The music industry has changed drastically over even the past half-decade or so, which is why it’s more important than ever to use marketing wisely. The wrong attention in the wrong direction, or the wrong effort the wrong way, and you’ll be wasting time, energy, money, and even the window of opportunity for your musical project to succeed.
Five tips specifically for current music marketing success including using promotional services, linking in all the right places, creating a master social media plan, looking into licensing and publishing, and keeping your music catalog organized and tagged. Without these steps, it’s going to be an uphill battle in terms of marketing.
Use Promotional Services
People who make music aren’t necessarily going to be very good at promoting it effectively. In fact, it might be fair to say that musicians get in their own way more than not when it comes to promotion, as ‘self-promotion’ even has that personalized dirty ring to it. So, if you’ve got a worthwhile set of music to put out there, hire a music promotional service to do that part of the equation correctly. Don’t leave the effort to chance.
Get To Linking
However, outside of professional outside promoting, you should do your own linking whenever possible. This means knowing how to use hyperlinks effectively from different services such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, and other places where good linking SEO is going to make a difference both in terms of user navigation and Google’s overall algorithm score that it will give your various pages. Having parters in your linking plan makes a huge difference as well, as cross-promotion is one of the more effective techniques.
Create a Master Social Media Plan
With social media aggregates like Hootsuite, you can take control of the type of post, the tags and hashtags, the frequency of the posts, and the consistency of the posts. Plus, from inside the site you can see what kind of analytics are available in terms of social reach.
Look Into Licensing and Publishing
One of the better ways to get money from any kind of music that you produce is going to be through licensing and publishing as well. If you aren’t familiar with how organizations like ASCAP work, it’s best to get registered and ask questions sooner rather than later.
Keep Your Catalog Organized and Tagged
And finally, to get the most out of your music catalog, always keep everything organized, labeled, and tagged. This means having brief descriptions that are always available for potential clients to browse though if they’re interested in your music, whether it be for a compilation, licensing, publishing, or even signing, depending on what industry they’re from.
