The present state of the music industry means lots of doing it yourself all the things: booking, recording, promoting, posting and anything else related to being a musician. This may leave a musician overwhelmed and making a critical mistake – not having an overarching strategic album release marketing plan.
Musicians used to have a supervisor, label marketer group, publishers and booking agents to work this out together, however that’s not often the case anymore. This leaves a musician in the position of caring for what needs doing now, and never taking the time to step back and develop an overall plan.
It’s understandable, musicians need to focus on creating the music and once it is finished, they need to get it out there. However getting that music ready for release has been an expensive endeavor mixed with a lot of hard work and time invested. To move forward without a strategic advertising and marketing plan to make it profitable is a mistake.
Let’s discuss 5 basic parts of a advertising and marketing to prepare for the new album release marketing.
1) Distributing in Album Release Marketing
In case you are planning to have hard copies for a release party or a performance, get them ordered with plenty of lead time. For the rest of your distribution, you’ll be utilizing digital mediums, and you need to pick a distributor, for example, Reverbnation, Tunecore or CD Baby. However, remember to search out additional methods to distribute your music like Pandora and Soundcloud.
2) Build an Album Website
You should have a professional looking site, preferably one that you could update yourself. Besides a landing page, focus on a few important pages such as newest information section, newsletter signup, and a listening page where followers can purchase your music.
3) Social Media Branding
You have to build a social media presence across several platforms. That is how most people are going to look you up and see how real you’re and get updates to know what’s going on with your music or band. Social media can also be the place where you may get conversations going that can be shared and construct your exposure.
Social media is where you construct your brand. Use artwork and images that consistently represent your brand across your social media platforms. There are 4 social media platforms to pay attention to your efforts on:
The original social media platform continues to be an important place to have a presence. You should maintain the page updated with uploads and posts as often as you may. An active page builds credibility and shows you’re real. You need to plan to spend some money promoting the page or most of your followers who’ve liked it won’t see your posts. Also, install apps like MailChimp for the newsletter signup, your main digital distribution channel, and apps for promoting merchandise.
YouTube
In addition to the home of funny pet videos, YouTube is also the place followers search for music. A professional channel is a necessity and you need to have videos categorized, for example, “Concerts”, “Official Videos” and so on. Followers should also be able to hyperlink to your other social media pages.
The descriptors and tags are important places for inserting musician’s names and keywords. Don’t ignore the importance of this; it’s how search engines discover and classify you, gives necessary information for the viewers and is a place for hyperlinks to your other social media content material.
This one is the place to construct customers and have conversations. Add everyone you deal with, and musicians in your genre – their followers will most likely like your music too. There are apps you could use to plan ahead what tweets you’ll put out over a week, and if wanted you may toss in more tweets when things come to you. Since you’re constructing relationships and engagement, don’t just tweet about your music career, add in other things like politics and information you care about.
The number of images shared a day on Instagram is staggering, at present about 80 million. Posted images should include a few different hashtags to help discover your images. Captions can also be added to your images to help communicate with followers. Make sure you combine it up a little so your Instagram isn’t just a clone of your Facebook uploads.
4) Have a Newsletter
Don’t let all of the talks about the importance of social media cause you to neglect to have a newsletter to email out. Social media is the way you connect with followers, however, the newsletter is where they become clients.
You need to send out your email newsletter once or twice a month. Use an email service that may give you analytics on which messages are working and other superior analytics about effectiveness and revenue generation.
5) Generating Press For an Album Release Marketing
Yes, you want to generate press, however not by blindly sending out press releases to as many music websites as you may Google. You need to do a little analysis and be a little savvy about getting placements.
Discover blogs, podcasts and radio stations that appropriate for your music and where placement will assist you to move forward. Just undertaking this process will help you learn more about the market for your genre and make you a greater marketer.
Then, don’t just blindly send them a press release and hope they read it. Instead, connect with them on their social media platforms first, and share their content material when appropriate. Engage with them if the chance presents itself, however, maintain it about what interests them, which most likely isn’t your music yet.
Maybe they’ll uncover your music on their own, in which case you just got very lucky. Barring that unlikelihood, at least now if you send them that press release, they could recognize you as a follower or somebody they’ve communicated with, which may help get your email opened and read.
The previous 5 ideas are critical things that a musician should undertake before an album release marketing. It’s lots of work, however, these steps are the fundamental foundation for a successful album release marketing.