How to Sell Musical Instruments, with Adam McHeffey
- Eric Doades
- 19 hours ago
- 23 min read
”Create a flurry of content. But do not put $10,000 aside for a celebrity to come in and talk about your brand. I want you to go after thirty smaller creators with followings between ten and thirty thousand.”
Today we hear from Adam McHeffey, the former CMO of Artiphon and current Chief Creative Officer at Rock Paper Scissors to discuss effective strategies for marketing musical instruments. Key points include the significance of IRL networking, the importance of strategic planning, and the role of traditional PR. Adam also provides some very clear step-by-step marketing strategies. This episode is a must for anyone looking to launch a new product or musical instrument.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
Dmitri: [00:00:00] Hey, you heard this week's guest, Adam McKee on last week's episode where he interviewed three really interesting independent artists who released of their music on social media platforms. It was part of this online events. We do our seismic activity, and Adam helped us bring together some great, folks there.
But I thought it would be fun to immediately have Adam on the podcast to share some of his expertise on how to market and sell. Musical instruments. Adam recently left the pioneering musical instrument company, Artiphon, where he was CMO for seven years. There he was known for his highly creative videos and content nurturing a large international community of creators and launching several new musical instruments.
Now Adam's the Chief creative Officer here at Rock Paper Scissors, and I thought it would be fun to dig in with Adam to help you launch your next instrument or product, or may, maybe even your first one. You've been on the podcast before. Welcome back Adam McVey. I.
Adam: Thank you so much, Dimitri. It is a pleasure to be back on the podcast. I just wanna say anybody listening out there. I am so [00:01:00] excited about this podcast. We are gonna get really specific with how to sell a musical instrument. If you have a musical instrument in your head or in prototype, or you're getting ready to start manufacturing, this is gonna be a really helpful resource for you.
I'm gonna give away a lot of my, uh, my insider secrets. A couple things that have worked for me, and although we're mostly talking about hardware, physical. Instruments that you play. I do hope that some of these lessons are helpful for anybody launching an app or even a or e, even a B2B software service.
I think what we're really talking about here is getting people excited, making sure you're capturing demand in an efficient way and launching your business. I really think it's an exciting time to be launching something, especially a creative tool, and we're here to help with that.
Dmitri: Out of the gate, he's ready to help. Adam McKee is on the mic and we can always do another one if we wanna talk about software and apps and B2B, I think. But yeah, I think you're right. Some of these [00:02:00] things apply across the board. Alright, let's dive in. If you're marketing a brand new musical instrument right now, what would be the first thing you do from a brand perspective?
Adam: I'll tell you what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to start posting without a strategy. Some sketches and some prototypes. Just let's be really careful because first impressions matter a lot. If you have a name, you like, grab the URLs. Great. If you have a name you like. Grab the Instagram account, grab the TikTok.
Make sure you have that, but then just wait on it. While you're in this moment where you're planning and you're strategizing, it is a great time to go network in your industry. Find your local music tech meetups. There's a great one in New York. There's a great one in Portland. That's where Dmitri is.
That's where I am. They're all over the country. It is a great time to get out there. We have a, a full list of just every single trade and, music business show that we attend, and we go to [00:03:00] start making some plans just to really get yourself out there and networking one-on-one. With people and I really want to get into the specifics here around what we're gonna do to begin capturing interest.
But before you do any of that, we just, we really need to make sure that we have a strategy in place. I don't want you to come outta the gates too early.
Dmitri: You know, I love what you're saying, Adam, because nowadays you can start a company and invent something from anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. And so it's really important to realize there are people out there who can help you, who you can collaborate with ways to get your. vet your ideas, hone in on things and so forth.
So I love, especially in this post pandemic world, the first thing you say is get offline. and go and meet people and talk to 'em. I love it. But let's get really practical here. What's the order of operations? Once you have your URLs, your kind of honing, your, your concept, maybe you, you've, already figured out exactly what the product is.
You've started to build out the audience. What are the top three to [00:04:00] four components of a marketing strategy?
Adam: you to start just by getting your schedule really crisp. And this might change, but grab a piece of paper and write down a handful of milestones. Start as far back, far away as you can go. When do you think you could conceivably have your product? In hand. Maybe it's a year from now. Write that down as a potential launch date.
And we promised we'd get specific. You wanna be strategic there. The summer is not a great time to launch a musical instrument. People are traveling. Spring and fall are great times to launch an instrument. Holidays are risky because people are. Shopping for gifts. So there's a lot of money moving around.
People are in a spendy mood, but if you're not delivering during the holidays, then that's really tricky. I love Labor Day. We're gonna see a lot of new products come out this Labor Day in 2025. We saw a ton come out around that same holiday last year, so be really strategic with that. And now let's work backwards.
One other step. When are you [00:05:00] going to launch it online? That's different than having it in hand and delivering it, and you really want to be clear about that date as well. And you have one additional marketing moment, which is when you're, when are you going to unveil your brand? And all three of these need to be treated really carefully.
And ideally you're doing all of that within the same 365 days. It's not always possible. Some people build a pipe for years around a product. I would say if you have a couple of months between each of those milestones, that's plenty of time to build up hype. the next thing I wanna talk about is once you have that schedule in place, what specifically.
Are you going to do? There are a lot of ways to get in front of an audience. These are my four favorites for going after a musical instrument crowd. The first one is email and SMS, and I'm gonna bundle those together because most platforms handle both these days. The second is your organic socials and the content [00:06:00] that drives that forward.
Three is artist engagement, working with creators. I don't like to use the word influencer. I call them artists or creators. We could talk more about that later. And four is paid advertising. And I put that forth very deliberately because I don't want you spending money on advertising until we've really set up a good foundation with the other three.
Dmitri: Got it. So first off is to really set some benchmark dates or milestones of when. At the very least when you're gonna launch the product. Maybe you go a little earlier, a couple of months before that when you're gonna launch the brand, but several other kind of milestones that you're planning to achieve before you just dive into marketing.
Makes total sense. And then,you've mentioned these four kind of buckets of ways to gain traction. So let's, let's talk about those, let's go through each of those and, tell us like, what do we need to know? Is there a top tip? Are there common pitfalls? I think you, you started with email and SMS.
Adam: So let's start with email and SMS. [00:07:00] It's not too early to get this going. Start a free MailChimp account, or there are so many good ones out there and. As you travel to these shows, as you network in your industry, start grabbing people's emails just one by one. And I think a really great first goal is to have a hundred emails on your list.
It's doable just through baseline networking, organic. You can get to a hundred emails pretty quickly. have a QR code on your phone. As you're at these events, have people scan it, grab their email, everybody will be so happy to do that for you. It's such a simple way to support. So that's how I recommend people get started once you get a little bit more advanced.
a common pitfall that I see people have really not gotten used to segmentation, and that is so important. Especially in the early days of launching a business, you're gonna talk to those first hundred people very differently than you're gonna talk to your D two C customers a year from now. [00:08:00] So do what you can to stay organized with all of that. I think the second one I mentioned was content and organic socials. I really want you to have a solid plan in place before you get started on this 'cause we don't wanna make a handful of videos and then get too busy and fall off. I want. You to think about what is truly compelling about your product, your instrument to you?
What do you love about it? What excites you? And then teach that to your audience. You should not be doing any selling on your Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube account in the first 30, 60, 90 days. You need to find a community that's interested in modular synthesis or educating children on music or whatever makes your product special.
Start talking about that. I would say the most common pitfall there. People feel that they need to post every single day and they really just don't. That is a complete myth. The my most viral [00:09:00] successes I've had recently have had nothing to do with posting schedule or time of day, or even frequency. It's just getting it right.
It's just getting it right and making something that we all loved. Then I talked about, artists and creator engagement. When you start and even after you're well established, I want you to go small. Do not chase a big celebrity. Out the gate, you're welcome to email them and you may find that you, that one or two of them are huge fans of the brand.
But do not put $10,000 aside for a celebrity to come in and talk about your brand. I want you to go after 30 smaller creators with followings between 10 and 30,000 followers. again, I'm trying to be really specific here, Dmitri, because this is what I've seen. Work when you're trying to create a flurry of content upfront, I feel like I, I gave you the pitfall and the top tip there all, all at the same time.
and then, uh, [00:10:00] for ads, wait on this until you have something that people can take action on. So if we're gonna launch a crowdfund. We can actually start a couple of weeks ahead of the crowdfund and we can start to drive signups saying be one of the first that's worth spending money on. But we don't just wanna boost content for the likes, the views, the shares this early in the game.
We wanna save our money for where we can really make sure that we're capitalizing on that early interest.
Dmitri: is there a kind of like an intersection between these things? Like you mentioned the real importance of collecting email and phone numbers at the very beginning, and then at the end you said, don't use adjective to boost posts, but for calls to action can, does it make sense to have. like a newsletter or a waiting list or something like that has a signup on your website.
And then to boost that with ads.
Adam: Yeah, you certainly can. I just don't want you to start that too early. I would prefer [00:11:00] that you're building an audience that is really passionate about what you're doing that is super interested in that newsletter. And when we start paying for ads, we are immediately going after a different behavioral segment.
Meta and the other advertising tools, they're going to target a behavior and for the most part we're looking for leads to later drive conversions or conversions right off the bat, and it's just going to serve us much better. When we have a landing page where we're explaining a little bit more about the product, where people can do a pre-order or at least show their intent to place a pre-order, and really, we're not gonna kick ads up and start paying for them until our pre-order campaign, whether it's a crowdfund or you're doing it on your own site, is live.
And that's where we're really gonna start to boost it.
Dmitri: You know, in a way, what I think I'm hearing you say is you really [00:12:00] have to be. have confirmation qualitatively through these social interactions, both in person and online, that you have product market fit, that you have a musical instrument that has a community that people are interested in.
and, adding the, the fuel to the fire of paid advertising is basically kind of like throwing money away too early if you don't have that confirmation that people are just signing up 'cause they love you or they love your video, or they love your instrument, or they love your invention.
Adam: What you're going to learn through the content that you make, through the networking that you're doing is you're gonna be surprised. Who is interested in what you're doing? We work with a company called Blip Blocks and absolutely a fantastic company and they make the only synthesizers that are safety certified for children three and up. So we figured we would make content that shows a lot of kids. I have kids, I use them [00:13:00] in, in our content. we've gone to a number of schools and kids do love the product. Kids genuinely love the product, but when we show children in our paid advertising, it doesn't work well. This is something that we had to learn.
And what we found after serving our customers is. There are a lot of people that love these products that don't have kids, and I feel like they had to kinda weave their way through our advertising and their socials to decide that it was something that they liked. Whereas if we made content that spoke to maybe an older audience. That would resonate right away. And we wouldn't know that unless we tested multiple things with multiple markets. And because of that, we're better off and we were able to make all of our advertising more efficient. So you have to learn and unlearn and test a lot of different things upfront.
And we don't want to be spending thousands of dollars on ads until we have really good hypotheses there.
Dmitri: So you've helped explain a lot of things that, work and some [00:14:00] things, some pitfalls as well.
But things are constantly changing with social media algorithms, with influencer brand relationships, paid ads. What's working right now that a lot of marketers don't even know about yet.
Adam: Community first content is winning. The brands seeing the best results are shifting away from super polished, high budget influencer partnership, and they are investing in community driven creators. I am encouraging all of the brands that we work with to double down on an influencer that works really well. Yeah, as opposed to trying to do three micro influencers, I'd rather you do three videos with one person that you feel like really matches your community, and now you've got a real brand ambassador on your hands. Customers need to be reminded maybe seven times that you exist, what the name of the brand is, what the name of the product is, [00:15:00] and so it makes sense to do multiple videos with the same creator. On the subject of community, there are some brands out there that are driving their community in a really effective way, and it is absolutely helping to keep revenue up.
I see brands starting Discord channels, and I know it sounds easy to do. It's not. It takes daily moderating and posting, but we now have musical instrument companies. That have discords with thousands of people in them, and we have these users coming into the discord to ask for advice just on general production stuff, things that don't even refer back to the company.
They just now have this trusted community and it's all under the brand umbrella. So I think all of that is really great. I would also say that. Right now brands are still so heavily reliant on meta advertising, and it [00:16:00] is a great time. To take some risks on other platforms. For instance, Reddit's tools just got really, really good for advertising, and I just learned this recently.
Dmitri, 40% of accounts on Reddit don't have a meta account. So as marketers we all just lean on meta so hard because for years. That's what's worked best. But engagement is way down on that platform. And you have these other platforms bubbling up with, increasingly sophisticated advertising tools and I really encourage you to, to play around with that.
I. If you are on Reddit or on Discord yourself as a user, you'll know what I'm talking about here. Think about that, what platforms are you on because I bet if you are in the business of making musical instruments, you already are a part of some of these communities. So really think about that and go to advertise in the [00:17:00] watering holes that you go to yourself.
Don't just automatically default to meta because your ads agency is telling you to do so.
Dmitri: I love that. I know when I'm researching a musical instrument or an interface or how, effects or whatever, Reddit always comes up. Even if you're searching on Google, Reddit's, the thing that comes up where you're like, oh, I actually have like. Solid information from somebody who literally just went through this same process with me.
It's real people, it's very, now it's very relevant. Um, so that's, that's, super helpful. Alright. Listen Adam, we have to take a quick break and when we come back I wanna ask you about what's coming next. I mean, you've always told me that it's not about learning one skill and then just doing it over and over again, but you really have to be, aware of how things are shifting.
We'll be right back.
Okay, we're back, Adam, and based on everything that you've been talking about so far in the interview, I'm curious what do you think is coming next in terms of effective marketing strategies? you've got us the foundations and the basics and up to the present.
Where do you think things will go, the next couple of years?
Adam: [00:18:00] It is true that what worked six months ago won't necessarily work today, and you constantly need to adapt and try new things. I'm gonna answer the question in two parts. I'm gonna give you a. Organic old fashioned dancer. And then I want to give you a future, a futuristic answer as well.
Dmitri: All
Adam: Okay. So my, my organic answer is that it's gonna go back to basics. I think we're gonna see a resurgence of in real life events and community meetups and real experiences. Dmitri, I, I moderated a panel last week. You were there and we had Alejandro Lombardi. Professionally known as the frenetic. He is this online beat maker who has done deals with a Kai and Adidas, and he places NPC and finger drums like you wouldn't believe.
Just a super talented finger drummer. And he reminded me of the importance of just showing up to in person [00:19:00] events and. When you go to NAM or CES or Music Tectonics, or any of these meetups, you see it pretty quickly. And when you go to those events. In addition to everything you're doing on the digital side, it all just clicks together.
You begin to create this perfect storm that's really hard to replace. So in, in a world where we're always worried about tracking and frequency and oversaturation and budgets, just get out of your house. Just please shut your computer and get out there and show somebody your instrument.
Call a customer. So I'm a very old fashioned. Marketer the future side, I think that we're gonna see some really exciting things. I think personalization is coming through in an extremely big way. If you're not already putting high first name in your email, you're way behind because that's simple optimization of [00:20:00] calling people by their first name.
It'll increase your open rates, it'll increase your click-through rates. It's just, it's been proven enough times. Take that and multiply it 10 x and I think that the amount of personalization that we'll be able to do. as we bring people into our funnels, as we bring people into our websites, is really going to make the entire internet this wonderful, customized, personalized experience, and we're gonna be able to give people experiences that really meet them where they're at and make them feel like they're right at home.
We're gonna be bridging the personal touch on a tech enabled scale.
Dmitri: that's super interesting. it's like,the things you talked about at the beginning of the interview around segmentation, like thinking about segmentation early was like the first version of personalization, but now you're saying it'll get even more and more specific to each, not only audience, but individuals, so that you can both track on what the individuals.
Problems are challenges and identify the solutions you can [00:21:00] offer that are very specific to their use case, which is awesome. Speaking of being personal, I wanna talk a little bit about what's happening with you and your career in the sense that you went from being the CMO at Arton to now representing many brands at Rock Paper Scissors as the chief creative officer here, I'm curious, Adam, what are you most excited about now that you're able to break out of marketing a single brand to working with a a wider variety?
Adam: first of all, I'm having a blast at Artiphon. The brand was minimal. Everything had to be clean and sleek. we brought blip blocks on as a client, I talked about them a little bit before. They make these synthesizers safety certified for children. Everything got super colorful. We're playing with pinks and purples and blues.
We're playing with lighting and we're just having fun. It is all about the sheer fun of play. Yeah, we have a, another client called Eternal Research. They make the Demon Box, which is this triangular instrument that you play using electromagnetic frequencies. [00:22:00] And if you don't know what I'm talking about, please go check out Eternal Research 'cause it is a brand doing some really interesting things and you'll quickly see that brand has a very different tone of voice, EV.
Dmitri: It's like the opposite of
Adam: opposite of Blip Blocks and I play them both, you know, every hour. I'm context switching between the two, but that's exactly what I love. Demon Box is dark and moody and there's so much emphasis and importance. Put on that look and feel and maintaining it. The products do to radically different things, and for me, being able to slip into that voice is really fun.
I, I actually feel like I can play all of these instruments. They're all completely different. I play them equally well. I, they're not different in my head. I just have fun with them and I create something interesting. But then when we go to market it, you can bet that when we're casting talent, it is a radically different pool.
of actors and actresses that were, that we're pulling from. So to me [00:23:00] that is Workplace Nirvana, being able to slip in and out of these different brands and also understanding their business challenges. One business might have an issue with,without giving specifics here, one, one brand might have an issue with just getting in front of more people.
They just simply need to get in front of more people. But we know if we can do that, people love it. And another product might have. Difficulty explaining how you play it. Maybe it looks cool and everybody wants it, but then you take it outta the box and it's a little bit difficult to play. That was certainly the case at Artiphon, and we really invested in great onboarding videos that we made ourselves.
We invested in having creators make their own versions of those same videos so that we knew that our customers would have a great experience even after. They took the product out of the box and started playing. So all of these businesses have such different challenges and I love understanding that and coming up with [00:24:00] strategies to help solve them.
Dmitri: Yeah, I like watching you in action on these variety of brands. you had, you dialed in so much on Artiphon, like you're kind of a, legend in the musical instrument world and the marketing world in music tech because No, 'cause you really dialed in like. This, the c, the community component, the social, and creator component where you were creating original videos, playing stuff yourself.
I loved seeing you on stage with a, with an orba, where you would just, you were like, just right out of the gate getting the whole audience involved. And, and I know you've done it with kids and at libraries and all that kind of stuff. and so you really had it like dialed in. You had a, you had like an artisan brand.
presence that was, you know, whether it was digital or in person. But now you get to take all those honed skills and like apply them to a lot of different companies and a lot of different use cases. And it's really fun to see you pick up an instrument and be like, how's this work? And you start playing it and then all of a sudden you start explaining it and then you start saying things and the, and the founders are like, [00:25:00] that's exactly what I meant.
Or like, that's, I never thought of that. Or, it's just, it's a real inter it's fun to see you in
Adam: if you're, if you're in marketing, if you're marketing a musical instrument for a company and it's an instrument that you did not help design or build. please. The first thing you should do is learn the instrument. Watch every video they send you. Read every PDF they send you and become the expert on it.
Write out questions, write out feedback, and this is music we're talking about. So I treat it with, a level of great import. Learn. Learn the instrument, learn how to play it, and you will be a much better marketer for knowing those ins and outs.
Dmitri: All right. this is fun talking a little bit about your engagement and one of the reasons I love, having you on the team at Rock Paper Scissors now is because you were a client of ours as well, and I get a lot of insights into, you know, what it was like for you to hire us and what the experience was on the pr, the earned media side.
So I wanna ask you, how does all of this marketing stuff that we've been talking about align with PR, with Earned media?[00:26:00]
Adam: Even if you do everything we've talked about so far and you have great organic content and you've got a few artists and your email list is growing, there are very few replacements for traditional PR and, and what I mean by that is the trust and the authority that you get from Time Magazine. TechCrunch and Gadget.
I'm mostly talking about the musical instrument space right now. So those are some important ones, but I'm thinking about Sound on Sound and Music. Radar. Music Ally, these have all been critical for the success that I've had with my musical instrument companies. They add validity to everything you're doing, especially if it's your first.
Product. There are also two different press moments when you're launching your instrument. One is you're launching your brand, you've got your imagery, you're launching your pre-order. That's a marketing moment, but then I want you to make sure that you're. [00:27:00] You're thinking about the press when you have your units ready to go as well, because that's really a second moment where you're sending it to a reviewer for a hands-on review and they're actually gonna give it a score.
That is another critical moment that you can capitalize on. And then once we start talking about Q4 and gift guides for the holidays. These publications are critically important. This is how you will really start to multiply your business by getting in a few of these gift guides in October, November, and really just the first week of December.
This is such an important moment and. These outlets, these types of outlets are so important for reminding shoppers that you exist when they're in their buying mindset. Musical instruments do extremely well in Q4 'cause they make a great gift because people want a gift, [00:28:00] something that is intellectually stimulating.
Some, especially if you have a product that's screen free, that's a whole angle that you could be playing with right now, you will be able to get in gift guides. It certainly helps to know somebody in the industry of pr. let me give one really fun example that I think is very relevant to 2025. If you go on a chat, GBT and you ask it a question about Artiphon, for instance, let's use another specific example.
I'm gonna guarantee you that it's gonna be pulling information from. Our reviews in TechCrunch and End Gadget and all of these other A-list press outlets. So when we talk about optimizing chat, GPT for search, media and these outlets play a massive, massive role because they rank so much higher on the internet than your own website or a forum or one of the smaller blogs.
So it, it [00:29:00] really is important and very relevant today. To driving your business forward.
Dmitri: I mean, even at Rock Paper, scissors, we're hearing more and more people who approach us about our services. Hey, where'd you find out about us? Oh, I asked Chad GPT, and I know it's from the past 20 years of. Content developments and SEO and press, press, we've created, press that we've gotten and so, so forth as well.
So, yeah. appreciate that. and it's funny, I don't know if you said this is on your mind right now, but I think you've just helped us develop a new download, a new kind of white paper that's at the rock paper scissors.biz website if you go to resources called your Guide to Gift Guides.
People who are listening to this can actually get a little, information about what the strategy is for gift guides, what it takes to build the momentum, to go from smaller press to bigger press, how to plan for lead time. the importance of telling stories year round. And my favorite part about it is it actually has a really beautiful calendar sharing.
[00:30:00] When are you supposed to start, doing PR for Father's Day gift guides or Mother's Day gift guides or summer vacations or back to school, but. I do know that the winter holidays, the Christmas Hanukkah, winter celebration stuff that time's now. go ahead and check that out@rockpaperscissor.biz in the resources page as well.
hey, this has been super fun, Adam. I think you've provided a lot of stuff. In fact, maybe you've provided almost too much for somebody who's like diving in.
Adam: of that back.
Dmitri: Yeah. So someone's listening right now. Maybe they've gathered all that information. Let's, let's give them one last bit of, advice or encouragement before we sign off for today.
Adam: you don't have to do it all at once, and you don't have to do it all perfectly. Just if I said one thing today that you said to yourself, oh, that makes a lot of sense to me. That sounds like something I could do. I could go to that event that I keep getting emailed about, or I think I could, work with some of these creators that I know.
Start there. Start small. The tools are gonna keep [00:31:00] changing. The trends will come and go. Agencies will come up and go away. But if you are serving real people in real ways, if you are making content that is genuinely trying to help and educate people, and in every email you send, you're trying to build real connection with people and you really believe in what you're doing, you will always be ahead of the curve.
Dmitri: Nice. Awesome. Adam, this has been great. I, there's some things that came up here that I think we're gonna have to dive into on future episodes. you, we didn't, we barely talked about Kickstarter and crowdfunding. You mentioned it a couple times. I know you have been extremely successful there, so we'll have to do an episode about that sometime.
We got touch the tip of the iceberg on working with, social creators, people in music that make videos that have audiences and communities that brands wanna work with. I think we could go deeper on that at some point. There's so many other possibilities there. I'm just excited to have you at Rock Paper Scissors.
and, uh, super [00:32:00] excited to see how we continue to help brands with. This cross service, support around all the marketing services and the earned media. it's a blast. I'm having a blast with you and thanks so much for coming on the
Adam: Thank you Dmitri.
Let us know what you think! Tweet @MusicTectonics, find us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.