Messenger Conversations

There’s a common rhetoric that marketing your music is harder than ever during the ‘streaming age’ where ‘no one values music anymore’.

Now aside from the fact that we’ve shown time and time again that that’s not necessarily an immovable truth, we’re also in an age full of advantages. One of those is the fact that a ton of social media activity is centered around direct messages.

To put that in different terms, we live in an era where fans can message their favorite artists on a whim - and potentially have them respond back.

This is particularly great for us as indie artists. We have a competitive advantage over bigger artists who aren’t hip to messenger marketing yet. We have the time, the capacity, and the most to gain by having one-on-one conversations with our initial fans.

We can be right there on the precipice of discovery to welcome fans into our world - one-on-one, in real time.

I want to start by saying there are ways to automate messaging conversations, and that is certainly something we’ll want to aim to do. However, it will make sense to start by discussing what we aim to get from messenger conversations whether or not they are automated.

Goals of a first-time messenger conversation:

1. Establish a friendliness and gratitude
   Having someone message you of their own volition is not something you should take lightly. These are some of your most earnest, truly interested fans! You want to reward their intrigue by displaying gratitude.
   
   
2. Gather Information that Informs Your Fan Avatar
   Aim to ask questions that provide qualitative data on your fans, or at least take stock of the information they are being forthcoming about.
   
   
3. Offer Them The Obvious Next Thing
   If the fan is geeking out over you or actively asking for ways to go deeper, give them what they’re looking for! This is why it’s helpful to have an opt-in mechanism on hand at all times. Later on in the training, we will be building educational assets that can also serve this purpose, and prime them for an eventual email acquisition.

It’s worth noting that having manual conversations at first is encouraged. Being right there on the front lines with your fans is something that can’t be replicated or faked. It’s important to imbue this feeling while you have the scale to do so, and get that firsthand experience of what your fans are like, how they behave, what they’re interested in, etc.

That aside, we can develop automated systems in ManyChat that help us do this in case our scale is larger or ramping up - or we have normal human responsibilities throughout the day 🙂

We will dive into the creation of these automated systems in the next set of videos, but for now - start thinking on how you might address these 3 main points of a good messenger conversation so you can be ready to build when the time is right.

There is one easy-to-use tool in ManyChat we can use to help catalogue the results of our conversations, and that is the Live Chat function. You can open any conversation inside of Live Chat and actively tag users based on their responses, or change their custom fields. For example, if a user reveals they’re currently living in Las Vegas, I can hop into Live Chat, go to our conversation, and change their ‘Current City’ custom field to Las Vegas. This helps me build potential touring locales, but it also assigns this information to the ManyChat user. If they ever enter a flow of mine where locale is relevant, that data is already attached to the user and can be read in the flow automatically.

We got Messenger on lock, so let’s move on to another common education tactic in the next video.