Building An Online Street Team And Managing Them Effectively Part 2

Welcome to part two of our series on building and managing a successful online stream team. If you want to build a ‘real world' offline street team, this guide will also help you too.

It's my hope that musicians, record labels, and others in the music industry will be able to use this to form their own team of marketers and get their reach out there more that they'd be able to do by themselves.

In part one of this guide, we looked at what a street team is, why you need one, if you need one, where to find members and much more. In this part we'll look at offering your street team members incentives, getting someone else to manage it and take the work off your hands, resources your street team will need and more.

So if you want to build a street team, be sure to read this guide through till the end. And share it if you want more guides like this in future.

Important: Give Fans An Incentive To Join Your Online Street Team

Your incentive will be what gets many people from thinking about joining your street team and dismissing the idea, to actually agreeing and signing up. The incentive you offer should be something that they'd find useful, making them promoting you a win win situation for you both.

So, what incentive can you offer fans of your music? Usually you should offer them a chance to not only work closely with you, but also get free merch and / or songs as well. They're already a fan of your music, so if there's a chance they'll get things most fans won't, there will be some who take you up on that offer.

For those wanting experience in the music industry and don't particularly know about you initially, you'll need to offer a different incentive. A physical CD or t shirt of yours isn't going to be worth much to them if they've never heard of you before.

Instead, you should offer these people the opportunity to gain experience, and also getting to meet people within the industry. They'll learn from you how music should be promoted, meet other street team members, and you could also put them in contact with some music industry links you have. It'll also help if you've at least one decent achievement to your name, even if it's something like having a music video out there that has over 2000 views. This will help show them you're more than just a bedroom musician, and that you're aiming to make bigger moves (and they'll be along for the ride if they stick with you).

While those will be the main selling points for each group, you should offer both incentives to both groups to help sweeten the deal. From there it's up to them which they accept.

Key take away: Everyone's will have their own interests. If you find a deal which will benefit everyone, street team members will be easier to come across. If you make it all about you and making you bigger, most people won't be interested as it won't benefit them. So give worthwhile incentives to get more people helping you out.

Find A Street Team Member To Take Over Management

Now, let me make one thing clear:

Running a street team can sometimes be more hassle than it's worth.

Yes it can have a huge positive impact on your music career when run correctly, though when run poorly it can cause stress and little time for other things.

I'd advise you to run your street team initially. This will both give you a chance to see how you want things run, and also give fans an incentive to get involved. That said, as you start getting more team members and it's taking up more of your time, you should get someone else to take over.

Effective management of your street team can be a full time job. Yes you should cut back on studio hours and other bits initially to get it up and running, but doing this on an ongoing basis is very counter productive.

The thing is, as you spend more time working with your street team, you'll hopefully start to notice one or two members who stand out among the crowd. Those ones who are really motivated and reasonably skilled. It's a good idea to make a note of these people, and eventually have one or two of them managing the street team.

If they're already enjoying being involved, chances are they'll be over the moon when you ask them to have a more important role in the street team. Furthermore, this will free up your time, and give you more of a chance to get involved in your core business: making music and possibly managing your music career (unless you've already got a music manager).

It can be hard to let go of managing things sometimes and let others be responsible for an important part of your music career. But if you want to reach the next level and spend your time doing those things only you can do, you'll need to learn to be comfortable letting others help you out.

Managing The Resources Your Street Team Need

Your street team will only be as good as the resources and instructions you make available to them, so make sure you get this part right.

There are two main types of resources you should make available:

1. Rewards which will go to street team members based on their performance, and
2. Materials they can use to promote you.

We'll talk about rewards below, so for now let's look at the promotional materials you should provide them with.

While you could just tell your street team to go out and find places to promote you, there is a much better way to do things. Not only do you want to give them some ideas of places, but you also want to give them promotional materials, ways to keep track of what they've done, ideas of how to promote things and more. The more resources and instructions you give them, the easier it'll be for them to go out and do what you want.

Now don't get me wrong, there should be an element of spontaneity to it all. You don't want your online street team to copy and paste the same script all around the internet as that'll look spammy and not be good for search engine results. That said, having a good guidance for them and the tools they need to do the job should they need it is very important.

You should also ask your street team members to let you know other places they find which they've started building up a relationship with on your behalf. That way you can add those places to your list, and possibly get other members to request you appear on their platform or collaborate with them in future.

Don't feel pressured to create all your marketing resources up front, but get started somewhere and you can create the other ones over time.

Track And Reward The Best Street Team Members

Keeping track of what street team members are doing can have a big positive effect on how effective this all is. There are two main reasons for this:

1. You can see which street team members are really interested in the task at hand, and worth spending time and attention on. If they're not doing much, you might as well stop working with them as your time will be better spent elsewhere.
2. Once you identify the good street team members, you can motivate them more by offering them additional goodies and opportunities.

If you've started trying to recruit for your street team, you'll know it can be hard to get people involved It's because of this that you'll want to do what you can to keep existing members on board. The truth is, it's easier to keep a street team member happy than it is to find a new one. So do what you can to keep them happy.

Note though that there will always be drop outs as time goes on., even people who love working with you will sometimes have to quit. They might suddenly have less time on their hands due to studying or work, they might fall ill, or they might have a child. Life happens, and people's priorities change.

That said, do what you can to keep as many as you can on board. Tracking the best ones and rewarding them appropriately will help with this.

A quick note on tracking:

The easiest way to track achievements is asking your street team members to note down all the things they do with links for proof, and get them to submit it at the end of each week (or every two weeks, depending on their workload). This can be done in an online spreadsheet file such as Excel; be sure to provide the ready made file for them to simply fill in.

Alternatively, there are systems you can use such as this one to track people's work as it gets done. These are usually paid solutions and only usually used when you're actually paying virtual assistants (paid members of staff), so the manual way is usually the best for street teams. At least initially before your team gets too big and until you're making a decent wage from music.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the second part of this guide on outsourcing for musicians done. While we've covered quite a lot here, there's still more I want to cover with you in future. Street teams can be very helpful, so I want you to be able to form and run one effectively.

Do you have any questions about what we've talked about so far? If so leave a comment and I'll answer any questions you may have.