Useful information for bands, individuals, and brands looking to boost their performance.
Most of this should be pretty obvious, but if you wanted me to spell it out for you here we go. Marketing is all about making people aware of your brand, and then presenting an opportunity to purchase and support you as an artist, brand, individual, whatever. A lot of marketers look at ROI or Return on Investment. Lets just start with saying the best investment you can make is yourself. You are your own best employee, and looking at yourself as a complete package and filling in the gaps of your behavior is the first step to achieving success.
Social Media
This is a huge one. You need a more or less constant stream of updates, photos, videos and user interaction these days. Don’t be discouraged, improve your content and provide a meaningful experience for your viewers and your fame is sure to grow. Nowadays, you have the same tools as the big-kids in LA or NY on top of the world. The people that manage those stars realize that they started from the bottom too, and they want to see at least an effort to keep up with social media. It sucks, but what sucks even more is someone else controlling that. Its not that important what the content is about as long as its you and what you do on facebook, twitter, youtube. All of that. If you want some privacy make up a fake name. (Just Kidding)
Providing an Opportunity for Fans to purchase something
You have to have something for sale or nobodies gonna buy it. You can’t give your music away for free forever. Nobody gets signed like that. The record labels will want to know how many “units” your moving each month before they even think about signing you. I don’t care if its tapes, CDs, Vinyl, Digital releases on iTunes and Spotify, merchandise like t-shits etc, all of that will come in time, but its never going to happen if it doesn’t get started. Get your first album out there and your second album will probably be even better.
Digital marketing is changing the music industry. Its a adapt or die, and new bands and artists are popping up on the internet all the time. New devices are released almost daily. For example, if your website doesn’t work on mobile devices, thats not going to work in an increasingly mobile world. You have to constantly be discovering new ways to connect digitally to other humans on the other side of the screen. I find a useful technique is to pretend like you’re a person trying to find/buy your music.
You should be the first result for your brand in Google. For example, if your name something incredibly common. Like Book. if Book was a band, it would be impossible to find on the internet. Even with a ton of stuff, users still might be finding information on how to Book a Band instead or Books on Bands etc. It might be a lot easier to call it something else. You need consistency and recognizability and something that is easy to remember and provides the right feeling for what you’re trying to do. If it doesn’t “stick” and doesn’t jive with what people want, its never going to be a big success in a commercial sense.
Probably the first area you should start with is your personal branding. What happens when someone googles your name? Understand the consumer landscape is turning more digital and is changing the record industry day by day.
