When your goal is to create great music, marketing is probably not on your radar. But if you want to stand out in a saturated digital music streaming world, effective music promotion is essential.
Like many independent artists, you may not have much experience in marketing. Your instinct might tell you that social media—like paid Instagram or Facebook posts—are your best bet. But that’s far from the truth.
First, if you don’t pay a lot to target the right people, your campaigns will end up being wasted on the wrong accounts. Second, even if you do reach the right audience, people who are on social media to consume visual content lack the mindset and intent to discover new music. More likely than not, they’ll just scroll past your ad.
As an artist, you must build a more effective strategy for targeting and engaging the right listeners. In this post, we’ll show you how.
7 steps to develop a music promotion strategy that works
The best way to manage your music promotion and marketing lies in a multi-approach strategy. With a holistic approach that combines different marketing techniques, you can maximize listener engagement, build up a strong community of fans, and obtain the data you need to refine your campaigns over time.
Here are seven music promotion techniques to start using today.
1. Get your music added to playlists
Playlisting is when you pitch your music to playlist curators with the goal of having them add your song. Today, this is one of the most effective ways to get discovered, especially for emerging artists who are seeking a direct and authentic way to reach relevant listeners.
Getting your music added to playlists makes it easier for you to get tons of exposure among listeners who already listen to your genre and style of music.
By submitting your music to the right playlists, whether they have thousands of followers or dozens, you will have the chance to get heard, saved, and followed by your ideal listeners.
You don’t pay for ads. Instead, listeners hear your music because they want to, and everyone’s happy.
The first step to getting your music on the right playlists for you is by identifying the playlists that will best fit your songs. It’s possible to do this manually, but this can consume lots of time and energy, with no guarantee your songs will ultimately be added.
Fortunately, there are solutions like PlaylistMap, which give you the ability to search for hyper-relevant playlists based on genre, mood, or artists that sound similar to you.
With PlaylistMap, you can easily filter the search results to find the right playlists for you, and even view helpful information about them, like when the playlist was last updated, top artists, and top genres. Then, you can customize a variety of pre-made templates and message the curators directly. If your song gets added, the Spotify algorithm will recognize that you have fans and continue pushing your tracks out to wider audiences.
2. Build a central hub for your fans
Your current fanbase is one of your greatest resources. These people already follow you, love your music, and by keeping them engaged, you can grow this momentum.
To gather them and make your fanbase stronger, you have to give them a central hub. When your fans are scattered across different social networks such as Instagram, TikTok, OnlyFans, etc, it is much more difficult to motivate them to action.
With platforms like Fangage, you can create, control, and monitor your fan engagement and how they’d like to interact from one centralized site. This helps you create a solid music promotion foundation.
Fangage is perfect for fanbase management, music promotion, sharing content, and all other initiatives for growth while feeding your fan community.
Start creating and engage directly with your fans from your own centralized website today.
3. Create exclusive content
Creating exclusive content is a great way to boost engagement and even attract new listeners.
There are two main reasons for this:
- Exclusivity: When listeners gain access to gated content (which requires a subscription to access), you can create the feeling of being a part of an exclusive group. Fans know that, as a part of this group, they will directly receive special content and early access to things like merchandise drops and ticket sales. This boosts engagement, and fans always look forward to your next post, video, or song.
- Data: In order to access your exclusive content, fans must register with their name, email address, and phone number. With this information, you can gain deeper insights about your fans, such as their gender, age, and city. Of course, having this information also allows you to communicate directly with your fans, share new releases and merchandise, and even decide where to place your next show.
Fangage makes it easy to create exclusive content with its follow-to-unlock gates, which currently work for Spotify users, artists and playlists, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. By creating gated content with Fangage, you can start with collecting immensely valuable fan data while boosting fan engagement.
Once you start collecting your fans’ email addresses and phone numbers, you can message them directly each time you’re releasing a new song. You can even refine your music promotion by setting advanced parameters, such as location, gender, age, and nationality.
4. Create text and email campaigns
Directly communicating with your fans via text and email marketing is a great way to give your promotions a boost. Think about how much easier it is to reach people by sending them a direct message, versus hoping they’ll pay attention to an ad on social media.
Fangage allows you to craft highly personal and engaging text and email campaigns that help you share your new releases, events, or merchandise sales in a more authentic way. This kind of music promotion technique allows you to communicate with your fans just as friends do, which can have a huge impact on your connection with them.
Give Fangage a try and start sending out emails and text messages to your fanbase today.
5. Sell more than your music
Selling merchandise and concert tickets through your central hub is another great way to boost fan engagement, as well as create additional revenue streams.
With Fangage, you can easily sell exclusive content, products, memberships to your fanbase, as well as concert tickets. You can even add discounts for your subscribers, another incentive to become a member.
6. Look for collaborations
Collaborating with other musicians, brands, influencers, small local companies or events is a great way to reach more listeners and gain exposure.
For example, collaborating with other artists introduces each of you to the other's fans, resulting in new people getting to know you and your music. Getting a popular influencer to mention your name or simply use your track on one of their videos could drive tons of new listeners to your Spotify page.
There are many ways to collaborate with others—you just need to be creative.
7. Get personal
People on social media are used to being bombarded with advertising content designed to get them to do or buy something. Music promotion should be different.
This is your art, your craft. If you want people to truly appreciate it, don’t become just another ad in their feed. Create content that showcases your music, events, content, or merchandise, and invites them to join your community.
Surveys, including fans in your decisions, asking them for their opinions, and even contacting them online is a great way to build authentic connections with your community. You’ll want to do everything you can to develop a real, close connection with your listeners and followers.
Take control of your music promotion
As a creator, spending energy on marketing your music can feel weird and unnatural. You might be intimidated, turned off by the costs, or simply feel lost because you don’t know what to do. Fortunately, with the right strategy and tools, you can crush music promotion to build up a solid base of fans.
With platforms like Fangage and PlaylistMap, you will gain control of your brand, engage your fans, collect helpful data, and succeed in your music career.
Let the show begin and start building an owned audience while monetizing your content with Fangage.
