Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
Welcome to another fabulous Monday and a tip about marketing… This is one I put into effect a number of years ago before I had an ink jet printer that could print directly onto discs. At the time, and even now, I find that providing any music tracks to the sound men that I work with on ships works best if I just hand them a CD. I used to carry Mini Discs and CDs and these days I sometimes plug my iPod directly into the sound board, but CDs are still the norm when it comes to playing back music during a show. Though I could just grab any CDR and burn the music to such a disc, there’s something a bit more classy about handing over a disc that ‘looks’ like it belongs to my show. There’s just something more professional about it. Having a custom designed disc label or the ability to print your image/logo onto a disc is the way to go and is one of those little details that people notice and remember.
Around the time when the decision came that I wanted a custom disc label was also about the time that promo was going from VHS to DVD (man I am dating myself no aren’t I???). At the time I was working with a designer on revamping the look of the promo I was sending out and one of the things we came up with was a design for a cbg disc label. I’ve never done such huge mailings of DVDs that I ever went to the extent of replicating my promo DVD, instead I simply burned the discs as I needed them, so having a custom label made seemed like the way to go. I went to a shop in the Vancouver area that specializes in blank media and they were able to take the disc label and apply it to both DVD discs and CDs. Each disc is labeled with either a DVD logo or a CD logo so I can keep them straight and I end up using these discs for burning a lot more than just Promotional DVDs and Show Music CDs…
Say someone needs some High Res Photos – I grab a CD and burn the images on a Disc. If I shoot a bunch of pictures at someone’s show I throw them on a disc and hand them over… So much of our world these days is based in the digital world that being able to copy information onto a disc and give it away comes up often enough that using this space as a platform for promotion only makes sense.
Especially as ink jet printers that can print directly onto blank discs have come down in price so much these days, theres almost no excuse for not coming up with a design that looks good, sells you and what you do and makes people remember you and your show then slapping it on what ever disc you end up handing to people. It’s just one more way to leave a positive impression and have a way for people to remember you and stay connected.
