This post contains an excerpt from the Musician’s Marketing Guide (PDF).
Marketing your music can seem like such an overwhelming process nowadays. Although artists have always needed to advocate for their work, it just seems like there are endless options nowadays, and it can be difficult to figure out where to start or how to organize your marketing efforts. It helps to understand where to start, so this post will help to break it all down so that you can get organized, get focused, and grow your fan base and music career.
You can download the Musician’s Marketing Guide PDF (it’s 28 pages long) for FREE, which dives even deeper into each of the 5 essentials of music marketing for musicians.
#1. Branding
Before you release music, before you have social media set up, before you do anything else, it’s really important to have your branding down. It’s important to have a strong and clear brand, even when your are starting out, it simply makes your communication clearer, more serious and professional, and makes you more memorable. Being memorable is the whole point of branding. That people can differentiate and remember you and your music!
Branding usually comprises visual and non-visual elements. Visual branding elements include assets such as a logo, specific fonts, graphics, and/or images. Non-visual branding elements related to your brand’s personality such as brand voice and brand experience.
#2. Email Marketing
Even before you have a website and social media set up, you should be thinking about growing your email list.
On social media and streaming services, you don’t own all of your followers, and these applications continually change how they operate and can completely fall out of favor. Whether it’s social media or a streaming service, you don’t have control, whereas with email marketing, emails land in your fan’s email inboxes, and those get checked multiple times a day – often before social media. Plus, with email marketing, you can craft your messaging, run tests, and utilize email marketing statistics to reach your fans in just the right way at just the right time. When it comes to email marketing you can reach out to any or all of the fans that have signed up to hear from you at any time.
#3. Website
A website is usually the center, the hub of a business, but for musicians, it’s a bit different. People don’t need to come to your website to engage with your music as they can listen on streaming platforms or social media. When it comes to merch, fans can buy merch on your Youtube channel or via Spotify too. Ultimately when fans, bookers, agents, etc. want to know more, they will search for your website and you want to ensure that your website is a destination that ties everything together, plus there are so many straightforward DIY options nowadays.
#4. Social Media
Social media is the top marketing tool for raising brand awareness. Your goals shouldn’t be to just grow numbers on a social media account, your goal should be to connect musicians with their would-be fans – these are different things.
It’s important to know that there are two different types of social media – organic and paid. The strategies for these two types of social media are different and have greatly evolved over the years. Organic Social Media is social media that occurs without paid promotion and Paid Social Media is social media that occurs with paid promotion, such as ads.
#5. Electronic Press Kit (EPK)
An EPK could be a single page PDF and/or a page on your website. We recommend having your EPK be a page on your website with a downloadable PDF option. Typically an EPK includes: artist name, music (streaming), about, mage(s), video, social media, notable events and contact info.
It helps to have a direct link to your EPK so that when you are emailing venues or your booker is doing their outreach, they can easily drop a link and not an attachment which is more likely to be flagged as spam when sending cold emails. Often you’ll email your EPK as a link and other times people (promoters, radio, etc.) will ask for a PDF.
To learn more about each component download the FREE Musician’s Marketing Guide (PDF).
