Make your PC work for you
Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2006 2:36 pm
Hi Just a couple of things I'd like to share as to how I made my PC help with marketing.First, know how to Google... I'm sure by now most of you do... One thing that helps is to put words together in quotes when you want to find them in sequence. For example, "Blue Moment Publishing" as opposed to the 3 words with no quotes. You generally get the best hits up front. ( Google eyes)You can do a lot if you gain some proficiency in Word and Excel. Early on, I started tracking every submission I made in an Excel spreadsheet- name of company, contact name, address, email, phone, songs sent, date, etc. When I got a response that was also noted (i.e. rejected, did not listen yet, keeping on file, you suck , etc) This helps you know what's out there and you check dates to see if it is a good time for a follow-up email. I also like this in case a particular company's name comes up later on. You can see what notes you made.More advanced: the mass mailing. (This is complicated). Let's say you get a long list of companies and you want to ask then all permission to submit a demo. One such long list is the film/TV Music Supervisor's guide from filmmusic.net. They offer an electronic version which can be imported into Excel or a database program...Using the above as an example: First, you sort the list to only those that have mailing addresses. Then you filter out duplicate listings, which will be there for some reason. Some other work may be needed to make individual columns out of Mr. or Ms., first name, last name, etc. Next you need to know how to use Word to do a mail merge. A mail merge is when Word takes one document (in this case a letter) and duplicates it per each item in the mail list which in this case is the Excel spreadsheet. You can personalize the fields on the letter- name , address, Dear Mr. zzzz, etc. so that the letter does not appear to be a form letter.You can also use the mail merge information to address the envelopes or print mailing address mailing labels. Just be careful it doesn't look like junk mail...Handwrite something on each envelope such as "music submission".As I said, this is complicated, but if you are not afraid to learn more Microsoft Office tools you can can a l It of productivity in this area. Is sure beats doing 200 individual letters.You can do something similar for a mass e-mailing but I haven't figured out an equivalent to the mail merge yet. (If someone knows how, please let us know!). For mass e-mails, I've had to go the "Music Supervisor:" salutation route and you don't need the company name and address as in a formal business letter. For mass e-mailing, you can sort your spreadsheet to only show items that have email addresses. Then you can cut and paste a bunch of addresses, in one shot, to your email program.When you mass email, make sure you paste the target addresses in the "Bcc" (blind copy) field, not the "To" field. That way one recipient does not see who else the email went to. This is important! It looks very tacky if they see the names of a zillion other companies and it certainly screams of mass e-mailing. Some email systems have a limit on how many recipients you can use in a single email (i.e. 50)... So group into sets of 50 as needed.One last thing: Don't forget to track all these responses in a spreadsheet too. For email, I often just create email folders, one such as "Mass Mail March 06 YES","Mass Mail March 06 NO", and "Mass Mail March 06 CHECK BACK LATER". Well, I hope this was helpful. Casey