Wow, what a busy year! Throughout 2021, GigSalad was fortunate enough to see a full recovery from the dips and losses of 2020. During that time, our team grew and our product improved in many ways. Read on for a full run-down of product updates to see what you might have missed. And get a preview of our vision for 2022. 🤩
In this update:
- Customizable lead preferences
- Specific locations settings
- Suggested categories
- More notification options
- Lead-viewing improvements
- Search results filtering
- YouTube “Shorts” support
- Monthly Top Performer reports
- Behind-the-scenes improvements
- Our vision for 2022
Set your lead preferences
There’s a new section within the Edit PromoKit part of your control panel titled Lead Preferences. This is where you control your location, travel distance, and categories – all things that play a significant role in which leads you receive. In addition to that, there are two new settings for further lead filtering.
Performance length: Set a minimum and maximum performance length to prevent leads for events that are too short or too long.
Advance lead notice: Set a minimum and maximum lead notice to prevent leads for last-minute gigs or events too far in the future.
Both settings are customizable per every category you are listed in.
📘 Read more about lead preferences in our Help Center.
Specify an address for your location
We now ask for a more specific location for your profile. Having an address, rather than just a city, helps us to better calculate travel distances for potential gigs. This setting utilizes an auto-complete feature that makes it easy to find and choose the right address for your act or business.
The address provided will only be used internally for more accurate travel info. Your profile will continue to display only your city and state to the public.
🔮 This is the first of multiple planned improvements to location settings and travel calculations.
See a handful of suggested categories
Categories are an extremely important feature for getting exposure on GigSalad. With a paid membership, you can list yourself in up to 20 categories (including your main category). But finding the right ones can sometimes be tricky. To save you some time, there will now be a list of suggested categories on the Additional Categories page in your control panel. Just review and click “add” to any that fit your services. The suggestions are curated based on categories that are similar or somehow related to the Main Category you’ve chosen.
Choose your own reminders & alerts
In the past when a lead remained unopened, we sent a total of four reminder emails. After testing the effectiveness of those emails, we opted to tweak the frequency and give you full control over which reminders you want to receive.
By default, we will now send you three lead reminder emails: 4 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours after a lead is received it. If you’d like to adjust which emails you receive, you can do that through the Notifications settings in your Account.
You can also opt out of receiving other activity alerts such as new reviews, viewed quotes, or status updates for events.
View your lead details with ease
Leads are the lifeblood of the site, so we are always looking for ways to make it easier to view and manage them. One significant improvement we made was adding a lead preview to the top of the mobile lead/message thread page. This includes a “View event info” link that will show you all the event details without having to scroll down.
We also added the category requested to the lead previews in your inbox to help you better differentiate between each client and their event needs.
💬 How can we make your lead management better? Send us your feedback.
More reasons to stay on top of your calendar
We tested and launched a new filtering option on search results last year that allows clients to choose the date of their event, which then filters out any profiles that have that date marked as unavailable on their calendar.
Unavailability is the number one reason leads get declined. Keep your calendar updated so you receive the best leads possible! Here are a few ways to get started:
- Set your General Availability to add your weekly/prescheduled gigging times.
- Sync an External Calendar to add events from your Google or iCloud calendars.
- Add Recurring Events to block leads for multiple dates at once.
📅 Explore all the things you can do with the GigSalad calendar in our Help Center.
Add YouTube “Shorts” to your profile
YouTube launched a beta version of a new feature called YouTube Shorts that lets users create and share short-form videos up to 60 seconds long. These videos are now also supported on GigSalad profiles! If you’ve been creating Shorts for your followers, you can add those videos to your profile the same way you would any other YouTube video.
These short-form videos are a great tool to be using. You can show off your service in a more succinct way, which is appealing to many event planners who want to keep their browsing to a minimum.
Check your Top Performer status
At the start of each month, a portion of our members will receive a Top Performer update with their stats from that month’s assessment. You’ll get an email if:
- You made Top Performer!
- You were just one criterion away from making Top Performer.
If you do not receive an email within the first week of the month, you’ve either opted out of our monthly report emails, or you were two or more criteria away from earning the status.
⭐ You can keep an eye on your Top Performer status at any time in your control panel.
Take a look behind the curtain
A lot of time was spent in 2021 working behind-the-scenes to improve various systems and the overall performance of the site. Many of these things are invisible to the user but are important to note because they are vital to our and your success.
Significant database upgrade
This is the most unseen change, but also the most important. This upgrade made the site faster and ensured we have the latest capabilities for building new features.
Countless SEO improvements
SEO is ever-changing and always a focus of our product and marketing team. We spent a lot of 2021 working with experts to test and implement various changes that we hope will further boost our site in search results.
Reworked quote request process
Despite looking identical to before, we entirely rebuilt the internals of the form that clients use when requesting quotes. It now loads more than 10x faster and when we tested it we saw a significant increase in requests. The revitalized quote request process will also be easier for us to improve upon further, which is part of our plans for 2022.
Our vision for 2022!
This is gonna be a big year, we just know it! We started making moves in the last half of 2021 that will pave the way for big things to come in 2022.
Here’s a sneak preview of 3 of our biggest initiatives:
Category-specific quote requests
Lead quality is always a priority, and this year we’re going to tackle one of our bigger projects to date. In order to provide better leads, we want to get more fine-grained information from clients about what exactly they are looking for. This means asking more category-specific questions, and possibly collecting more information from our members as well.
Memberships
We’ve had a “one-size-fits-some” approach to memberships and pricing since the start, but there are a lot of different people, businesses, and success levels on our site. We are working with a third party to help us better understand our client base as a whole and ultimately discover the best way to serve them – whether that means pricing, structure, and/or feature changes.
Branding
We did some testing and research last year to determine how users felt about our overall brand – is it warm, inviting, trustworthy? From that feedback, we are now building out some new branding options to test with more users. The hope is that we’ll come up with a new iteration of our brand and site design which evokes positive feelings and ultimately increases activity to get more gigs for our members.
There are many more items, both big and small, on our roadmap that we look forward to sharing later as we tackle them. The list will also grow as we continue our research and testing throughout the year. As always, we couldn’t do it without you. Your feedback and support are invaluable. Please, never hesitate to share your thoughts with us. Here’s to a successful new year! ❤
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Heather is the Content Manager and a GigSalad veteran of 15+ years. She loves helping event planners create unforgettable celebrations and talent make a living doing what they love. When not at work, she enjoys reading romance and fantasy books, bingeing TV shows, playing board games, and spending time with friends.