When it comes to the DJ business today, things are certainly very different than even a decade ago. Running a DJ business (or any small business) requires the business owner to wear many hats. If you’re a solo DJ, you are the talent, the SEO and content creator, marketing department, webmaster, HR, customer service, etc.
One thing that many DJs (and DJ company owners) struggle with is marketing, specifically SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing. If done right, it can really change your business.
So what do you do? You can hire website and marketing professionals, or you can learn to do many of these things yourself. If you’re a one-person operation, then you likely don’t have the budget to hire professionals. So, chances are, you’re going to have to be a DIY pro.
Here are my top 5 tips to help you with your DIY search engine marketing and optimization journey.
Tip 1: Find your Niche
This is one of the most important tips for any business, whether you’re a DJ, photo booth company, planner, or any business. Find out who is your ideal customer. Understand that you can’t be all things to everyone. You can certainly try (like I did), but it’s much harder to do.
This is because if you’re a DJ, without a niche, you’re basically competing against everybody else. Instead of just a handful of competitors, you have hundreds, if not thousands of competitors. Be smart and identify your ideal, target client and “niche down” as they say.
Instead of targeting weddings, you can target more specific weddings or events. Maybe you’re great at Top 40 music, so your target market would likely be younger couples. Laser focus on your target market and become the go-to person for that market. Let’s discuss how to do this, more in-depth.
Tip 2: Do Content Marketing
You may have heard the term content marketing before. This can be blogging, vlogging, creating infographics, social media marketing, etc. These should actually all work together as part of your overall marketing campaign.
Content marketing is basically creating relevant content to your targeted audience to drive website traffic, and ultimately, sales! It’s very important to convert that traffic into sales. You can get 10,000 visitors per week, but if only 1 person decided to book your services, you’ve got some work to do.
Tip 3: Choose Good Content Topics
Now that you know what content marketing is, you need to figure out which topics to talk about. If you decide to blog, remember you have a business, and the goal is to capture your target audience’s attention. Think about what info your target audience needs to know.
Answer Frequently Asked Questions
When you get emails, calls, or in meetings, what questions do they ask you? If you keep getting the same questions, this is a great blog to create! You can answer those questions ahead of time, without ever having to email, or call! They can look at that article and see all of your answers to typical FAQs.
I created a FAQ page and it has saved me tons of time! Instead of going back and forth, answering these questions, I simply send this link to my clients or possible clients and ask them to review it before booking. Here’s my Frequently Asked DJ Questions page, if you want to see what I’m talking about.
Tip 4: Blog/Vlog About Topics Your Audience Cares About
If you don’t know what questions to answer, try to use the Answer the Public site. This is a handy, free tool. Just type keywords related to your industry and wait a few minutes. All the major questions will pop up and now you have blog topics to write about!
You can also blog about industry-related topics or topics within your niche. For even more topics, use Google’s auto-complete (what Google thinks you might want to search for) or “people also ask” (at the bottom of search results). These are great for topics, too!
Tip 5: Ask — What’s in it for your readers?
Remember, everyone is searching on Google for a reason, usually to answer a question, or to find something they need. Be the site that answers that question or need very thoroughly. Make sure your content is better than any other site’s content about that topic and you’ll win!
Just do some research and write amazing articles. Use free tools like Answer the Public or Ubersuggest to research your industry topics and see what other people are writing. The beauty of this tool is that it tells you which topics are doing the best. You simply write similar, but better, topics.
Once you have the topic ideas, it’s time to write killer content and be sure it’s SEO optimized, which is my next tip.
In my next installment, we’ll talk about SEO and the results I got from applying these very tactics with my own DJ business.
Jason Rubio owns Austin’s Best DJs. He last wrote about photo booth marketing.
