Music marketing is by and large c hall enging for most performers, that is something all of us need to realise. Marketing yourself, being confident to allow individuals to listen to your tracks and most vital ly, handling criticism takes a bit of time to get used to. In the majority of cases though, marketing plans do fail. you may have a great sounding track, but if it is not marketed properly then it will just be white noise.
Nonetheless all is not lost.
The central reasons why music marketing fails is that
1) there is always some money involved, and
2) we market our music.
They all sound a bit strange. That I understand, but my plan is for you to get over these hurdles and to get your music out there in the absence of any hassle. I will take each of the above points in turn, but remember they are interlinked:
1) Money marketing. This is bad. The economics of this is so: you have to sell slot of tracks to get back the amount you spent on marketing, then you need to sell a few more to make any profit. The problems is, why are we invest ing so much resources on music marketing, or, why are we invest ing any resources on marketing at all?! The Web has greatly reduce d the cost of marketing by 100 %. Yep, marketing should be free, then any tracks that you do sell is pure profit. There are so many music marketing strategies, some of which are simple ideas that are not being utilised.
Here are some fantastic free marketing strategies are not being used, at all. How about leaflet distribution, flyers, making a mailing list then advertising your new tracks on that (they already prefer your tracks because they have signed upto your mailing list). Applying to competitions will always bring in some much necessitated traffic as competitions generate 1) leads and interest from the host website, 2) your tracks will get viral marketed only if it has become in the top 3. Viral marketing is just another way of spreading interest, all the people who voted for your tracks will recommend the amazing track that they heard, and you name spreads. 3) You may always advertise the fact that you got in 1st, second or third in X competition (always state how many other competitors were there as well- coming third out of four entries is hardly anything to encourage really).
Indeed the best advertising strategy is…give away your MP3s for FREE! A simple technique that encourages your tracks. people then trust you, they love quality items, they assume then, “hmm, if this is free, and it’s wonderful, what’d his selling tracks be like?” Free stuff sells pay wonderful s, fact. Give away alot of free stuff…MP3s being the primary one, and then be patient.
Once you’ve finished your free marketing, start again. Just keep on promoting yourself by free processes. It gets your name banded around, people will see your Webpage link and click on it rising your traffic. It may not too successful in the 1st few months or may be even a year, but stick with it, gaining visitor confidence will best ly prevail.
2) The above is great, but why would everybody buy any track from you in the first place? To the majority surfers you’re faceless, they don’t see you on the music videos, so why ought to they buy anything from you?
Harsh words I know, I am sorry, but it’s true. That is the real reason why there are thousands of good groups and musicians out there in Internet land marketing away, spend ing cash and showing virtually nothing for it. They marketed first, wanting cash, and their visitors are literally saying “I don’t think so”. You then become the banner ad- looks really good, but never gets the click.
What you need to do is produce content within your website. easy as that. in the absence of content you’re just another website that the visitor has no real reason to come back to. Content additionally improves the opening s of you being pick ed up by the search engines. Please note:Google, and the other ample search engines have stated that their thousands of calculations per website includes content search. This is a fundamental statement, even if you’re a music website giving away your MP3s.
If you’ve ever looked for MP3s within the search engines, there are about six million web sites dedicated to the term MP3. Next, your one web site has to be found by a visitor, the opportunitys are surprisingly low. Nonetheless, if your web site has content focused keywords, such as ” nice guitar riffs”, “how to gig” etc, then you’ll be choose ed up much freely than a easy MP3 search. Within the numerous pages that you’ve created you put, “download free guitar MP3s” or something that suits your music, and you then advertise your MP3s through the “back door”. Content will also bring back the visitors, they love a web site that they are interested in, they sign up to your news-letter, and then you email them with new updates, your new MP3s etc. Then you start to produce your own little buzz, you produce people willing to listen to your tracks.
A sideline to content is always relevant, up-to-date content. offer ing tapes with your tracks on is music marketing suicide. I have seen these actually being offer ed on some website s. offer ing a tape states that 1. You’re not up-to-date hence your sounds will not be, 2. You’re offer ing poor quality, hence your tracks will not shine, and 3. You’ve to pay out for the tape (postage and packaging etc). individuals on the Internet want things now, not tomorrow, offer ing MP3s, even short WAV files is giving the visitor what they want- immediate access to your tracks.
Relevant content is just as vital as current content. If you’ve a rock website stick to rock related Internet pages. If I was into hip-hop I would not go onto your rock website and look at hip-hop related articles. I know that this seems obvious, but scarily this has been done. It additionally has another effect. The search engines see topic specific websites as just that, topic specific. If you stray away from your chosen topic it won’t look good for you with the engines. They’ll see that your relevance has reduce d and so to will your page ranking.
Content isn’t that easy to accomplish. It comes with time, you need to tweak, track whether that has done any nice to your traffic or click throughs. You might furthermore just be writing alot of drivel. Content needs to be “Search Engine Focused”, you need to honestly guide individuals to buy from you, you need to have a one to one style ( like you’re talking to a friend), and definitely not be boring. Almost forgot, you need to assess who your fans is. Are they young, middle aged, technophobic? You writing style ought to cater for your fans. For example, a younger fans will like more colour, more tech information, a friendly banter, and up-to-date chart acts. Generally if you write as you would talk to a friend then you’ll be on safe lines.