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Encore Drinks: How to Market yourself as a Musician

Last month we welcomed Encore members to our workspace in Techhub London for our fourth Encore members drinks event of the year.

Encore Drinks events are not only a great opportunity for Encore musicians to network and hear from great speakers, but are also designed to give our members a chance to give feedback face-to-face and have their say in the future development of Encore.

We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who came along and shared their conversation and thoughts, we left with lots of great ideas for how Encore could be improved!

If you missed it, here’s a brief summary of the evening…


 

Encore members at Encore Drinks

Musicians in Moorgate: we had a full house at our Techhub workspace

Design workshop

We began the evening by catching up with our musicians over a free drink, getting to know them better and hearing about the way they use Encore. This is often the most fascinating part of Encore drinks for the team, when we hear first hand how you’re finding using the site!

To gather more specific feedback, our Lead Designer Cláudia, ran a workshop on her latest project: the new Encore Bookings flow update. The update will address many of the current issues around Bookings, by speeding up the current Bookings dashboard, separating bookings from applications, and adding helpful features like instant job travel distance estimates.

Aided by a plentiful stock of Percy pigs, she asked musicians to rank which information they they’d like to see on the bookings page, and gave them a sneak peak of her current designs. With this helpful feedback now integrated into the project, the new Bookings flow is almost ready to go live, so you can expect an email announcing the update very soon!

Encore Design Workshop with Claudia

Cláudia’s brilliant design workshop!

Guest speaker Joel Garthwaite: How to market yourself as a musician

Next we enjoyed a informative and entertaining talk given by Joel Garthwaite, professional saxophonist, marketing consultant to ISM and founder of classical music PR agency, Bright Ivy. During his presentation, Joel explained why you should market yourself as a musician, how you should go about it using the tools available – from websites and social media to business cards and networking.

Joel’s top marketing takeaways:

  • Only publish your best content
  • Start using email marketing
  • Network effectively
  • Match your prices to your promises
  • Decide what you want to achieve
  • Create a strategy and work at it

You can watch the first section of his presentation below and follow along with his slideshow here.

James McAulay: An Update from the Encore

After a short drinks break, we heard from Encore CEO and Co-Founder James about the latest developments to the Encore site and our plans for the future.

The most important of these were:
1. Improving client enquiries with a smart enquiry form
2. The new Bookings dashboard (to be released very soon!)
3. Musician profile redesigns and site rebrand (coming soon)

Unfortunately, the camera conked out at this point but movie-lovers will be pleased to know that you can watch James’ previous Encore drinks talk, which covered similar topics, on our blog post here.

Update from Encore CEO, James McAulay

James pointing at a photo of James pointing at a photo of James…


Thanks again to everyone who came. We announce all Encore drinks events to our members by email, so make sure you keep an eye on your inbox if you’d like to come to the next one. Hopefully see you there!

Encore members in conversation

New friends: Encore drinks events are the perfect place to meet other musicians

Jonny Venvell

Jonny is Encore's Head of Artist Relations.

He's responsible for supporting and helping musicians on the platform and writes most of the musician-facing articles on the blog. He can usually be found singing in choirs, drumming in bands, or nodding meaningfully to particularly good chords in London's jazz bars.

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