5 Basic Truths of Music Marketing That Every Musician Needs to Understand

When you’re trying to promote your music career, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the routine. You stick with what you know.

But, there are certain steps that you need to take in order to gain fans and earn recognition – including the use of music marketing.

Music marketing is something that most musicians realize they need, but don’t know how to use. You might think that posting on social media each day is enough. Unfortunately, that won’t help you attract the audience that you want. You need more reach, which requires more marketing.

If you don’t think that marketing is an essential part of becoming a successful musician, then take a moment to review these basic truths of music marketing. These are truths that every musician needs to understand.

#1 – Anyone Can Learn to Market Their Own Music

Music marketing doesn’t require a special degree or previous experience. Anyone can get started. You just need an effective marketing plan. There may be some costs involved, but these can be minimal when you’re first starting out.

Mainly, you need to treat your career like a business. Think of your music as a product and your fans are the customers. You then need to find the most efficient way of targeting your market and getting them to buy your product.

This is typically achieved through a combination of social media marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, content creation, and sales funnels.

The internet is full of knowledge. A quick search will provide you with all the resources that you need to learn more about marketing. Look for articles related to digital marketing for businesses. For example, you can watch YouTube videos on online marketing for businesses:

Apply the techniques that you learn to your music career. Generally, if it works for a business, it can be adapted to work for a musician.

#2 – Music Marketing Helps Increase Brand Recognition

Marketing is all about brand recognition. When a business creates an advertisement, they know that most consumers aren’t going to rush out and purchase their product instantly.

But, with repetition, they will grow to recognize the brand, so that when they see the product on a shelf at the store, they’ll know to buy it. And, the more people that they can reach, the more people will buy their product.

This applies to your music. You are trying to increase your brand recognition. You want to increase exposure while attracting more customers.

#3 – You Will Need to Interact with Your Target Audience

Social media has helped businesses connect with their customers. When someone has a complaint about a product, they are more likely to post a comment on social media than to call a customer service department.

If a business ignores these comments, they’ll lose customers. Not only will they lose the angry customer, they’ll lose any business that the customer would have brought through word-of-mouth advertising.

So, you need to interact with your target audience on social media. When you start gaining more followers, you’ll notice that more people respond to your tweets and Facebook or Instagram posts.

While some of these comments won’t require a response, you should respond as often as possible – especially when a fan has a specific question that merits a response.

Don’t leave people hanging on social media. Check your social media feeds at least twice per day. You should check it in the morning, while getting ready, and then again in the early afternoon. If you can respond within 12 hours of less, people will be more appreciative of your responses.

#4 – You Need to Do More Than Promote Your Own Music

Marketing is about more than just self-promotion. You won’t get anywhere if you just share posts related to your own music.

Again, look at the top businesses. A lot of them share posts related to interesting topics or news in their industry. They mix a little bit of product promotion throughout the day. But, for every promotional post that they release, there are generally a couple non-promotional posts.

Use this method with your social media posts. Share stuff that you think your fans will like. You might discover a new song that you want to share or find a new restaurant down the street that you think local fans will enjoy.

Share this stuff and occasionally post about your music. You’ll find yourself retain more of your existing followers. It also gives followers more insight into your interests and personality.

#5 – You Need to Remain Consistent

You can’t disappear from the internet for months at a time and expect to retain your followers. If you don’t remain consistent, you’ll have trouble keeping your numbers up. So, create a schedule for your social media posting and email newsletters and then stick to your schedule.

Generally, you’ll want to post at least once per day, during the weekdays. With email, you may want to release one newsletter per month, to keep people updated, and then send occasional emails as needed to inform your subscribers about last-minute events or new music releases.

Basically, you need music marketing. And, you don’t need a manager to get started. These are steps that you can perform on your own. Music marketing begins with the creation of a website and social media profiles.

From there, you just need to keep on posting and sharing. You’ll eventually see your numbers start to grow. It typically starts slowly and then begins to snowball as your follower count increases.

Good luck out there and remember to search online for business marketing tips and then apply their suggestions to your music marketing plan.

 

 

 

Source: ArtistPR Music Marketing