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In this article, I’ll be explaining three terms for a clear understanding of Music Niche Marketing; niche, niche marketing, and a niche market.
A niche is basically a small specialized segment of a larger body, more like a focus area in a large industry.
Niche marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on a unique target market. Instead of marketing to everyone who could benefit from a product or service, this strategy focuses on one group, that is, a demographics of customers who would most benefit from the product
According to Wikipedia’s definition, a niche market (target market) is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. It is a segment of a larger market that can be defined by its own unique needs, preferences, or identity that makes it different from the market at large.
A niche market could stand apart from others because of geographic areas, demographics, psychographics, needs, profession, lifestyle, habits, and culture.
Let’s take a simple example that puts the three terms in action but isn’t exactly music-related.
Within the market for women’s fashion, there are so many different segments; there’s lingerie, shoes, hair, jewelry, makeup, and clothing. Women’s fashion as a whole is absolutely enormous. But for someone who wants to go into the business would pick a niche, say he decides to open a jewelry store where he sells only gold jewelry. In this case, he has chosen a niche, which is jewelry, and niched down even more by selling just gold jewelry, specifically for women. He begins to advertise; put up banners and flyers, run radio ads, and so on (Niche Marketing) to attract working-class and older women whom he knows can afford his kind of products, who are in this case, his target market.
Let’s head back to music. Of course in the music industry, there are so many different music genres out there that appeal to different sets of audiences. You as a music artist, have your own style of music which you create and the audiences have their style of music which they listen and vibe to.
One part of creating a successful music career is identifying your target market and within that, your ideal fans. This is the group you should direct your music, your message, and your promotions towards. Hence you’ll need the knowledge of Music Niche Marketing to target your music to these audiences.
What is Music Niche Marketing?
Music Niche Marketing is a marketing strategy that helps musicians focus all of their marketing strategies on their niches or the kind of music they produce and the certain audiences that listen to their kind of songs.
This type of marketing strategy allows musicians to get the most of their marketing campaigns as the campaigns are relayed to the target audience within the musician’s niche, thereby focusing on those who listen to their type of music more.
Music Niche marketing helps musicians get more from their marketing campaigns, at a lower cost, with more assurance of conversion as this is the aim of any marketing strategy. Targeting a larger audience, without niching down the marketing campaigns could lead to more cost, and lower the campaign’s conversion rate. This is why it’s advisable for musicians to adopt Music Niche Marketing in their marketing strategies for a better conversion rate.
Although not all musicians understand how music niche marketing works as they expect their publicity team to understand everything that has to do with marketing, it’s required that the musicians understand what’s happening with their publicity hence, at least minimal knowledge of music niche marketing is needed for the musician.
Should Musicians focus on a music niche so as to aid their music niche marketing strategy?
Why Focusing On a Music Niche Works Better
One very important thing to understand while understanding your music Niche and aiming for a successful Music Niche Marketing campaign is that your music wouldn’t appeal to everyone, trying to market to everyone would be baseless and would yield a low return on investment (ROI).
To save yourself time, effort and money, you need to focus on a group that will be receptive to your music and are willing to build a strong relationship with you. Hence, the introduction of music niche marketing.
You should also note that building an audience of followers is always better than marketing to just sell your music. As an emerging artist, you need fans. Not passive fans, but fans who consistently engage with your music, fans that are willing to support you and spend on you, your super fans.
“You can either be a small fish in a large pond or a big fish in a small pond”. The large market is already dominated by big, billboard topping artists, and going for that large market would mean competing with them, I guess you already know how difficult that can be. Instead, you pick out a niche and dominate in that market. This creates ease for you while trying to create your Music Niche Marketing strategies.
Tips To Help You Choose Your Niche As A Music Artist
Follow your passion
It is the passion that got you and me to this point and it is one of the things that will get you to the top. Do not produce music and content because you feel that is what people will like. Instead, find the right audience for the kind of music you create.
By focusing on a specific niche, you have the opportunity to explore and create content beyond your music by getting other passions of yours involved thereby making Music Niche Marketing easier for you. With this, you can consistently provide content that appeals to your fans which evokes the same emotional response they get from your music.
Understand your music
If you wish to sell your music and have a successful Music Niche Marketing campaign, you have to first understand it. To identify your niche market, you have to, first of all, define what your music is about then find the target market for your music.
Think about the specific sound and the genre into which your music fits.
One way of living this is researching your competition, that is, artists who sound like you. Study and observe them. Find out how they describe their music, the set of audience who are most interested in them, find out strategies used by these artists to connect with their fanbase.
This not only helps you clearly define your sound but also your target market. Find your voice and stick with it.
Tips to Growing Your Digital Presence With Music Niche Marketing.
Understand Your Target Market
To get the best out of Music Niche Marketing, you’ll need to narrow in on your ideal fans, then you will be golden in marketing; once you have chosen your niche you should validate that it is a reasonable idea if it is a lucrative niche.
Use competitive analysis to see find artists in the same niche space as you, find out who follows them. This can be easily achieved using social media, websites, streaming sites, etc.
Pay attention to their demographics and psychographics
Demographics; a population-based on factors such as race, age, sex, employment, income, marriage rates, Location.
Psychographics; psychographics attributes such as personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle.
Luckily there are tools you can use to carry out such research, for example, the Facebook insights tool. This might not give you all you are looking for, but it is a great place to start. The front gives you an insight into the lifestyle and interests of its users.
You can find users based on demographics, and psychographics. One thing about this is, you can use it to find out what other topics your ideal audiences are interested in outside of music which you can use to target them even more, maybe by using a killer content strategy.
Locate The Platforms Your Fans Use
If you do have a product for sale, it is only logical you go to the place where you’ll find people who are interested or need your products, to advertise them. Same as your music, after all, your music is your product and you are a brand.
Doing this research is actually easy; you can take the available platforms and go through their user demographics. These statistics are readily made available for free. Take for instance, if your target market falls within the age range of 18-25 you should be thinking TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
Create a Solid Digital Strategy.
In the online world, there’s no successful campaign without a strategy. You should have a plan of action designed to promote and sell you and your music effectively. What platforms have you chosen to promote your music and grow your online presence on? Which features does each of these platforms have which you can use as an effective marketing tool? What types of content thrive on each platform and what content strategy are you adopting to grow your online person with? What brand image are you going for? How well can you promote on each platform organically and inorganically? How do you optimize your profile on each platform to boost your reach?
To learn more about creating a successful music promotion campaign, you can check out this article.
With all these carefully thought through and penned down, you can come up with a game plan that will help you achieve a successful Music Niche Marketing campaign.
