The world’s most successful musicians haven’t achieved their fame and fortunes through sheer grit, determination, and talent alone: each and everyone of them have supplemented the raw materials at their disposal by expertly advertising their music.
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Guest post by Victoria Greene
Advertising your music is a case of how, not if. There are a huge number of ways you can get your music out there and it’s important that you select the ones that work best for you.
Below I have run through some of the great ways that you can advertise your music. Read on, decide on the best options for your music, and promote your way to success!
Recommended reading: Finding A Music Publicist You Can Trust
Your music is a business, so go after businesses
You might not want to deal with corporate shoes and hawk your art to soulless companies, but let’s face facts: if you want your music to be more than a hobby you need to treat it like a business, and that means dealing with businesses.
Once you’ve hurdled that moral quandary, you could do no worse than get in touch with a platform like ReverbNation. They exist to connect musicians to brands, publishers, festivals, any companies and organizations that it would be profitable for you to advertise your music to.
Build relationships with representatives from these companies and then negotiate a price with them to advertise your music through their channels; having access to the larger audiences that come from these businesses will make it a worthwhile investment.
Work hard on your mailing list
A well-subscribed mailing list is advertising gold and still the best way to directly reach people who have already expressed an interest in your music.
Research has found that email marketing is as much as 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined, so it’s crucial to keep your mailing list updated and growing all the time. A regular monthly newsletter that lands directly in your fans’ inboxes is one of the most effective ways to advertise your music.
Make your website as beautiful as your music
Each time a visitor comes onto your website you’re advertising your music to them – most people like to learn visually and if you can’t be bothered with how your website looks, it will paint an ugly picture of your music before one of your songs has even been played.
Creating your own images should be the goal you aspire to, as this project's your personality onto your website – you also only have to pay for your own time and won’t have any copyright issues to worry about.
However, if graphic design isn’t your strong point and you have neither the budget not connections to make your own images, the crucial things is you select beautiful ones that you are allowed to use. Using a free stock photography site will allow you to select from a library of available professional looking images, which will enable you to make your website look beautiful and help encourage your visitors to become fans.
Social media advertising is not dead
Creating and uploading regular content to your social media accounts is a given, but you can’t stop there; Facebook has changed the way that its news feed operates, meaning that brand posting will be seen after content uploaded by a user’s friends/family, or posts that have paid advertising behind them.
If you’re asking “why should that bother me?” This is why: if you want to extend the reach of your music beyond your existing social media followers, you’ll have to hope that they share posts about you to their friends and family. This means if you want to proactively advertise your music to a wider pool you’ll need to pay to play.
Facebook ads allow you to reach thousands of potential fans on a reasonably small budget. An effective ad campaign allows you to reach out directly to a targeted group of people, selecting who sees your advert by location, age, interests and more.
If you’re advertising to potential fans rather than current ones, you can target them by musical genre, as they will be interested in listening to styles of music that they already enjoy; you don’t want to waste your time advertising your hip hop stylings to acoustic rock fans. Start with a small daily budget and experiment with your ads. Facebook allows you to track how well each ad is doing so you can hone them to peak efficiency.
Seek help from influencers
Your own social media accounts are an invaluable advertising channel for your music, but just how valuable would the accounts be of an individual with thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers be? Very valuable.
Influencer marketing is a staple tool of advertising and it’s one you should be using to bring your music to a wider audience. The question you need to answer is whether the best way to do this is through a macro influencer or a micro influencer.
- A macro influencer is someone with 100,000 followers
- A micro influencer is an individual with 10,000-100,000
While using a macro influencer will give you access to a larger audience to advertise your music to, a micro influencer is likely to have a more engaged audience. A sensible tactic would be to seek out a few macro influencers with a fan base who would be receptive to your music.
There are plenty of tools available to help you find the right influencer to advertise your brand. Or, you can put in the hard graft and do your own research, then approach influencers directly.
Using these methods will allow you to establish an online presence, target fans old and new and create an engaged fan base. Advertising online gives you to reach a much larger audience than you could hope to offline, giving many more people access to your music.
Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares tips on ecommerce and how companies can improve the way they represent their brand. She is passionate about using her experience to help brands improve their reach.
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