At Mission Bay Media, we’ve been creating websites for San Diego area businesses for nearly ten years, and in the process we’ve confirmed that a great website is a key ingredient to any business’ success, and for a multitude of reasons. Running a business requires a certain degree of creativity and original thinking, yet we view “businesses” and “creative endeavors” as two separate and distinct things. But are these two things really that different after all? All sorts of creative professionals like artists, authors and musicians aren’t “business people” per se, yet they still perform a service or create a product that they need to sell in order to successfully contribute to their livelihood. The truly successful “creative types” that we have met always keep a business & marketing driven perspective in the backs of their minds in order to maximize the potential they have to earn through their creative and artistic endeavors.
We’ve created many musician and band websites at Mission Bay Media over the years and in doing so have seen how much a great website can help musicians, artists, authors, bands and all sorts of other people who engage in creative and artistic endeavors professionally. Whether you’re in a band or you sell custom artworks, you’ll want your potential clients to be able to do three things: Find You, Hire You, and Remember You once they leave. Most artists don’t even think about the marketing or business side of their “art making,” so here are 3 huge reasons why you as a band or artist need a new, PROFESSIONAL quality website before you spend time doing anything else:
1) Searchability: Helping Others Find You. With any website, one of the goals is going to be Search Engine Visibility, with the hope being that new potential customers will find you without knowing about you already. Regardless of what people are looking for, we live in an era where all searches for products and services begin on the Internet, and specifically with Google search. Having your own professional website allows you to cater your content to the product and service you’re trying to sell. Are you a local cover or wedding band looking for more gigs and more business? Having your own website allows you to pepper in relevant keywords such as “San Diego Cover Band” or “San Diego Wedding Band” to allow people searching for those things to find your band before they find your competitors’ bands. Buying a domain that follows the format of WWW.YOUR_BAND_NAME.COM allows people who have already seen or heard of you to find your contact information quickly by leveraging your band’s name in your website’s URL. Either way, you can’t sell your service unless it’s easy for everyone to find information about you on the Internet.
2) Marketing: Convincing Others to Hire You. Again, with any website or marketing plan, the primary goal is getting other people to hire you for the service you offer or to pay you for the product you’re selling. With artists, it works in exactly the same way. You’ll want to create a professional, custom website to showcase who you are and what it is that you do. If you’re already in a band or creating art of some sort, you’ve likely signed up for and started creating content for various social media outlets: a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a YouTube channel, Soundcloud, Etsy, Pinterest or Reddit possibly as well. While doing these things is essential to marketing your art or music, taking the extra step with a professional website on a custom domain name is the “cherry on top” that will absolutely set you apart from your competition. Having a professional website projects feelings of success, trust and respect onto your potential clients — the perception is that anyone can sign up for and populate social media account pages, but only a successful professional will have a custom website viewable on a personalized URL such as YOURBAND.COM. With bands in particular, we’ve noticed that having a killer website is particularly helpful, and in some cases helps push artists into a higher payment tier that they would otherwise have to spend years grinding away to achieve. A professional website is the perfect marketing tool for any artist really. It creates a venue for each piece of marketing material that you have in an organized and pleasing way. Regardless of whether you’re a band, a painter or a novelist: with a custom website, your photos, videos, logo, social media feeds and voice all have a home and all help sell your artistic product or service in a coordinated fashion.
3) Branding: Helping Others Remember You. So you’ve successfully been able to get potential customers to find you, and you’ve also found a great way to tell them all about you and what it is that you do. But, after they leave your site, you’ll want them to remember you easily. You want them to call you back, you want them to have your name on the tip of their tongue and you want them to spread the good word about you, your art or music and your mission. Branding is important for your product or service regardless of what you’re doing, and having a professional website is the most impactful way to send your brand home with your potential customers. A custom website is a perfect place to display your logo, which ideally will tie into your domain name as well, thus strengthening the first impression. A custom website is also an excellent place to display large-scale photos and videos — two marketing tools that help capture and define your “image” as an artist and use that as part of your brand. If you’re a musician or other performance artist, having an “easy to say aloud” URL or domain name and custom website to go with it is a great way to direct people to any audio or video samples detailing your work.
Mission Bay Media is a small website design & development firm located in San Diego’s Pacific Beach neighborhood. We serve up high-quality websites and design for local clients and patrons of good web design everywhere. For questions about this article or anything we do feel free to contact us at info@MissionBayMedia.com.
