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Now that you’ve made your songs available on every digital platform, and have also been active on every popular social media channel, what are your planned strategies to promote your music?
One of the most popular questions asked by independent musicians is how do I promote my music? Yes, you’ve created good music, now how do you get that music to the ears of your potential listeners?
There’s a lot more that goes into creating and releasing music than just making it accessible on every digital platform and also posting some social media posts. You need to understand online marketing strategies to promote your music.
In this article, I’ll share with you the best strategies to promote your music online to increase your listeners and fan base.
Identify Your Target Audience Or Niche
If you want to get your music to the right audience and maximize your promotion efforts, one of the strategies to promote your music is to identify your target audience.
Most musicians think by identifying their target audience or niche means whenever they post new music on Instagram, they need to use a hashtag. The fact is, this won’t work if you haven’t built a following around that niche.
This isn’t so much of a strategy to promote your music but is a fundamental step you should take to maximize your efforts in creating your music and successfully getting it to people who want to listen to your kind of songs.
Identifying your target audience and finding your niche will help you get your music to people who find your sound delightful. Here’s a detailed article on music niche marketing and how to identify your target audience.
Make A Plan And Start A Campaign
Now that you have your fundamentals in place and you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to make a plan and start a campaign. To take advantage of the strategies to promote your music, you need to have a plan and strategy in place for a campaign.
To create the campaign, you need to identify what the goal is, then go on to create a list of tasks, schedule all your action steps, and put together all the assets you would need to execute the campaign. Be more intentional with your efforts so you’ll get the best result from the campaign. Hence, follow the campaign plan to the later to maximize your efforts.
Provide Value
In marketing, you often have to give more than you receive first to build relationships. This is a method termed by Gary Vee as “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right hook” or “Give, Give, Give, Ask”.
Most times when independent musicians don’t get their desired results from their music promotion and marketing, it’s usually because they are asking before they give which in turn makes them seem like one who doesn’t provide value. The music industry involves building relationships as most people who do not know you before or have never heard your music will ask themselves “what’s in it for me?” If they have to do anything for you concerning the success of your music.
In music and music marketing, you need to create entertaining content that gets your potential listener’s attention so they can follow you up and want to continue listening to you. This is where offering free music or creating entertaining social media content comes into play. This is one of the important strategies to promote your music to new listeners.
In this new age and society, it’s become quite easy to create ads in an entertaining, educating, and inspiring way. You can leverage this to create your content by providing these aforementioned values to attract new listeners.
Share Your Story
Social media is a very powerful tool when it comes to engaging strangers and getting them to listen to you. All you need is a compelling story that grabs your audience’s attention, spreads the word about you, and keeps the engagement rolling in. You can share your story in different ways and channels, depending on which one works great for you.
This is one of the effective strategies to promote your music because you’ll be leveraging the audience’s emotions and capitalizing on the psychology. You can document your journey and share your experience in music so your audience can see you grow from an upcoming artist to an A-list artist.
While using this as one of your strategies to promote your music, be genuine. Don’t be one of those “fake it till you make it” artists because it doesn’t end up going well for them. There’s value in genuity and it could be what defines your brand as a musician.
If you’re able to share your story in a good way, you can go on to use this strategy as one of the strategies to promote your music and watch your followers and potential fans feel more emotionally invested in your journey. Your music will be able to promote itself because your story is relevant. People want to listen to an underdog story of someone who’s giving their all to make it, you should take advantage of this.
Live performance
This is one of the traditional strategies to promote your music. Although not every music artist loves to be a performing artist, you’d be missing out on a very important income stream and exposure platform in the present music ecosystem. It’s an opportunity to network and meet other music artists, promoters, producers, and content creators that may one day be very helpful to your brand.
As an emerging artist, live performance isn’t a scalable medium for music promotion but it’s more effective when you use it as one of the strategies to promote your music, build more relationships, and increase your network. The most favorable opportunity when it comes to live performance is if you open up a concert for a more established artist. To get to that level, you can try out many other things like open mics, talent shows, and local community events.
If you don’t intend to do live performances for exposure and music promotion, you should do it for the experience if you’re aiming to become a full-time musician.
Social Media Ads
Although this may be an expensive channel to promote your music if you can afford it, do it. Paying for social media ads can be a quick way to get your music out to other listeners in different demographics who love your music. This is one of the effective strategies to promote your music if it doesn’t go beyond your budget.
You can pay influencers to market your music, run a retweet campaign, etc. but make sure whatever you’re paying for is organic and not some bot or follow for follow campaign. Make sure the channel is one that will lead new listeners to your music.
TikTok is a very influential tool in this aspect. You can pay TikTok influencers to create a TikTok challenge with your music. This will lead tons of audience to your music as others will use your music for the challenge and in turn increase your streams.
You can also use tools like Facebook and Instagram ads to promote your music. Although there’s a learning curve to be able to use these tools effectively, you will get the hang of it and see quick results in a short period of time.
Compelling Video Contents
In today’s culture, video content is a key medium to promote your music as an independent artist. You need more than pictures to promote a song on social media successfully hence, invest in creating video content. This content doesn’t have to be a full music video, it could be a short video or a short animation video.
Focus on creating compelling and engaging video content that revolves around your brand and your music. They can be educating, entertaining, and inspirational video content. In fact, they can be skits, you just need to know how to intertwine the content into your brand.
If you understand the science of social transmission that fuels word of mouth, you’ll understand that video content is much more engaging than using photos to promote your music. So make sure you have this as one of your strategies to promote your music.
It’s not news that you have to spend money on videos because if there’s anything you have to spend money on when it comes to music promotion, it’s videos and social media ads.
Activate Word Of Mouth
Referrals and word of mouth are very effective strategies to promote your music. Having others promote your music by leveraging word of mouth is one of the very effective strategies to promote your music. People will rather listen to music suggested to them by their friends than you promoting your music directly to them.
Now the important question is, how do you get people to talk about you and your music? Here’s the short answer- you need to make great, quality music that people want to share with others.
Pitch your music to music blogs and playlist curators
Pitching your new songs or projects to music blogs and playlists is one of the effective strategies to promote your music. Although compared to social media ads pitching to music blogs and playlists isn’t more effective, it’s still a very effective strategy to promote your music.
The reason is that doing this isn’t easy as it may require you to contact a third party, like a publicist who has connections or strong relationships with bloggers, and playlisters. In terms of cost-effectiveness, using a publicist isn’t the most cost-effective strategy to promote your music as an independent musician because a good publicist is quite expensive and very selective with who they work with.
To beat the cost, you can reach out directly to small blogs and music curators through a site like SubmitHub. I’ve also lessened the burden on you by compiling a list of top 15 African music blogs you can pitch your songs to.
Conclusion
Applying these strategies to promote your music should help you achieve your music promotion goal and desired result. But you have to apply these strategies by using the ones that best suites your marketing plans and goals. These 9 strategies to promote your music may not yield immediate results but your patience and consistency will surely help you achieve the goal so adhere to the rules as stated and go on to sit back and watch your listeners and fan base grow gradually.
