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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Beth Ewen
September 2007

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Marketing

Waxcoach.com new site to help sole proprietors do their own marketing

A new Web site, www.waxcoach.com, offers tips and articles about do-it-yourself publicity and marketing. It?s the newest venture for Bonnie Harris, founder of Wax Marketing Inc. in St. Paul.

This is the first big blast, she said, about the newsletter she sent in mid-July. I had 7,000 names on my list, and very few opt-outs. I was really pleased.

A free membership is available, and for that people get the newsletter. For a lifetime subscription of $139, members get access to discussion boards where they can pose questions, like who’s the booker for Ellen, Harris says, referring to the popular TV show.

She started the site to serve the many inquiries she gets from sole proprietors, authors and others who don’t have the budget for a $2,000 a month retainer, the typical client for a company like Wax Marketing.

In the July 17 edition, Harris likened promoting a business to building a killer recipe for beef stew.

You wouldn’t try each ingredient one at a time, she writes, and neither should you buy one ad on a Web site, then when that doesn’t work send out a press release, and then when that doesn’t work hire someone to do e-mail marketing. The combination is the key.

She doesn’t think giving away marketing information for free will hurt her business. I see them as two separate customer segments, she says, referring to sole proprietors on the one hand and firms with several million in annual sales on the other.

And if the smallest businesses grow, they may become her clients one day. As businesses get bigger, companies don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to do it themselves, she says.

Bonnie Harris, Wax Marketing Inc.: 651.225.8201; bonnie@waxcoach.com; www.waxcoach.com