Table of Contents
A Musician’s Guide To Content Marketing
Music artists need as many marketing techniques as they can lay their hands on to effectively get their music to reach a large specified set of audiences. Hence, why I’ve channeled this article to be a musician’s guide to content marketing.
The need for effective music marketing and promotion is becoming more important each day because of the amount of competition you have in the online world.
Both indie and signed music artists are taking their music online for effective promotion, with this amount of competition, you’d have to work harder and put in more effort in coming up with strategies to get the spotlight on you.
There are so many of these strategies, both organic and inorganic that yield good results, but content marketing would be the best strategy to market your music, grow your fanbase and make more money through your music.
Content marketing is the right strategy for music artists and almost all music artists are using this with or without being aware of it. But to get it right, you should have good knowledge about it and create a solid strategy to make it a powerful marketing tool in the palm of your hands.
This musician’s guide to content marketing will take you through the basics of content marketing, help you understand how content marketing works and how you can use this powerful marketing concept with your music promotion plans
What is Content Marketing?
Simply put, content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing online materials such as videos, blogs, and social media posts which is intended to stimulate interest.
Content marketing is a strategic approach to promote your music where you create and share valuable and interesting content to attract and retain a new audience or connect with an existing audience.
The content can be in whatever form you want. Text on your website, media players playing your song, videos on YouTube, pictures, and videos on Instagram, whichever you choose.
The idea behind the content is to lure your fans into your world and make them yearn to hear from you. Instead of spamming your audience with loads of sales pitch asking them to buy your album, sharing valuable content that really connects with your audience will naturally make your fans want to preorder and buy your album without you even asking.
Why Content Marketing is Important for Musicians
Content is really important for you as a musician because it gives your fans a reason to keep coming back to find out what you’re going to do next and build a stronger relationship with you.
Valuable content helps create awareness about you and your music and sinks memory of you into your fans’ subconscious.
Content marketing can be a great avenue to drive massive traffic to your website. With blog posts on your site with maybe simple ‘how to’ guides relating to the music industry, fans and aspiring artists will always have a reason to be on your website.
This works best when you have a search engine fully optimized website. With your SEO in order, you’d rank higher for related search queries and searchers eventually click on your page, and just like that, they find out about you.
The beautiful thing about content marketing is that it is absolutely free; you just have to invest your time, creativity, and initiative to get good returns.
Take for example; you’ve been recording a new album and while doing it, you let your fans in on the process showing them videos of short studio cuts on YouTube, making videos explaining what motivated you while writing each of the songs, the inspiration for the album as a whole, why you picked the name you picked and all, things about the album that will really connect with them.
By doing all these, you slowly begin to create buzz around the album even before it is released. People begin to anticipate the album and might even preorder it and when it drops, you’ll see fans rushing in to buy it.
This of course seems more logical than just appearing out of the blue, announcing an album you released, and asking the audience to buy it. Obviously, the audience would go for the one they have in a way formed some kind of sentimental and intimate bond with.
Due to these reasons, I’ve culled out steps in this musician’s guide to content marketing to help you create a successful content marketing strategy.
Creating a Content Strategy
Content marketing is long-term and the key to success is creating a well-planned and thought-out content strategy. You don’t just come up and post any type of content for the sake of posting.
A good content strategy involves defining your goals, understanding your target audience, choosing the type of content you would be creating, creating a solid content calendar, preparing & scheduling your posts in advance.
Defining Your Goals
The first step to creating a successful content marketing strategy in this musician’s guide to content marketing is to define the goals you want to achieve with content marketing.
The audience you target and the type of content you create all depend on your goals, what you are trying to achieve using content. You should know exactly what you want for your music career and how you can use online platforms to achieve those goals.
Understanding Your Target Audience
The next step to creating a successful content marketing strategy in this musician’s guide to content marketing is to understand your target audience.
Understanding your target audience, as previously discussed in this article, is very important because you’d have to create the type of content they like.
Do they prefer videos or texts? What would they like to see on their social media feed, entertaining or educative content?
This sets the tone for your content creation process and also the basis on which you choose a particular platform for your online music presence.
Studying a set of audiences has been made very easy these days with the analytic tools these platforms are providing their users to help businesses thrive in the digital world.
With an analytics tool, you get details on followers’ demographics such as age, gender, and location. Beyond, you can use polls and surveys to learn more about your fanbase.
Once these are all penned down, you then decide the kind of content you want to create and come up with a posting schedule to help be consistent.
Choosing a Type of Content
As the aim of this musician’s guide to content marketing is to create a successful content marketing strategy for musicians, choosing a content type is an essential step to creating the perfect content for your audience.
The idea is to take your fans along your music journey; you should connect with your fans on a personal level. It is about creating an environment with a feel like you are all in it together, like you actually really do care about them.
There are three categories of content that thrive in the online world – educative content, entertaining content, and documentation. It is of course right to mix things up a little but keep it within what your fans would enjoy.
There are a lot of contents out there you could pick out from. I’ve listed a few below;
- Using engaging videos; videos are usually the most engaging kind of content. You could create ‘how to’ videos using loom, for the music industry. You can create webinars teaching song-writing techniques or just answering frequently asked questions in the music industry.
- Use images and infographics; images are a great way to let fans in on your day-to-day life. Let them know what you’re doing, where you’re going, where you’ve been, how you spend your day, what you do for fun. Just let them in on your personal life in general.
Infographics are an interesting way to deliver great educative content to your audience e.g. how to play an instrument. It uses icons, images, and illustrations which make them more relatable and inviting if well designed.
- Create contests and offer incentives; hosting competitions and giveaways is a great way to drag massive attention and create awareness about you, even create buzz around your new music.
If what you offer as a reward or an incentive is good enough, definitely, you’ll see people rushing in. It is advisable to do this once in a while.
- Writing blog articles; one of the best ways to use content marketing is to run a blog. This blog can essentially be about anything music-related. Guides and entertainment articles generally thrive on blogs.
There are so much more examples of content out there you can try out but the essential examples of content have been stated above in this musician’s guide to content marketing.
Creating a Content Calendar
What’s a musician’s guide to content marketing without explaining how musicians can plan their content calendar?
When you decide the kinds of content you want to create, it is time to get into action. You need to plan a content calendar which you would be consistent. Are you getting content out there every day or four times a week? Map out a long-term calendar that will serve you in the long run. what types of content should go out on Monday? What time should they be posted?
Your contents should be prepared and scheduled in advance. A lot of online platforms offer tools to their users to do this.
Call-To-Action
In marketing, call-to-action is basically asking or directing your fans on the next step to take, like asking your viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel, links to stream your music, links to preorder your album, vote on a merch design, etc. Every content you upload on the internet should have a relevant call to action.
