The DIY concept has been evangelized, refuted, and defended as the way to achieve success in music. No matter what your opinion is regarding the do-it-yourself ethos, there is one thing that should be universally accepted: do-it-yourself doesn’t mean you are a one person machine. Read more.
Building a strong fan base online requires you to create and execute an effective content strategy. Most often, we focus on the idea of engagement, and while there is no doubt that this is a requirement of an effective content strategy, engagement should not be the only focus of your online music marketing and your efforts to achieve your music career goals. Read more.
Marketing your band and your music on the digital landscape, it’s easy to get lost focusing your time and efforts on the wrong sites and connecting with the wrong people. Ideally, you’d take the time and have an opportunity to think through the who, how, what, where, and why so that all of your efforts are connecting you to potential fans and influencers within your niche from the get go. Read more.
It’s easy find an excuse to take a vacation from an otherwise consistent social media presence. Events like a tour or a new album release present opportunities to make you even better at social media marketing. There are several principles of social media marketing that can be found rather naturally from your tour schedule, which can help to give your presence and engagement a nice boost. Read more.
Music success stories don’t happen overnight. To keep you on a long term path towards reaching your goals as a musician, you should have several ways to gauge your progress. I call them key performance indicators (KPIs), and they provide a way to measure your performance and the growth of your music career and music marketing efforts. Read more.
Once you’ve determined the purpose of your ad, the best budget, the target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs – e.g. email list growth, ticket sales), you now need to actually put your online ad together and set it up. The following will help you to navigate this set-up process to ensure the money you spend is worthwhile. Read more.
Focusing on building your community organically is part of a balanced digital PR strategy, but when used effectively, advertising can magnify your existing PR efforts. The reasons for advertising generally fall into two categories: awareness and conversion. Read More.
As an indie, your plan should be to seek out social and digital distribution platforms that will cater best to you and your audience, but there is one platform that still dominates as the go-to for mass music purchasing. This platform is iTunes. As of 2013, iTunes accounted for 66% of all digital music sales. Read more.
In our second social media review, we dive into a few “niche” social media platforms. Though many of them have significantly fewer users than Facebook or Twitter, each can play a critical role in effective branding, marketing, and fan engagement for independent musicians. You could find more engaged followers here than you will on Twitter or YouTube. Read more.
Social media can be a confusing landscape to navigate for anyone, as each platform offers a unique opportunity and experience. We’ve compiled several key stats from recent studies and reports for some of the biggest social media platforms to help make the process of managing your social profiles less overwhelming.
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To be successful you need to compete with the several million musicians worldwide who are online vying for the attention, loyalty, and money of music fans. By focusing on your musical niche, you have the opportunity to explore and create content beyond your music by incorporating your passions and interests into your daily conversation with your fans. Read more.
Your artist brand is whatever approach you take to the aspects of your career that provide definition to your fans and to the market place. Once a brand has been established, even in an organic way, it is important to nurture and uphold that brand through your online presence. After all, with all of the social media clutter and chaos, why not try to make it easier for your dedicated fans to find you and engage with you? Read more.
Social media has become the center of the universe when it comes to music promotion. While Facebook and Twitter typically play prominent roles in an artist’s music marketing strategy, creating a musician blog is often is overlooked. To build a base of long-term fans, it helps to establish a presence online and deliver high-quality content to keep them entertained. Maintaining a musician blog offers four unique opportunities you should consider. Read more.
Introduced as a micro-blogging platform in 2008, Twitter has become the standard for real-time communication between bands and their fans. In this post, we dive into this social media platform, which has enamored so many musicians and confused so many more. Twitter for music promotion can be highly effective, but you need to understand the nuances of the platform first. Read more.
Facebook, the biggest of the social networks, is arguably the most difficult for musicians to navigate and use effectively for music promotion. So let’s break it down and focus on the things you can do to optimize your Facebook band page and make the best use of this platform in your social media marketing. Read more.