So make a budget and invest in your campaign. There can be exceptions to that rule, however. Most businesses expect to lose money for a year or two before making a profit. These losses are often factored into business plans from the start, and can be considered customer acquisition costs, brand awareness costs, etc. This helps you optimize your marketing more quickly. Once your campaign is out of the testing phase, you can determine whether you want to spend the rest of your budget quickly for a critical mass, or whether you want to allocate the rest of the budget over a longer period as a kind of maintenance spend.
We live in an age where we are being marketed to every day, whether through social media, email, SMS text message, etc.
Think of your marketing as a way to either tell the story of your music, or to confirm something about your audience that they feel is essential to their identity. Test different approaches. For your first impression, get in, get your message across and get out.
If you linger too long before getting to the point, your audience will just scroll on by without seeing your message. So even if the call-to-action comes a little bit later, something compelling has got to happen right away. It has to be intriguing enough that we want do the next thing: unmute the sound, click the button, keep watching, etc. With emails, make them personal, but try not to write a novel. There could be other interests and topics that overlap with your music as well.
Keep testing, keep learning! Platforms like Facebook continually learn about your audience as you run more campaigns. Want them to watch your livestream or buy tickets? The exception to this is first-touch audiences people who are totally new to your music on a social platform. No CTAs or links. Just good content delivered to the right people. In marketing speak, remarketing is the process of putting the right sequential messages in front of a defined audience based on their previous actions.
Eventually this journey leads your audience from introduction to lifelong fan, from cold to lukewarm to warm to hot. You work your way slowly towards the vinyl offer, the t-shirt of the month club, the VIP tickets. One of the best ways to track that audience behavior is with the Facebook pixel. Stay in front of them! Or that makes them them speaking about your fans. Check out our DIY Podcast episode about branding for musicians to learn how to effectively identify and sell your brand.
You should also download our free Music Marketing guide for some ideas on how to align your marketing efforts and your artist story. It feels like your ego is on the line. So before you launch a music marketing campaign, have an idea of what the next step will be in the weeks or months that follow. Yes, you still need a website in Having an official artist website is an indispensable part of your marketing efforts for the following reasons:. But perhaps most crucial for your marketing efforts, you can put remarketing code such as the Facebook pixel on your site!
This provides a great window into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and helps you build retargeting audiences. With your own website you can drive traffic to a squeeze page. You remove options, hide the top navigation, delete the footer, avoid other links. The visitor either takes the action you want, or they hit the back button. You remove barriers by removing choices.
One common use for squeeze pages in the digital music space is to create a bridge between your chosen ad platform and Spotify. Well, you could. But to limit bots and junk traffic, you would first send ad traffic to the squeeze page on your website.
This page would have ONE option — to stream the music on Spotify. Yes, that ultimately means less overall traffic to Spotify. But given the extra step, the action demonstrates greater intent. The button clicks on your squeeze page would be tracked as conversions , helping Facebook learn more about your true fans, and thus sharing your ad content with more and more qualified members of your target audience.
Email is a major component of marketing. And some studies are showing that email marketing is more effective than ever. Just about everyone has an email address, far more than even people who have social media accounts. Plus, we all check our emails just about every day, and studies have shown consumers prefer to be marketed to through email than any other advertising avenues.
What do you actually write? He says the first thing you want to do is increase open rates in your emails. Next you need to know what the benefit is to the reader. Couple your button with a compelling CTA to really increase clicks. Email automation is the process of setting up your email system so that your email content takes your fans on a journey from a subscriber to a fan.
Automating your emails is a way to work smarter, not harder with your audience communication. For more, listen to our podcast episode about 30 emails to automate your fan list.
You also know text messaging and marketing via text is a delicate balancing act. Text messaging feels much more personal than email. Your phone is yours , a device you carry everywhere with you and check more often than email. It might sound obvious, but the first step to promoting your song on the various streaming platforms is by actually distributing said song to those platforms. CD Baby is the best in the biz at getting your music everywhere you need for maximum exposure. And the really cool thing is that distributing music is in many ways its own form of promotion.
The first big step to promoting your music on streaming platforms is verifying your artist profile on the platforms that allow it.
Everything you do as an artist on the streaming platforms stems from verifying your profiles. The main advantage to verifying your artist profiles is that you can customize your branding and appearance. This is also its own kind of promotion because a personalized and professional-looking artist profile will attract more listeners. If you look at two artist profiles without ever having heard a song from either artist, and one has a fully verified profile with a professional artist photo and other features fleshed out on their profile, and the other one just has a generic picture of their latest release and no confirmed verification, whose music are you going to check out?
How you present your music has an impact on how and if people hear your music. Explicitly spell out your messaging to your audience; tell them what they need to do when you release a new song. Not everyone knows all the inner-workings of streaming platforms. And not every fan understands the positive impact their actions can have on your music.
The streaming platforms value quality engagement. Essentially, as they monitor listener behavior, they want to know that people actually care about your music when they listen. As such, your overall stream count is less important than the percentage of people who saved or playlisted your song, listened to the whole thing, listened again, etc.
Whenever you look at your streaming stats, you should remember quality is more important than quantity. When listeners behave in a way that suggests they ENJOY your music, platforms such as Spotify and Pandora are more likely to recommend your music to new audiences.
Most of this basic promotional heavy lifting is done through algorithmic playlists , of which there are two powerhouses:. The more people who enjoy a new release early on, the more Spotify will serve that music up on more algorithmic playlists.
You can build anticipation and encourage follows by creating a Social Unlock campaign with Show. Social Unlocks incentivize your audience to follow, save, pre-save, or stream you on Spotify in exchange for special content like:. So if you have a new metal, hip-hop, jazz, or whatever song due soon, getting it on a major playlist curated by experts of all things heavy, rhyming or outright cool is a great way to introduce your tune to a wider audience.
Spotify calls this feature a pre-save and Apple Music calls it a pre-add. Which brings us to…. To help build traction on Spotify for your new music, you can run a pre-save campaign. All CD Baby artists get free access to Show.
Actions Shares. No notes for slide. Links to new releases and where to purchase them is made much easier for artists to publicise. Now running for the full 24 hours and being watched my an estimated 1. Various magazines, includingTop Of The Pops, have designated pages for the advertisement of new music, where, for a fee, artists can advertise for their newest releases or upcoming tours.
Comparatively, nowadays very few people still buy magazines and read them, so there is therefore a much more limited audience which will see the advert and meaning that magazine marketing is arguably not the most successful when compared to other methods of marketing, such as Youtube.
With every minute more than hours of video are uploaded with an estimated 49 hours of such being music based. Total views 1, On Slideshare 0. From embeds 0. Number of embeds Downloads 9. Shares 0. Comments 0. Likes 0.
You just clipped your first slide! Clipping is a handy way to collect important slides you want to go back to later. Now customize the name of a clipboard to store your clips. Visibility Others can see my Clipboard. I'd suggest a healthy mix between both online and offline music promotion.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Making good music alone isn't enough to make you a well known and paid musician. People won't find out about you simply by you being able to make music, you need to do everything you can to get your music out there. Using other people's established platforms is one of the best ways to do this, and one of the fastest routes to success as a musician.
You can either find these places yourself, or you can pay someone to do it for you. The company I linked to not only make it super easy for you, but they also charge a very affordable rate for independent musicians with no long-term commitments.
Whatever you decide to do, whether it's your own music marketing or having someone else do it for you, make sure it gets done so the world can hear your music. Remember though, none of what you've learned will matter if you don't know how to get your music out there and earn from it. Want to learn how to do that? Even in the smaller genres there will be a lot of competition for you, each musician fighting for their moment to get heard.
Do you pay attention to news and world events? If so, your attention on the media could actually be benefiting your music career. Not in a sleazy, manipulative kind of way, but more in a relevant, timely and….
As you probably know, many of the tools that are freely available to independent musicians are online. On top of that, an increasing number of people find out about new music online through browsing or recommendations. It therefore makes sense that you create a strong online presence for you and your music. Many of the guides here on Music Industry How To are based around free ways to promote your music.
That said, if you have a budget behind you, even a small one, there are ways you can use that to push your music career forward faster. There are lots of services and companies ready to…. In that guide we looked at why you need to start building a mailing list for yourself as a musician, and how you can get started on doing that asap.
I want to be a musician but I lack the confidence to post the songs anywhere. My name is Jan, I want to be a rapper but the difficult thing is to market myself. So Shaun, all record label wants musicians who are known and have fans? Great advise Shaun. But my question is, how do you market yourself when you are actually opening a new path.
This is what is happening to me. I dont seen to fit in a concrete market and yet I could fit somehow in many of them although not totally. I have read your information with great interest.
I am 87 years old and sing songs which I know the older age group like. I will send you my demo CD and relative information if you are interested. Good luck with promoting it. I really like the guides that you provide. Ok, so i just wrote my first song what should the next step be? Hi Logyhn. That depends, are you trying to get known as a musician? If so, you now need to promote your music. I really like this guide, thank you so very much!
Or could we possibly get into record label with our original music? Hi Nadeshiko-san. Good luck whatever you decide to do.
Thanks man………. They said they liked it alot. Soon i am also performing in front of a very large crowd….. I also want to have my music on tv channes and radio. Can you suggest me what should i do to do it and promote my music further? Skip to content. Previous Previous. Next Continue.
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