We know that when it comes to solidifying your presence online, there has to be *some* dedication to the frequency, and the level to which you as an artist, are online. And for a lot of folks, that can be a tedious or overwhelming task.
Let us tell ya, that is completely okay!
We offer a range of social and music marketing strategies that can help up your game and make sure people remember your name. It might be the right fit for you now, or it could be something you’re looking to engage with down the line.
Whatever the case may be, beehive can help. Below, our Head of Social Buzz Liz, answers four simple questions surrounding music marketing and how it can help you.
How can a well-executed music marketing campaign amplify an artist’s online presence?
Whether it’s an ad campaign, a content strategy or media buying across editorial, a well-executed music marketing campaign is the difference between putting your music out into the world, and putting it on a platform for people to hear.
The beauty of what constitutes a well-executed music marketing campaign in 2023 is that if you have access to a smartphone, you have all the tools you need for a successful campaign!
Some artists may find the idea of pursuing a music marketing campaign for their music daunting or overwhelming. What’s the first thing you’d tell an artist who is approaching their first run at it, to make it all make sense?
The first and most important tip is truly to not overthink it.
The best thing to do is to think about it as a music fan; how do you consume music?
How do you consume social media? What accounts and posts do you engage with the most? Do you actually click on hashtags – if the answer is ‘no’ then remove them from your captions.
Do love seeing what your favourite artists are doing in the studio? If the answer is ‘yes’ then you should be creating behind-the-scenes content. Are you more likely to discover an artist by clicking the banner on a website, listening to a Spotify playlist or scrolling social media?
A great marketing campaign can be as simple as reverse engineering your timeline back from your release date and plotting out Instagram + TikTok videos to tease and promote a release.
More often than not, ‘raw’ and authentic looking content pieces perform much better than the polished and filtered ones, so the best news is the only cost that you really need to attribute to content creation is your time!
What do you think is one thing people may underestimate about the reach a good music marketing campaign can attain?
I’d like to break this down into the most underestimated tool and the most underestimated implementation strategy.
The most underrated tool is engagement. Engaging with your online audience – whether it be liking and replying to comments or replying to the comments on a bigger artist’s posts to try and gain some fans – is what will have the algorithm working in your favour.
Consistent engagement sessions on your newsfeed and in the right circles will have your online audience growing in no time. It’s all a domino effect; as people start to engage back and follow your account, the algorithm will see that things are bubbling and serve your profile to more and more people each day.
Remember: The goal of every single platform is to keep you online longer. It wants you to get lost in the rabbit hole, so it will feed you content that it thinks you will like. If Rachel, Adam and Charlie are mates and engage with each other online but Rachel is the only one who follows you and interacts with your posts, Instagram/TikTok/YouTube is going to identify that Charlie and Adam share similar interests to Rachel and feed your account to them to interact with, thus deepening the rabbit hole!
The most underestimated strategy of implementation is to think like a consumer. It’s not hard to do that in music because we’re all here with one thing in common – we love music! If you think about when and how you consume music and when and how you engage with online content, you’ll get all the answers you need as to what to post and when to post.
The times you are most online is most likely the time your new fans will be online so if you find yourself sitting on the couch scrolling, that’s your time to post! If you find you’re sharing a certain type of video, that’s the type of video you need to be posting!
Again – the key is not to overthink it, but to just do what comes naturally.
How can an artist best prepare themselves when coming to you with a campaign pitch?
It’s always great to know what an artist wants out of a music marketing campaign. Some artists are great with posting and online engagement, but need help managing ads.
Others don’t know where to start or what to post, and then some artists have nailed it all but are ready to take the next step and have a more wide-scope digital marketing plan that includes YouTube pre-roll, editorial marketing and a more aesthetic-based approach to content creation.
We break all of our music marketing campaigns into content pillars and we work back from there. Each pillar represents an objective, and the strategy behind each pillar always leads to fulfilling that objective. Knowing what an artist actually wants to achieve by having a music marketing strategy in place gives us the foundation to build from.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of having a conversation and we can figure it out with them.