Without marketing, your business has no vision. There would also be no clue as to what you have to do to proceed with running your business. Therefore, to keep your business running smoothly, you need to know what to do to spread your message, make sales and generate income. Having your own music marketing plan is a simple, yet vital step forward in the planning of your business.
In this post, we show you how to develop your own music marketing plan and we use Krannaken (our music) as our prime example.
Music Marketing Plan Summary
Just as we did with our business plan, we should start our music marketing plan with a summary of what we are including. We should start off by explaining who we are and what we do. We then go on to saying how we make money and a very brief summary of what we do to generate sales.
Krannaken’s Music Marketing Plan Summary
We are Krannaken, a Birmingham-based EDM duo. We do not perform live, but we do make our music available in any format for DJs who want to include us in any of their sets.
The ways that we do make money include…
- Radio airplay
- Music streaming
- Retail sales
- Merchandising
- Production music library projects
- Loops and samples
- Affiliate marketing
Let us go through each of these and we will let you know how we have developed each one.
Radio airplay
Our membership of Reverbnation allowed us to submit music to various opportunities. One of these was a University radio station in America. The good people there liked our music enough to give us some air-time on their station.
Reverbnation can be found here. To increase your chances of success with Reverbnation, you are welcome to use the Reverbnation Bot by Rootjazz. You can find that here.
Music Streaming
Although we are not the most listened to artists in the world, we do have a growing fanbase. This has largely been through paid promotion and we will discuss this later in this post. With the release of Everhald’s Lost Youth EP and my Breakthrough EP, we have some excellent material for people to listen to. Therefore, we are doing well with music streaming and we are happy in the knowledge that we have people who want to listen to our music.
Retail Sales
This really goes hand-in-hand with streaming. However, in the industry today, people will often stream most music. I know that I stream most of my music. I also see the importance in paying for Spotify membership. It may make Spotify a little richer, but at the same time, the main reason I pay is that I want to support other artists. If I want people to support Krannaken, I want to support others. Just as in anything else in this life, support is a give-and-take force. The more you give to others, the more they will support you. I would much rather pay my £10 to Spotify than pay £12 for BBC TV license. I don’t see the point in the latter as I don’t watch TV.
Our music is available to purchase from Amazon, iTunes, etc. However you want to acquire your music, we appreciate your support. If you want to learn more about the music we have available for streaming or sales, simply search for Krannaken on your favorite streaming or retail music site.
Furthermore, if you want to learn more about how you can quickly and easily get your music out to all the top sites, simply click here. However, if you have more time and little money, you can find free music distribution here.
Merchandising
There can be no better advertising than word-of-mouth – or word-of-T-Shirt! If people see the name Krannaken on a T-Shirt or a hoodie, they will be interested to know what or who Krannaken is. Therefore, they are curious to learn more. If a friend has found a new artist, their friends are naturally curious about who that artist is and what the music is that they are listening to. That is why you will find a list of your friends on the right column on Spotify. This is really a viral marketing strategy. Have you ever clicked a song that a friend is listening to in Spotify? I know I have. I am always curious to see what the music is that my friends are listening to.
Therefore, sites like Teespring and Cafe Press are making a roaring profit from people’s curiosity. If someone likes your music, they will want to share your music – especially if it makes them look good. Furthermore, this is one of the easiest ways of advertising your business. Are you stuck what to get your friends for Christmas?
As far as Christmas goes, my family and I are putting together an album release to go to close family and friends. This is a great present because people can’t find it elsewhere. If you are a music artist, I strongly urge you to spend money on making a unique album this Christmas to go to your family and friends. Firstly, it is inexpensive. Secondly, if you make it big in the music industry, your family and friends have something of real value to brag about with their friends. This is because that album is a very limited edition.
[bctt tweet="Break Into Composing Music For Production Music Libraries"]
Production Music Library Projects
Production music otherwise known as music libraries cover a vast amount of the music that people hear on a daily basis. In fact, 80% of all music that the average person listens to is this type of music. There are various reasons why production music is so popular. Firstly, for film companies, it is much less expensive than hiring a composer to write a film score. Another reason is that the music is already written and available for anyone who needs music for any kind of video. Have you ever wondered where YouTube gets it’s background music from? Library music! Have you ever wondered who wrote the music that you listen to on the TV? Again, that is production music or library music.
There are various outlets who accept music from unheard of artists. Such websites include Pond 5 and Shutterstock. However, there are many more.
If you are wondering what the difference is between exclusive and non-exclusive music. If you write non-exclusive music, you will be able to sell music again and again. When a library wants exclusive rights, they want to sell your music once and only once. From there on, the customer owns all rights to your music. Non-exclusive and exclusive contracts have their own benefits. Selling music just once (exclusive rights) means that you will be paid more for that track. However, if you have non-exclusive rights, it means that you can sell it again and again and you will keep the copyright.
Loops and Samples
As with production music, loops and samples are created to be used by other artists. The biggest and best place to get loops and samples is Loopmasters. They also have downloadable organization software called LoopCloud. This allows you to store your loops and samples and make them searchable by many different factors. Such factors include instrument, genre, key, tempo and format.
Getting into making samples and loops i easier than the aforementioned production music. However, getting into selling through Loopmasters is not as easy. This is because you first have to apply to one of the approved labels in order to be considered for selling your products on Loopmasters.
Affiliate marketing
Although the others have been about your music, affiliate marketing is about advertising other companies on your blog or website. All of the links and banners on this website give me a cut of the commission if visitors purchase products through those banners and links. Many people live off affiliate marketing commissions alone and some are doing incredibly well as affiliates.
What is Next for Your Music Marketing Plan?
From looking at our summary and what we do to make money, we will look at how we get our message across. Therefore, we will look at both online and offline marketing strategies and how you can include them in your music marketing plan.
Online Marketing Strategies
Online marketing strategies will take up most of our time. This is about what we do to advertise our business. These also include strategies that are completely free of charge and some that you have to pay for.
This includes the various social media sites, your blog and content marketing. Paid marketing includes pay-per-click, Facebook advertising and other social media advertising. However, it is recommended that you only do two or three of these strategies, but you need to do them well in order to succeed.
Free Social Media Marketing Strategies
The social media part of your marketing plan should include the implementation of both main-stream and music related social media sites. However, the main strategy that we impement for our music marketing strategy costs a minimal amount. However, we believe it is well worth the expense as we see some great results from it.
We share blog posts, videos and more on our Facebook page. We actually paid fr Facebook page likes. However, this is not totally necessary. It is more important that you know how to generate organic likes for your page. The best way to do this is to start with your friends. Invite your friends to like the page first because they will want to support you. From there, if they like your content, they will like and share your content. Therefore, more people will see your content and you will be able to grow your following.
Although Pinterest is best when used with Tailwind, you can still see significant results from using Pinterest on its own. Therefore, if you run a blog as a part of your music marketing strategy, Pinterest is the obvious choice. However, just as anything else, Pinterest is a give-and-take relationship. You must share other people’s content if you expect to have other people share your pins in return.
Twitter is another site that we use to build our music marketing following. It is possible to grow your Twitter following through third-party apps again. Therefore, if you don’t want to use Twitter directly, you can use these sites instead. However, they will all cost money. We will talk about SocialBee which we use to build both our Twitter and Facebook following on autopilot.
[bctt tweet="Grow both your Twitter and Facebook following on autopilot. Click here..."]
Include These Paid Social Media Strategies on Your Music Marketing Plan
The SoundCloud – Hypeddit Partnership
Perhaps the biggest music social media site is SoundCloud. I strongly urge you to use SoundCloud as it is great when implemented alongside Hypeddit.
The reason why these two are so great together is that SoundCloud is one of the biggest music social sites in the world. Hypeddit is a fan acquisition platform that can place a download link on your SoundCloud track. Therefore, you can generate fans from SoundCloud who can become fans on Hypeddit.
As a fan acquisition platform Hypeddit can build your social following on a wide range of music sites and social media platforms. These include the likes of Facebook, Spotify and Twitter. Furthermore, there is an option to collect an email address and grow your email list by participating in Hypeddit. It is just really easy.
Tailwind for Pinterest and Instagram
Tailwind is a platform that offers tribes who will share your content on their Pinterest boards. A lot of bloggers are making a roaring success of their blog marketing because of the relationship between Pinterest and Tailwind. Again, this is a give-take relationship. You have to share other people’s content in order for them to share your content.
Blogging
Blogging is a key marketing strategy in a lot of music marketing plans. Therefore, you should not discount it. After all, if you want to find out about something you will either type it into YouTube or Google search engines. These are the largest search engines in the world and the number one way for people to find information.
As well as being able to offer unlimited traffic to your website, a blog can be a source of income. You can collect email addresses and you can also include affiliate programs.
[bctt tweet="How to Create the Most Interesting Music Marketing Plan"]
We will be talking about blogging much more extensively in a future blog post. However, as far as your music marketing plan goes, you should aim to do at least one long post or three to five shorter posts every week. Personally, I think that one post of more than 2,000 words is totally adequate for what you need. Furthermore, you need to spend 80% of the time marketing your blog posts.
Your Music Marketing Needs a Content Schedule
When you have written a blog post, it is a great idea to produce a content schedule based around that content. You should do this by repurposing your content.
With one piece of content, you can do multiple different things. You can create infographics or slideshares. It is a good idea to rewrite them for article submission directories. In addition, you can complile your blog posts into a book in either digital or paper form. You can launch those books as Kindle or pdf books. You can create paper-based books through CreateSpace. If you are writing for Kindle or CreateSpace books, you will sell them on Amazon or you can share pdf books on dozens of different ebook sharing sites.
If you feel able to do so, you can create a Udemy or Skillshare course based around the subject covered in your blog post and upload one of these videos to YouTube.
With our blog content, we will be creating a book on music marketing. This will be sold on both Kindle and CreateSpace.
Your Music Marketing Budget
I would suggest for your financial side of things, that you have a base figure. This should be the cost of your memberships to the various marketing sites. This can include Hypeddit, SoundCloud, your blog host and Tailwind. However, it is also advisable to set a percentage of everything that comes in to be rolled back into the business. Therefore, your marketing budget will fluctuate, but will be a part of your income. This means that you will not have to worry too much about having “enough” to spend on marketing. It will always be there.
It is advisable that you allocate at least 50% of your profit for marketing. This will largely be spent on Facebook and Pinterest promotion, but it could also help towards the cost of your various memberships.
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