Need business/marketing ideas to stay ahead of the competition

[sonare]

Forgot to mention that based on my experience and that of my colleagues-- location work is about 30% producing/recording and 70% sales. Finding the middle ground between modest and brash is illusive!

Rich

[TheLoud1Please]

Zhou is actually a great name for a company. Just add the industry after Zhou - Zhou Recording. You might even be asked to mic up some monkeys for extra $$$. It's great because everyone is familar with the sound "zoo" and it's fun to say.. "kazoo" "zoom" "hay-Zeus" "go to the zoo". It sticks! You also want something that people are compelled to ask about. Zoo recorded your recital??? Yeah Owen Zhou. He did me right!

[Boschen]

Originally Posted by TheLoud1Please

Zhou is actually a great name for a company. Just add the industry after Zhou - Zhou Recording. You might even be asked to mic up some monkeys for extra $$$. It's great because everyone is familar with the sound "zoo" and it's fun to say.. "kazoo" "zoom" "hay-Zeus" "go to the zoo". It sticks! You also want something that people are compelled to ask about. Zoo recorded your recital??? Yeah Owen Zhou. He did me right!

+1

Don't underestimate the power of branding.
Remember, you can't establish the brand of your company; your audience of clients does that through their interaction with your company name, the image of your logo, your website, your finished product, and all that.

A quick google of opus zero gets a million hits; the first twenty pages are mostly bands called opus zero. I think Zhou is a great base for a company name, and much more original.

Besides an excellent music dept, CU has plenty of design and graphics folk who could help with establishing your company name and image.

[rumleymusic]

I have always been rather bad at branding. I am somewhat out of touch I think. When I came up with Rumley Music and Audio Production, I just wanted a name that explained the general idea of my business. And I know it is rather booring and sterile. People started calling it R-Map for short, and while I hated that, it stuck and I had to embrace it. More people now seem to want to embrace RMAP as a music label than Rumley Music and blah blah for the obvious reasons.

People will give you nicknames and brand you the way they want. (Mickie-dee's or I-Hop anyone?) It is a good idea to catch onto a positive and recognizable branding and capitalize on it.

[Liquid Shadow]

I'm not to use my last name as my brand especially since 99% of the non-Asian folks can't pronounce it correctly. Like I said I'm 100% set on the name I'm not going to change it. There maybe a bunch of other Opus Zeros out there but I came up with it myself without googling.

[sonare]

There are more important things to sort out than the name of your company. Move on to the part about getting the business and making them happy.

Rich

[Liquid Shadow]

Originally Posted by sonare

There are more important things to sort out than the name of your company. Move on to the part about getting the business and making them happy.

Rich

Yes agreed sir. Will get on with it as soon as I'm done studying for these placement tests XD

[iluvatar]

Originally Posted by WVUtubadude

When people were giving me grief for taking business from my school's recording department, that is what I used to rationalize it. What most recording guys are lucky to make in a year is two or three student's tuition at WVU. With 24,000 students and several million in donations and grants, I don't think they are feeling the hurt. Same logic applies at any academic center.

Not only do they have plenty of money, but they're probably exempt from some/all of the taxes that you'd have to pay, so they have another leg up.

-Dan.

[Thomas W. Bethe]

I ran the audio department at the local college for 20 years. We tried to do outstanding recordings of every student's senior and junior recital. The conservatory did over 365 concerts a year but the spring was when most of the concerts were scheduled so sometimes we had as many as 4 concerts a day. All student recitals were done by students who worked with me. They learned their craft well and we had very few problems. Fast forward fifteen years and now they are doing even more recitals. They still have students doing all the recordings for other students but now they charge $60.00 per recital to cover their costs.

I now own my own on location recording, mastering and video post production business and I have been asked to record some of these recitals but the college makes it almost impossible for someone outside to do the recordings because of the way they are scheduled. There is no time to setup or to get levels and no time to tear down afterward. It is not that they are trying to keep outside people out but simply that there are just too many recitals one right after another all in the same hall. The other problem is that if the student forgets to tell the college that we are recording them they still charge the $60.00 for their recording so their costs goes up.

We also do video of concerts but again the time pressure is immense and most times we have barely enough time to get setup and get a white balance, let alone do a practice run through of what will be happening visually in the concert.

Many schools and colleges have their own AV departments and staff them with, as someone has already pointed out, work study students who if they were not working at the AV department would be slinging veggie hash at the cafeteria. These types of students pose no threat to you. If the school has tied their audio department to their course of study in recording arts then you maybe up against some stiffer competition from their students but it sounds like you are a pro and should have no problems doing a MUCH better job.

You have to establish yourself as someone who can do a better job for about the same amount of money or slightly higher. I wish you good luck and hopefully you will be able to work all this out with your move to a new state and hopefully you can get setup in time to start doing recordings in the fall. Your idea of inviting the students to a editing session is probably a good one but most music students I know don't have time to breathe hard let alone spend a couple of hours while you edit their recital.

Best of luck and let us know how it is working out.

[Liquid Shadow]

Thanks for the kind words Tom!

[marvin100]

Your logo is jaggy.

[ghellquist]

My two cents on this.

I get the impression that video is the thing people will ask for more and more. Youtube is the example. And audio using the cameras built-in mic really sucks. Too many examples of that on the net.

So perhaps, in answering the question on how to stay ahead of competion, doing really good audio + decent video might be the answer. Double delivery then, an audio CD + a video with "you-tube" quality might be a real edge over only sound.

Technically I guess a simple camera, not HD, should do it. Point and shoot is probably quite sufficient, no movement or panning. You might elect to pipe sound to the camera from your audio recording equipment or add it later in edit (which has its own problems as the video and audio will firstly not be synched and then slip out of synch as the two systems are not perfectly the same speed ) . It still takes a vidoe editing program but nothing fancy.

Of course there is a temptation to go the full route with HD quality and many cameras, but that is a quite different project.

// Gunnar

[9sbean]

Originally Posted by ghellquist

My two cents on this.

I get the impression that video is the thing people will ask for more and more. Youtube is the example. And audio using the cameras built-in mic really sucks. Too many examples of that on the net.

So perhaps, in answering the question on how to stay ahead of competion, doing really good audio + decent video might be the answer. Double delivery then, an audio CD + a video with "you-tube" quality might be a real edge over only sound.

Technically I guess a simple camera, not HD, should do it. Point and shoot is probably quite sufficient, no movement or panning. You might elect to pipe sound to the camera from your audio recording equipment or add it later in edit (which has its own problems as the video and audio will firstly not be synched and then slip out of synch as the two systems are not perfectly the same speed ) . It still takes a vidoe editing program but nothing fancy.

Of course there is a temptation to go the full route with HD quality and many cameras, but that is a quite different project.

// Gunnar

Agree. 2 years ago, a Sony PMW-EX1 was added to my audio service. Now I compete easily with traditional video guy for they got burden of pricy (years ago) SD video equipments and lacking of good audio. To compete with audio only competitors, HD video is also very convincing.

Multicam is not difficult. But it really takes a good team to do the job. Not only audio engineer and camera men, but also an experience music video director reading the same music score as the conductor does.

[Liquid Shadow]

Originally Posted by ghellquist

My two cents on this.

I get the impression that video is the thing people will ask for more and more. Youtube is the example. And audio using the cameras built-in mic really sucks. Too many examples of that on the net.

So perhaps, in answering the question on how to stay ahead of competion, doing really good audio + decent video might be the answer. Double delivery then, an audio CD + a video with "you-tube" quality might be a real edge over only sound.

Technically I guess a simple camera, not HD, should do it. Point and shoot is probably quite sufficient, no movement or panning. You might elect to pipe sound to the camera from your audio recording equipment or add it later in edit (which has its own problems as the video and audio will firstly not be synched and then slip out of synch as the two systems are not perfectly the same speed ) . It still takes a vidoe editing program but nothing fancy.

Of course there is a temptation to go the full route with HD quality and many cameras, but that is a quite different project.

// Gunnar

I have had people asking me if I do video also, but I never considered doing it. It's going to cost me more money and time to do video, and frankly, I'm just not interested in video. Audio is my passion and I'd rather be exceptional at audio alone than a jack of all trades. What I do offer though for people who have cameras, is give them an audio feed from my interface via the software mixer. Thanks for the thought though.

[hbphotoav]

Originally Posted by Liquid Shadow

I have had people asking me if I do video also, but I never considered doing it. It's going to cost me more money and time to do video, and frankly, I'm just not interested in video. Audio is my passion and I'd rather be exceptional at audio alone than a jack of all trades. What I do offer though for people who have cameras, is give them an audio feed from my interface via the software mixer. Thanks for the thought though.

No reason to not find a qualified partner to help with the video end. Heck... fly me out and back and I'll do a very nice one-man/two-camera HD shoot for a grand. Edit is $110 an hour. You can mark it up as much as you'd like to.

But, seriously, someone with a decent camera, knowledge of how to use it in low light/contrasty light situations, and a capable edit system can add that capability to your business for whatever the market will bear. Yes... they may want half of the gig fee... and they're worth it if they know what they're doing.

HB

[Liquid Shadow]

Originally Posted by hbphotoav

No reason to not find a qualified partner to help with the video end. Heck... fly me out and back and I'll do a very nice one-man/two-camera HD shoot for a grand. Edit is $110 an hour. You can mark it up as much as you'd like to.

But, seriously, someone with a decent camera, knowledge of how to use it in low light/contrasty light situations, and a capable edit system can add that capability to your business for whatever the market will bear. Yes... they may want half of the gig fee... and they're worth it if they know what they're doing.

HB

Yes I am very open to the idea of collaborating with someone who does video. Just need to find the right guy (or girl) for the job.