The Understanding of Music Seminars

After years of applying traditional methods for advertising, the Understanding of Music Seminars decided it was time for testing new ways to attract people to its educational offering. Working with Conscious Agency allowed them to apply data-driven techniques and hyper-targeting to reach the right people and, staying within expected cost margins, they increased the attendance levels and got incredibly valuable information for further events.

The Understanding of Music Seminar (UMS) is an educational initiative created by the English recording artist, producer and composer -in addition to a passionate educator- Duncan Lorien. The seminars aim at leading people through the understanding of the music path.

Step by step, they help learn about subjects such as naming notes on the keyboard and the guitar, playing scales and chords without having to use memory, the basics of improvisation, reading and playing music notation, singing and songwriting. In 3-days seminars that are held around the world, they teach how to read, play and write music. UMS has been running events across Australia and New Zealand for the last 20 years.

Over 25,000 graduates on five continents have now experienced the magic and fun contained in these seminars. Music is a language and Duncan Lorien has discovered the way to show anyone how to understand and communicate it.

Publicity has been always done through traditional advertising, newspapers, posters and magazines. However, the APAC promoter started to think about using new methods of advertising. The problem was the old methods had worked for a long time and they couldn’t afford to switch and fail.

In order to test new ways of communications, they were referred to Conscious Agency (CA) by a client who had been working with the growth agency driven by Thomas W. Green for a long time.

The FunnelLogic™ methodology

They were looking to leave behind the old working solution to move into the unknown and test a new way. The goal was to find a workable solution that continued the success of the previous methods but could also build a bridge to the future.

Thomas and the Conscious Agency team started to work right away. They applied their FunnelLogic™ to approach the process in both a formulaic and scientific manner. This methodology utilizes a marketing and sales funnel which incorporates a growth engine.

The sales funnel -also called growth hacking funnel- is a framework that divides the purchase process into different parts to comprehend where to focus attention. At every stage, the customer assumes different roles, from explorer to ambassador.

On the other hand, the set of strategies and steps organized to take a business to a new level is called the growth engine, where you can set manageable targets and test results to define what activities are useful to achieve a company’s goals.

Growth Diagnostic and Strategy

They decided not to test different headlines or call to actions as they had a tried and tested headline that had worked for them over 15 years. The client had already done dozens of tests offline, and so CA had to stick with the headlines given and certain imagery despite their recommendations to do otherwise. The agency considered it imperative to always be testing different options.

After negotiation, the UMS decided that certain events would be digital only to fill, while other events would be both digital and conventional to fill. After discussing with CA, they were convinced that everything had to be tracked along the way.

Hyper targeting and Marketing Funnel

Techniques like look-alike audiences and hyper-targeting were used to deliver specific adverts to the right eyeballs. Through a conversion funnel of live event previews, followup emails and followup SMS they managed to ensure that there were high attendance numbers to each of the events, in spite of any difficult environmental conditions such as heavy rainfall, public transport networks closing or accidents on major traffic arteries.

A new way of attracting customers

As a result, they got the specific cost per attendee they were aiming and they are still refining the follow-up process. “We managed to get good attendance at the previews, with over 400 registrations per event, which converted to over 35% actually arriving at the preview events”, states Thomas W. Green, co-founder of Conscious Agency.

Enough information was gained to decide that next time, they will run multiple preview nights per city due to the large cost of travel and the bottleneck of only one night available for people to register for. They are going to test charging a registration fee for these live previews, due to the value of the information and to incentivize people to turn up.

The campaign was a success as it more than covered its costs in an experimental phase and with optimization. Next year, it will allow for growth that had not been available by sticking with the old methods of conventional advertising.