Let’s Build Your Personal Marketing Plan
No need to wait for a marketing team member to get this very important journey started. No time is “too soon” to start preparing for promoting and marketing your music. In fact, the sooner you get started, the better. There are so many avenues to marketing, but at Melboss we have very specific and helpful steps for artists to approach this task. Here’s how we do it!
1. Know your audience
Getting a good sense of who your music reaches is great to know for both marketing and non-marketing factors. Once you begin to see the demographics of your listeners you can get more specific ideas of how they hear and learn about new music. With a greater understanding of how people find out about your music, other bands they listen to, and aspects like those, you have a better handle at knowing how to communicate and bond with potential fans.
Let’s say you are a newer performer and don’t have much of an audience or fan base yet. Look into bands and musicians that are similar to you and your music. Study them as if you were studying yourself to see who their fans are. Replicate their marketing strategies and study how they use their platform. This will give you something to work with and then you can revisit this idea once you establish an audience of your own.
2. Solidify your brand
Before going off and venturing into promoting your music, it is at the utmost importance that you know what your brand is. This includes but isn’t limited to music genre, style, and uniqueness. How does your music and artist persona stand out amongst the rest? These ideas will help you decide the most effective ways to promote you and your music. These days branding is just as important as the music you create. Fans want to know who you are behind the great tracks and lyrics.
3. Internal SWOT analysis
This model recognizes and establishes an artist’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats around their music and brand. These four factors acknowledge the positive and negative aspects, which can help determine strategies and plans to actively pursue along with what to avoid.
- Strengths: These represent the skills you are great at, the aspects that represent your brand and music well. This could mean anything from video production for music videos to witty captions and responses that help form relationships with fans. Identify the better parts of your career to continue to execute them well.
- Weaknesses: Everyone has skills they haven’t quite mastered yet, which is okay it is just important to recognize and know them. This makes you realize that you need to work on certain aspects or even hire people to help in your weaker areas. Maybe you need better and more unique graphic designs to help promote your music. Whatever it is, find it and fix it before outsiders see the weaker elements!
- Opportunities: You’ll want to scan the web and other mediums for each and every opportunity to promote you and your music. This is also a great way to capitalize on the strengths you have. If you are great with social media is there an organization that allows bands/artists to “take over” their Instagram to post stories throughout today? If your personality is one of your more effective aspects, is there a radio show looking to invite you to chat?
- Threats: It is imperative to think about what could go wrong and possible problems that could arise at any time in your career. This way you can have more back up plans and ideas to avoid problems taking over and stalling your career. For example, you might feel uneasy about one of your team member’s work and/or how long they might work with you. Whatever it is identify it and don’t ignore it.
After researching and planning, this model demonstrates all of the factors that go into creating a strong and successful career. Knowledge is power and knowing both the negative and positive aspects can greatly impact a musician’s career for the better.
4. Gather feedback from mentors
With the help of our Melboss mentors, we are able to collect feedback about a band from those with extensive and varying professional experiences. This really helps show artists how they and their music are perceived. This constructive criticism will let you know to be aware of things you might have never thought of. Correcting and adjusting the right aspects before promoting yourself can save you from a lot of trouble on the road ahead.
5. Gather feedback from fans
Besides mentors, fans and potential listeners are the best people to get feedback from. Ask them about their overall thoughts, how they heard about the music, where would they like to see you more of on the web, and other questions of this nature. This is great input coming from credible and personal sources that can help shape your music and career in all the positive ways. You’ll want to take advantage of their responses as they are coming from the people that can determine how successful your career is based on how much they listen and support your music!
6. Create goals to reach
Striving towards goals can create more productivity and a stronger work ethic than without it. This is also a great way to assess whether or not your current marketing plans are effective for your brand. Are you reaching more goals with certain avenues than others? Can those more productive avenues be better utilized? Marketing is something you will have to constantly revisit and revise as your music and career shift around new circumstances.
7. Establish a budget
Visions and goals are great but a realistic budget is needed to support all of that. It’s not necessarily about having a lot of money but more so about knowing how best to use the money you do have. Creating images to share both physically and on the internet requires talented artists and graphic designers, and great photos call for great photographers. With all of the new knowledge, you have about where your audience is most likely to get news about you, decide where best to put your money for quality products to share.
8. Create a marketing mix
There are so many mediums that can be used to showcase your work both on the internet and off. Believe it or not, traditional means of marketing are still used and are effective today despite technology being such a major part of today’s society. When you create a specific plan for how much you would like to utilize promotion services (social media, radio stations, flyers, etc) you will be navigating the marketing field in a much more productive manner. Decide what is best for you and your brand, but also incorporate how your audience best hears about you.
