Welcome to Episode 27 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the band I've podcast. You probably guessed it by now. My name is James Cross, and I am one of your co host and I have here with me the awesome drummer Aaron Gingras of Suburban Samurai.

How are you, Aaron? Hello. Hello. What's going on today? Not a ton. Just I heard that you have a cat named Tilly who was trying to get into your bedroom, and years ago I was working with sponsor who did the campaign to free Tilley from Sea World, which was really fun campaign and you know, unfortunately, Tilly is now free, but not in the way we wanted. But long story short, I learned that your cat is named Tilly, but not after Tilikum the whale rather Matilda from the movies.

So that's a pretty cool story in a good name for a cat. I think I think so, too. And it was going to be Matilda until we I realized that was sort of hard to, like, say, really quickly, three times fast. So we shortened it. Yeah. And so how old is Matilda? Oh, gosh, we actually got her. I was on tour in 2014, and Kate was actually home alone because I was not at home and our landlord got Tilly. I forget what she was. She had named her something different.

And when you know what? Our landlords dog did not really agree with Tilly the cat. And so she's like, Oh, would you like a cat? And we were actually thinking about that as well. So we like great minds think alike, I guess. And we inherited Tilly and like, the summer of 2014, and she was like to at that point, so, like, 77 ish. Oh, that's awesome. Well, it's really nice that your landlord thought of a good home for her rather than being like, well, back to the shelter. That was a good move.

And I'm sure she has an awesome home and at some point soon. Hopefully I get to meet her. Once the social distancing measures are lifted and it's safe, Thio interact. And then I can see your new house that we talked about on last week's episode. Two. Heck, yeah, we'll have to figure out how Thio safely be very, very loud with instruments in that place while also, uh, keeping in mind Tilly's sanity and her ears and hearing. But where there's a will, there's Yeah, I know. My cat did not like the drums.

He would go a Sfar the ways he could, you know? Obviously he'd go to the other room, which had a couple of walls in between, so it wasn't too loud for him. But he still didn't like the sharp, percussive noises that was too much for him. Yeah, so this week we're gonna be talking about the power of a straight team, which most listeners air, probably familiar with the idea of a street team. But I don't know if most listeners have ever been on one. If you have, that's awesome.

You have a better understanding of how they might work, and there's obviously no set rules. The street team could work totally differently for different artists. But we think that street teams should see a comeback because this is using your super fans in a good way. You're not using them in a bad way to help get your word out there and make them feel good about your band and have effective, inexpensive marketing to grow your fan base and spread the word like capitalizing on your exactly and in turn, giving them an even stronger community to take part in and giving them free stuff.

Because who doesn't love free stuff? So just going through the basics here, people are more likely to check out your band if their friend tells them about you rather than they see an ad from you. Because if they see an ad, they're like, Okay, whatever. But if their best friend says, Hey, I just found this band. I love their music. They're so awesome. That person is going to check out your music because their best friend told them, Toe, listen to it. It's really cost effective to because your fans are naturally inclined to share the music that they enjoy.

So if they like your music, they're gonna be happy to share it. And then as a little reward, you can offer them free merchandise in exchange for completing tasks or activities. And that doesn't necessarily mean hey, tell a friend and we'll give you a free T shirt. But that could be something like, Hey, you know, tell 10 friends and for every person you tell you get 10 points and once you get 200 points will send you a free T shirt. A street team is a great way to build your online community so your fans can connect and build friendships with each other, which will let them positively associate their happiness, their friendships with your band, which makes their connection to your music even stronger.

I've seen several bands do this really well. One. I loved to talk about them on the podcast. I fight dragons back in the day, 2010 to about 2012 2013. They had an amazing street team program, probably going back to 2009, even where basically, you could do tasks for them, And this is before everything was online. You could do hanging up. Posters already could do online stuff. It really dependent on what was needed in your area. You could hand out download cards to friends, all kinds of stuff. After a while, you'd have enough points to rank up or get free merch from their merch store and all kinds of stuff, and it was really cool.

And even though that street team hasn't really been active in about 6 to 7 years, I still talk to some of the friends I made through that street team almost a decade ago. And so guess what? Here I am talking about. If I dragons almost a decade later giving them more free publicity, it doesn't get better than that. They truly have a fan for life because of that street team program that they ran, and I hate to say it, but that program is no more because they don't really tour that much anymore.

They don't need it there in a comfortable spot where they built their fan base to where they wanted it to be. And it's now sustainable by itself. That is in no small part because of the street team. So those are some of the very basic reasons why you should have a street team and the main thing is you give free stuff to people because they help you out and yet cost you some money in the long term. But it is going to give you a great return because you're gonna have more people buying tickets to your shows once we're playing shows again, buying your merch, buying your music, all kinds of stuff.

So, Aaron, why don't you take it away? And let's talk about how to run an online street team? Yeah, so I mean, with everything you said, it's a relationship. It's very personal because it's based on an art on music, but there is a back and forth, and so you need to have a system in place for that. So as you mentioned, you could have certain tasks for certain fans or different groups of people to do something. Ideally, that's not too difficult, but something that does, you know, give them something to do, takes a little bit of effort.

So that way, when they're, you know, when they've completed that task again, not crazy difficulty. Not entirely, you know, enormous investment. But they do feel like they walk away having done something. Uh, they could reach out and touch or they've They've made a difference in some capacity you touched on. You can implement a point system. Eso certain different tasks can be, uh, you know, valued at 10. 20 points 25 5. You know, however you wanna structure that, and that's the piece of the system that will allow you to kind of figure out all of your returns or whatever you wanna call them, returns or prizes. Incentives.

However, you wanna phrase that again, it's building a community thes fans air helping you for as much as they're doing for you. You should definitely remain focused on how you can add thought you did their lives. Because at the end of the day, as you pointed out, James, if somebody's a straight teamer for a year or two years and then for whatever reason, if that you know, may go away or they may, you know, stepped down from being an active member, chances are they're still gonna buy your records.

That's really the thing that kind of keeps on giving. So if they're investing time in you, you want to make sure that you're investing time in them or acknowledging the fact that they're interested enough toe really participate and help you out. So again, that's not just say you shouldn't benefit from this. Obviously, the promotion that they do for you will lead to more fans as well. You're not only will they, you know, hopefully come back record after record and stream it or hopefully by it or purchase merch.

Or but that's gonna be them. Assisting with promotion and hoping to really end more people to buy more merch or two. Engage in more in different ways with your music, whether it's buying the record or sharing. It's like a spider Web. And all of that, in turn you know, will hopefully lead to increase sales. Yeah, absolutely. And to tie into that what we're saying about adding more value to those people's lives. So let's say that they directly spend $50 on merch, but you give them another $50 of free merch.

Then they tell their friends and those friends each by $50 of merch. So, yeah, you gave the first person $50 of free merch. That's an investment, because you already made that back on the three friends who bought $50 of emerged from you as well, and that's way over simplifying it. But think of it that way. It's an investment, and you might lose money on that one specific relationship. But when you see the value that those fans bring by telling other people about it, you're absolutely earning money on that relationship.

So you have to look at the big picture rather than just the one person you're losing money on. That's what we're trying to say here. Absolutely. And it's it's a it's a give and take and just keep. Keep in mind the direction you want ahead. And if you want to grow the thing that you're working on, that's the way to do it. You can't be in every place at once on DCI Chances are you're not a millionaire or a billionaire, so communities the way to do it.

And even if you take money out of the equation, being in a band is a community and of itself, and you're playing to people and those people are part of that community. So it's just enhancing everybody's experience, and this is something that you can kind of do for each other exactly, and it could be tough to build a straight team if you don't have super dedicated fans, because the super fans are the ones who are really gonna have the commitment to do it, the conviction to do it because they want to help their favorite band and if they feel like they're helping someone that they care about that just makes it all the better for them because they're going to be much more willing to do this.

So it could be really useful to reach out one toe, 12 people who you recognizes your top fans and ask them if they would be interested in joining the street team and make it personal. Say, Hey, you know, we're only reaching out, You know, our top fans to start this off and we want to see how it goes before we ask anyone from the public to join. Like we're gonna invite, you know, 25 or 30 people and you're one of them, like, if you want in will put you in the group, and that just makes that connection that much more special because they're like, Whoa, this band, recognize me is one of their biggest fans.

That's so cool. It can definitely be something that's a little more personal, at least to start. And then as it grows, you can open it up to more and more people. But just do be careful that you never lose touch with your Ogi fans, because if they feel like they've been abandoned when all of a sudden the street team has 200 people on it, they're not gonna be happy because they feel like they've lost something by helping build your band, which is unfortunate. But that can happen. So, Aaron, what's one of the first steps?

Aside from just having people in your street team that you should take to make sure your street team runs smoothly, it's all about systems, systems, systems. This is a great example of there being opportunities through technology toe really make that technology orc for you and not replace all of these interactions and and turn them into something that's not genuine but enhance your ability to, as you're saying, increase your own bandwidth. So that way you can have more time to personally engage with these people. So it's just the better organized you are from the beginning, the get go, the more people you're going to be able to communicate with whether it is one on one or is part of a group.

You know, a few of the examples that we wrote down here, you know, there are gravity forms, James. I think you might be able to speak to that a little more than myself. I think that's associated with WordPress. But Google forms is another example of that and that one. I don't know much about gravity forms, but I know Google. Obviously, the Google suite is available to anybody, and it is, you know, free. And that's a great example. Thio both communicate out and also received information back in.

So whether it's sending out, you know, if you've already got our relationship going with a bunch of people, you can say, Hey, I'm creating a pole or I'm creating a form. I want your input on this thing on so it's a great way to receive information that you don't have, but it's also a great reporting tool for, you know, when you are looking to try to have an understanding of what your street teams really done. It's a good way toe interface with a point system. If you decide to create a point system or some sort of ah schedule to sort of a sign and keep track of who's done what, you can really shape that to whatever you want it to be.

And it's super easy to use gravity forms. Is that something that's, um, similar to Google forms? Or is it different than any ESO? Gravity forms? Is a lot more complex than Google forms, I think for most people building their first straight team, Google forms will be plenty. Both of them will do conditional forms, which is what you need for what we're gonna be talking about. Gravity Forms is all hosted on your own website. Again, it's WordPress on Li. Like you mentioned, If you have a WordPress site, it's great.

I think it's $60 a year, which is not that bad. But of course, Google forms is free, so the advantage of gravity forms is it's all in your site. You have all the data and you have full control over what the pages look like. You can drop it into any WordPress page and, like make it fit your brand, whereas with Google forms you can change the colors and that's about it. It's still gonna look like a Google form. It's gonna be on a Google domain. People are gonna know it's a Google form, but there are major label bands out there like a F I. They do contests pretty much every month for their fan club, and they use a Google form so no one is going to care.

If you're just using Google forms, they're not going to judge you for it. It's totally fine. Basically, what you would set up is on this form. You would ask for their name and their email and then have a list of tasks as check boxes and ask them to check off which tasks they're submitting and then have a field where they can upload files, which Google forms, I think, can Onley upload via Google drive Gravity forms supplements directly to your site, so that is another advantage. But either way, people can upload files and they would upload their proof.

So, for example, if the task was reaching out to friends on Facebook via D. M. And telling them toe check out your music, you say okay so you can reach out to up to 15 people. And for every single person you've reached out to, you get 100 points, Just send a screenshot, and it does have to show that they at least read the message. It doesn't need to reply, but it needs to have the little scene icon at the bottom just so we know that they actually opened it and read it, even if they didn't reply.

Because you can't control people reply. But that way you can't message people who are never online knowing that they're not going to see it or something like that. And then you get those files and say, Okay, then you go over to your Google sheet and input the number of points this person has earned in their section. You know, you'd have a row for each person and enter the notes and their points, and then you have their balance. And at the end of all this, you can say, Okay, we have added your points.

This is how many points you have, and you just have an email template for that. So you email them, fill in a couple of spots on the template, and you're done. If you're using a CRM, you can even have those fields auto populate, except for the points you could have, like their name and stuff like that Auto populate, which is really cool. But we'll have to do an episode about CRM at some point just to really go into detail with that. One thing that I wanna mention when we're talking about this, though, is that you need to have a budget specifically set aside for these promotions because not only are you going to be sending out free merch so that merch is going to cost you something you have to pay for the shipping.

So you have to keep that in mind and make sure that you can send stuff out to fans on time. You never wanna email a fan and say, Hey, you have the points. But I gotta wait till I get paid next Friday so I can mail out your shirt. Nobody wants to hear that. Have money set aside for this program and expect what it's going to cost. Do the math on it. So if you're going to give away merch to 10 people, this is your pilot program essentially, and you can put a limit on it, you know, Say you can Like I was saying earlier, you can reach out to up to 15 people, and for each task you can have a different limit.

So you know how many points these people are going to potentially get, figure that out and say, Okay, with these points, this is the merch they can redeem it for. So it's going to cost us up to $35 per person, plus shipping. Well, 10 people. That's $350 just on the expense of merch. And then, let's say shipping is another $10. So you're looking at $450. Let's call it even 500. Just so there's a little wiggle room in case something goes wrong. Package goes missing and you have tow. Send out another T shirt or something.

So you have $500 set aside specifically for this promotion, and that way you know that everything is going to run smoothly. You're not going to run into any financial issues, and it's totally scalable. You know, if you open up a street team, if you're a little more established and you have ah 100 or 500 people. Make sure you have the budget in there. I would say the more you scale it, the more liberal you could be with cutting the budget down. Because if 100 people join a street team, not every single one of those people is going to do the whole thing.

You wanna have enough money that everyone who does the tasks and redeem the points can get the free stuff. But that doesn't necessarily mean you need to have enough funds for every single person, because that's not gonna happen as nice as it would be, the caveat here is that if somebody redeem something and you spend money on getting there, emerged to them, replenish that budget because somebody else is going to redeem something the next day or the next week or the next month. Whenever it is, just make sure that you constantly keep that pot full so you can always have money in their to send that stuff out.

Another thing that I should mention is this all comes down to solid communication with your fans. You should have a really good platform where you can communicate with your street team If you haven't checked out Episode 26 yet that'll be over at Band. I've got rocks slash 26. That episode is all about communication, whether with your bandmates, your team, other bands, venues, promoters or your fans. So that's definitely something to keep in mind that we would highly recommend you check out that episode if you haven't already so moving on Erin.

We have some examples of different tasks that people could do. And, you know, this is not an extensive list or anything like that. Just some basic ideas. And we think people could get creative and come up with our own stuff. But do you want to run us through some of the basics here? Yeah, so, again, not an all encompassing list, just some of the basics that will be more or less applicable to more or less. Most people. Um, you know, the point of this is to get you thinking And of course, at the end of the day, if you take advantage of or pursue a couple of these options, there's nothing wrong with that.

But really think about who you are, what the band is, what they do and who you guys interact with Andi, kind of get creative and and get unique. Andi people appreciate that. But ah, couple of generic examples. Things you can't really go wrong with doing. Getting fans to tell their friends via direct messaging again. Making sure to try to avoid coming up is spammy wherever possible. But getting fans to engage with their friends, whether it's via direct messaging. Um, you know, sharing music links. So things like smart, your oral or other tools that link fans or potential fans to sort of, ah, landing page with all streaming platforms.

So they have everything right at their fingertips, getting fans to get their friends to go to shows, posting photos of themselves and or their friends, uh, you know, showing that they're having an awesome time to show, you know, posting photos of them, meeting you or photos of them in the T shirt that they just bought. Or, if you have, you know, cool. Other piece of merch, you know, somehow getting them to communicate out to their own social bubble, their own world. Hey, there's this act. It's cool.

You should check it out. I went to their show where I have a piece of merch. I'm somehow involved or enjoy being involved with this group and what they dio again, as I think you mentioned earlier. A fan will trust the opinion of ah, friend and engage with and think about that conversation more than they would just ing an advertisement advertisement. Obviously it exists, and it exists because it works. But that's a much, much more personal way to sort of, you know, plant that message. And I think you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck.

If those conversations happened between groups of friends who already trust each other and, as you mentioned earlier, will associate a positive feeling towards that conversation because they had it with their friend, who they trust again, kind of a callback to If you do develop some sort of ah Callier point system, um, you know, offering rewards to those people who do bust their butt for you and work hard and produce content or produce activity in support of what you're trying to do. You could refund some of those tallies or the points, you know, lend them a head start to the next free march item or whatever it is that you're offering free admission to a show, whatever.

But again, just those are basic ideas, things that would be more or less applicable to more or less all situations. But again, it's a really cool opportunity, Teoh. A good opportunity. Thio. Assess who you are, where you are and who and where you're engaging when you're doing what you do. And I think that will allow you to get more specific and more unique and sort of cater more specifically, thio the people that you interact with, you know, I mean people were they? I love the idea that you were mentioning that if a fan does redeem some merch for free and then they post about it being all excited, saying, Hey, you know, I just got this for free from one of my favorite bands.

That's so awesome. First of all, they feel really good about that. And then if you reach out and say, Hey, thanks for posting like here's 10% of your points back so you can get a head start. That's awesome, because then they're that much happier. And they just made a post about how great you feel about this band that all their friends are going to see or let's be, really, if you're on Facebook, like 10% of their friends are going to see because all social platforms they're limiting that now I will say, just, you know, this kind of If I were to plant myself outside and look inward at this just for a second, this totally sounds like a thing.

You know, it sounds like or it could sound like, Oh, God, you know, that this is a whole other system that I need to set up. I don't want to bother. I do wanna kind of nip that in the button and say Totally not. This is it could be whatever you want it to be. You could take advantage of some of the ideas that we've gone through and use on the systems we've used. But again, those were just examples. Really, All we're talking about is, um, you know, the nurturing of a community that exists in support of you and your business in your art.

So that could take, you know, any one of the forms that we've we've touched upon today. But it could also be something you know the system you come up with could be something totally unique and totally different. And the key here is that it's engaging with your community and nurturing that relationship. Andi, it could, you know, you could come up with something tomorrow that just doesn't even exist today. A za long as it works in support of that goal. That's kind of what we're getting at. So it could be a xcom plex Orosz, simple as you would like it to be.

But at the end of the day, you know, it's sort of touches upon. I would hope the honest work component toe what it is that you dio James, you mentioned If you do see that if somebody the reports back to you or you do see that somebody did totally by the merch take a picture of them with the merch, put it on their social or whatever it iss, you know, they plan to your music, this or that or the other thing. All engagement means is recognizing that people are helping you out and that they care.

And those people will care that you care, because I think it's all too easy, you know, to sit on your phone and scroll through Facebook mindlessly or, you know, open up 900 tabs of YouTube and just there's so much content out there and a lot of it gets either brushed off for school passed rather quickly, so it might sound silly or stupid. But I really do think that if you take the time to in whatever capacity, in whatever way, acknowledge you know when people do support you just that acknowledgement of the work that somebody else has done or the effort somebody else's put forward for you that in and of itself just that that will go a really long way because everybody knows how easy it is just not to do that.

These air things that do not need to take a lot of effort or a lot of time if you don't want them to, it's really the principle behind the whole thing. And we're just trying to point out that there are systems out there that you are able to use if you so choose to sort of provides a more structured to it. But again, it's community calling back to the last episode. It's communication and it can really be whatever you like it. Yeah, I definitely agree. And what you're touching on about the systems and tools is so true, because setting up those systems and tools would probably take about two hours.

Maybe if you're not computer savvy about three, it should not take you more than an afternoon. What is going to take time is figuring out how you want the program to run, so it's balanced that you're not losing tons of money, but that the fans are getting enough value to keep wanting to help you out and then actually building that community. Once you have your idea of how you want to run it now, you could ask people to pre sign up for it. You know, you could put them in the group if they're interested and get things going there and start building the community while you're figuring out the details of the program, that's absolutely fine.

Just make sure it doesn't take forever, and you need to keep your fans updated on what's going on. So they're not just forgetting about the group, and then two months later, when you finally launch it, say, Oh, that was two months ago like whatever I don't care anymore. You have to either not tell your fans or on Lee. Tell them when you're very close to being ready. So I think we should mention why we chose this topic for today's episode, and that's because it's extremely relevant. Right now, everyone is online.

Yeah, we talked about some stuff in the examples, like going to shows and taking a picture of the show. But there's so much stuff that people can do online to spread the word about your band that even when there's a global pandemic, this is a good, cheap and effective way to market your music, your merch, all that stuff. And it was already relevant before Covic, you know, I was talking about I was on an online straight team from, like I said 2010 to 2012 or 2013, and there are still bands that have straight teams who are active now.

And so I would love to see more bands doing this because it's still incredibly effective at building community in connection with your fans, even though after cove it the world will probably be very different. I definitely think that street teams will still be very relevant to building a solid career for any artist after this is all over with, and hopefully that is sooner rather than later. But either way, I think street teams they've been fading the last few years, But I think they should make a comeback because they really are effective.

And I think people would recognize that if they give it a shot. Yeah, well, that does it for another episode of the band. I've podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. And I really hope that you will take action and implement a straight team of some sort for your band because it really is so important. And I think it's the way of the future and also, at least right now the way of the present. So explore some options, brainstorm some ideas and think about what you can do to start a street team for your band.

We'd love to hear what you come up with. So if you head on over to our Facebook group just by searching Bandhive on Facebook post in that group, what you are doing to build your online street team will, of course, be back with another new episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m. Eastern time. Until then, have an awesome week. Stay safe and, of course, as always, keep rocking.