are not sitting around asking for electro space rock pop electro jazz, okay? But if they got to know you and how awesome you are and how much you understand the culture, which is all understanding all the things that they love and celebrate and read and watch and eat and do and they are going to be like, “I am going to buy your music because you are one of my tribe and you’re awesome and there’s no way somebody this cool doesn’t make good music.” 

But if you just think, “I am going to get in here and just sell music” I mean that music better be so beyond the held awesome and knocks people and you get those kind of things but nowadays, they tend to be more parody stuff, right? More like the mash-ups and somebody who I saw one when they took all of Trump’s speeches and put together the lyrics of a Megadeth song. You know it’s like, who has that much time? But these are the kinds of things that are being pushed around. 

So you have that challenge of that’s what you are up against when you are online here but if you can attract people to you, if you can that’s what the funnel is all about. That’s why that funnel is so important. This is where people really get bogged down because they don’t understand this aspect of it. Funnels are about building that know, like, trust aspect. That is what they’re for. For example, you see a mini version of it with probably when most of you went through Leah’s webinar for the Elite group, right? 

So you spend an hour or so with her on a webinar and you’re like, “Yeah” because an hour was a sufficient amount of time for you to go, “She is getting all the pain points and she is covering all the type of benefits that I’d like to see in my own music” and so you’re in. So that is just a mini funnel right? You went from not knowing a whole lot to knowing all about it and to creating an affinity for her and by the end, you were ready to get on a phone call. That’s a funnel. 

17:06 CJ: You went from awareness to interest to commitment, right? Awareness, interest, commitment, that’s how that funnel goes down just like that. So you are going to be somewhere in there with your music, maybe out of little bit all of them depending on where you are, you may not have marketed yet, you may just have set up your Facebook page. I don’t know where you are but awareness, interest and commitment. 

So awareness is that top of the funnel right? That is what we are bringing in everybody in. So that is awareness. I don’t like talking to a student and then two months later, we’re still talking about your micro-niche or we’re talking about whether you should use Drip or AWeber or whatever. Like I said before, I’d rather come and find you doing way too much than fiddling just with everything. I’d rather see you out there just aggressively hitting the streets so to speak. 

Than overly concerned about your micro-niche or the exact wording in your bio or something like that. You have to pound the pavement. You need to build awareness that’s one thing you can all do no matter where you are in this course. So my first question is going to be, are you running video view ads? Are you building an audience? Are you running page like? Are you bringing people into awareness? Are you making people aware of you? 

Leah is not somebody, you can say I stumbled upon Leah back in 2016. Well, that is not the only time you are going to stumble on her. That just happens to be the first time you are going to stumble on her because if you didn’t stumble on her that Tuesday on March 28^th on 2016, you were going to do it two days later. Why? Because she’s freaking everywhere. You want to go to Instagram, she’s there too. You want to go over here? She’s there too. She’s going to get you, why? Because she’s all about awareness.

19:04 CJ: Well I hope you got something out of that, the secret to understanding social media. As you can see, it is something you can begin to apply today. So look at it that way. When the technology disappears and you realize you’re just talking to people, it’s going to make such a significant difference for you in marketing your music and building a dedicated base of super fans ready to buy your music. The secret to understanding social media is to understand that you’re just talking to people. 

So here’s what I like you to do today, if you are interested in becoming a part of the Elite Group, we would love to have you. So what I want you to do is go and visit callsma.com today and book a call with one of our staff members and learn more about the Savvy Musician Elite Program. It may just be the thing that you need. Thank you again for joining us on the Savvy Musician Show. Like I said, please leave a review, give us five stars and help others discover this impactful podcast. 

We’ll see you next time.