So you may be a creative producer, or artistic creative, and you’ve spent countless hours refining your material to be the best it can be, painstakingly writing every note, every chord, every word of every lyric to be the best it can be, then captured and presented it in the most professional way possible. Now you want to engage with fans and consumers to connect them to your creative content.
Whether its a painting, an EP, single, or almost any other artistic work, you need to connect with the right marketing strategy to make the most of your work. You may have spent many hours making your album, but if you don’t spend any effort marketing it to to people potentially interested in it, you may fall short of your expectations, and nobody will even have a clue you’ve released an album.
Guerilla Marketing 101
Marketing and audience engagement often takes a secondary role of the creative process. The fact is, if you aren’t spending at least as much time generating interest in your material, as you are creating it, you may not be taking full advantage of the power of releasing your material in the most profitable way possible. While marketing your music might seem not that cool, you can do it in a cooler way than the average bear.
Social as the New Norm
Social marketing has become synonymous with digital marketing these days, and connecting with your marketing target audience can be as easy as posting a tweet, facebook status, or instagram tweet. Those are your people, so keeping them updated with what you’re doing is important.
How often and what type of material to post is dependent on what your typical demographic is, but in general, post for your biggest fans, don’t worry about the haters, and keep releasing content to see what works and find out who cares about what you’re doing.
Since social has been an integral part of any modern marketing strategy, we can fairly assume that social media is how most people find out about new music and visual art that they like. What other emerging places might be good places to experiment with, what social media platforms aren’t worth dealing with anymore? Only you can know for your specific fan base.
Some other places you might want to think about, would be facebook groups dedicated to local music, or art, or other communities like forums, bloggers, or youtuber communities which are active recently. Pinpoint where your fans are at, and where their friends are at and target them with your hottest material. If they don’t like it they will just scroll on by, don’t worry if its a little beyond your confidence level. There’s almost nothing you cannot do yourself, and if you do eventually get a management or PR company, the first questions they will ask you will be about social engagement strategies online, so even if you do very little, that’s better than nothing, and you can always improve your audience goals later.
Engaging the Community
Once you’ve connected with the community of potential customers, you need try to capture their attention with content engagement.
Live performances can be a great way to engage with fans. Get hyped and get real with your music, whether it’s on the stage or after the show, you can speak to people and fans who might want an opportunity to support you later.
You can find out who cares, connect with those fans, and present them with an opportunity to support you. Whether it’s just liking or sharing videos, your fans will be the ones who are on the front lines distributing your content through their networks. Some fans may be willing to watch your video, but may not buy something. Other super fans might be willing to like everything you do, and buy anything you have. Testing out different levels of connection and engagement methods can reveal new insights about your fans and what they want to hear or see next.
About the Author:
James Kananen is a Recording Producer and Recording Studio Owner at Bad Racket Recording Studio in Cleveland Ohio. Keep making music, We’re Listening to what you have to say, and ready to make take your creative journey to the next level.