When it comes to music, or if you are from the music industry, you must be familiar with the fact that music marketing requires the same kind of strategies and tactics that promoting any other kind of product or service does.
People who come from the music industry are those who are passionate about music. Therefore, they must carry out their music marketing also with the same amount of passion, or else it won’t work.
The concept of music marketing has become more popular in recent years when many youngsters are showing up with an enthusiasm to become a musician. Before discussing some interesting music marketing tips, let’s define what exactly music marketing campaigns are, and why they are important for everyone who belongs to the music industry.
What is Music Marketing?
Music marketing is the process of marketing, promoting, and advertising your music. It is really as simple as that. If you are a musician, you would need to apply some marketing strategies to put your music out there to the world so that more and more people can know about it and listen to it.
These days, there is even music marketing 101 courses available online, which teach you the best ways to market your music and sell it in different ways to those who have the kind of taste in music as yours.
Since so many individuals make music nowadays, nobody might even be able to discover your music if you do not run music marketing campaigns. Nobody can come across your music and admire it if you don’t know how to put your music out there or make it available for people to listen to.
It is the same as it is with podcasts. A person may start recording podcasts, but he or she will not have any listeners unless they tell the world that they write and record podcasts. The process always begins with telling your close friends and peers about your passion, but soon you have to go beyond in your marketing efforts than just telling the people whom you personally know. You have to let the mass audiences know about your podcasts or music. You have to let people decide if they really like your music or not. You have to take the risk of allowing the general public to give their honest feedback about your music.
Why Do You Need to Market Your Music?
The music industry has become extremely competitive due to the increase in the number of rising stars who create and promote their own music. Musical instruments have become easy to learn and use as many of them have become digitized. You can now even create complete tunes by practicing and testing on an application, rather than having to buy a musical instrument for it. You can use trial and error techniques in your music marketing process, to brainstorm and edit your musical tunes before you come up with the perfect one.
Here are 3 specific reasons why you need to run music marketing campaigns.
1. It Can Create the Demand For Your Music
Music is a very creative art. It is not something that would have a demand in the market first that you would try to fulfill by making music. It is something that needs to be created first, and then its demand will also arise. In other words, music marketing helps you to unleash your creativity and create a demand for your music.
Musicians know that they are quite ahead of an average person in creating new tunes and making new kinds of music. In fact, they want to create the kind of music that their audience has never heard before. If they are always on the lookout to come up with entirely new kinds of music, how can they expect the demand for their music to already exist in the market? They know that they will have to create this demand, and if they are confident about the quality of their music, they know that their music marketing process will not be so difficult.
2. It Helps You Determine the Best Channels for Music Distribution
Once you start doing your music marketing, you find out about the kinds of market segments that are the most interested in listening to the kind of music you make. This in turn will be useful for you to decide where and how to distribute your music. In the long run, you might even come up with the idea of organizing an event, such as a concert, to further your music marketing efforts.
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You would obviously distribute your music in areas and into customer segments that enjoy listening to your music the most. Just like promoting any other product, the segments that place a higher value on your music will be willing to pay you a higher price for it. Areas or market segments where your music is not much admired might still buy your music but at a relatively lower price.
3. It Allows You to Fine-Tune Your Music Making Goals
Making music as a passion is one thing. But once you start moving in the direction of trying to make money out of your music, you might find yourself getting more and more conscious about your musical skills. This is why many musicians are happier when they first start their career in music but slowly begin to steep down in their creativity when they are in it for the money.
When you want to make money from your music, you have to consider other people’s choices in music as well. This reduces your level of creativity, and in some cases, might reduce your confidence as well. To avoid this from happening, you can use music marketing to just test the demand for your kind of music before actually launching it. Once you know if people like your music or not, you can fine-tune your music-making goals.
7 Effective Tips to Create a Music Marketing Plan
Here are 7 music marketing tips that you can apply to make your music effectively known to the world.
1. Build a Music Website
It goes without saying that for promoting any business or service, or even a passion, the best way is to first build a website for it that can serve as the main platform for its promotion. Building a website is not such a complicated process these days. You can use our website building platform called Strikingly, where we have several ready-to-use templates for creating a music website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Promote Your Music Website
Now that you have a platform where you can build or compile your music portfolio, the next step for your music marketing is to promote this website. You might need to use several tactics for this as part of your music marketing 101.
- Work on your site’s SEO.
- Regularly update the information on your site.
- Tell your friends and peers about your website.
- Open venues on your site for commuting with its visitors.
3. Do Social Media Marketing
When it’s about promoting anything or influencing the audience about a brand, passion, or service, social media can simply not be ignored. People these days spend a lot of their time on social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Therefore, it is almost necessary to use social media for your music marketing.
Therefore, if you want your music to be known, don’t forget to create social media pages and/or channels for it, where you can keep uploading your latest musical tunes and rhythms to let the audience listen to them. It is also easy for people to comment on your music on social media because everyone is familiar with the templates and mechanisms of the famous social media platforms.
You can even make short clips of your music and post them as Instagram stories. On YouTube, you can post long trailer videos with a combination of your most favorite musical tunes.
The next step would be to integrate social media with your website. This can be done by inserting the feed from one or more of your social media accounts into your landing page.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Build Interactive and Interesting Content to Boost Your Music Marketing
Even if your passion is on the musical side, you cannot escape from doing some writing to promote your music. Music marketing campaigns also involve a lot of copywriting for the sake of conveying to your audience what your music is about. You need to be able to convey to your listeners where your music is coming from, and why you create the type of music that you do. They need to feel touched and inspired by your background, your story, and your angle of creating your type of music. Only then they will feel inspired to start listening to it.
Once you have good content for your music marketing, you can post it on your website, on your social media pages, and also on blogs through guest posting. If you have a better aptitude for writing or are willing to hire a professional content writer, you can even start your own blog and publish articles on it.
If your website is built on Strikingly, you can add a blog section to your site.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
This is how you implement effective music marketing campaigns. If you are confused about where to start from, we suggest the first thing you do is create an account with us on Strikingly. The process to build a website on our platform is quite self-explanatory. Once you have a good-looking landing page to talk about your passion for music, everything else will begin to feel easy.
We wish you all the good luck in your pursuit of a career or passion in the field of music!
