As we looked at offline music marketing strategies last week, this week we look at online music marketing strategies. Most of your attention should be online. This is simply because online music marketing allows you to reach your potential market much more easily and effectively than you can offline.
When I was a boy growing up, my school had a CD Rom that had pictures of my home town, (Kenilworth, Warwickshire in England). I was really impressed with that. I thought, “Wow! This has pictures of my home town”. Today, we look at that kind of technology and think it was really primitive. The internet has brought a lot of power to a lot of people. They should take social media lessons in schools.
“Free” Vs Paid Online Music Marketing Strategies
Firstly, let us dispel the myth of “free”. What is your time worth to you? I know that my time is worth a lot. I could be focusing on other areas of my business – or even spending more time with my wife and son. These are really valuable to me. My family could be making memories. Therefore, time is worth something. In fact, time is the most valuable commodity we have. You can’t buy back hours, days, weeks, months or years. Once they have gone, they have gone. Are you any closer to your family if you work your butt off all day, every day. I don’t think so.
As time is so valuable, paid marketing can be a better option. Therefore, I have listed below the online music marketing strategies that we use all the time in the hope that you can learn something from them. I hope you enjoy reading this post…
Hypeddit
How Can You Use The Free Option of Hypeddit for Your Online Music Marketing Campaigns?
If you really can’t afford the monthly fee of around $7, I suggest you might want to try the free option of Hypeddit. You won’t see as much success and you won’t achieve that much, but if you really can’t afford a $7 monthly fee, then getting the “free” option could be right for you.
With the free version of Hypeddit, you only get one sharegate. Therefore, you can only use one track. Whereas, with the paid version, you can also have as many tracks as you like. Therefore, paid really is the best way to go.
How Can You Use The Paid Option of Hypeddit for Online Music Marketing Campaigns?
For just $7 per month, you can have as many share gates as you like. This has a knock-on effect with SoundCloud as we will discuss below, but if you want more social media followers, or you want more emails on your list, it is vitally important to use both Hypeddit and SoundCloud to maximum potential. Therefore, you must get the pad versions of both Hypeddit and SoundCloud.
SoundCloud
The biggest reason that you need to use SoundCloud with Hypeddit is that you get to promote your “free download” link directly to your listeners. Therefore, you will see a lot of business from SoundCloud.
With our downloads, we share a sample pack that we create for the tracks. Therefore, it is not just another track. It is something that people can use to build their own tracks. Our tracks are all trance music, but even if we are promoting to people who aren’t trance artists, we still drum up more interest because we are sharing something of valuable that can be altered to be used in most productions.
It is also worth noting that you get to share as many as five tracks to your SoundCloud crew. This is something called the “Spotlight”. With Spotlight, you can place five tracks at the top of your profile.
The SoundCloud Success Formula
Therefore, I use the following process to generate interest from SoundCloud.
- Add our best tracks to the Spotlight.
- Do a search for similar music that has been uploaded in the last hour to the last day.
- Like the track (if you really like it), share it (if it fits our genre) and we follow the artist.
- They then see that we have interacted with their track so feel obliged to do the same for us.
Therefore, we can generate a lot of interest from other artists who will be happy to share our music. This really is the best way of promoting your music on SoundCloud. Furthermore, this will have a knock-on effect to your other music channels. If you find fans on one platform, you will also find that those fans will look you up. We have pushed hard on SoundCloud and seen more streams on Spotify as a result.
Repost Exchange
I have to say that I am not the biggest fan of Repost Exchange. However, they are worth noting down here. If you want to maximizer your results, then Repost Exchange can help you to develop more relationships with fans and you will also gain more exposure as a result.
Repost Exchange have an app that is available on Android. We are unsure of the Apple app store as we don’t use Apple mobile. However, I believe there may well be a version of Repost Exchange that is available on Apple.
Perhaps the biggest reason why I don’t like this service as much is that even on a paid plan, you are unable to activate campaigns on a daily basis. I would like to be able to do this.
Sendfox for Email Marketing
For my email marketing campaigns, I use Sendfox. This is a part of the same family as AppSumo and KingSumo. AppSumo is something that I also use quite a lot. I highly recommend Sendfox because you only need to pay once and after that it is free for the first 5,000 emails. From then on, you pay $10 per 1,000 email addresses. Therefore, I think it is great.
Another reason why I rate Sendfox so highly is because deliverability has always been first class. They send within seconds and I have never had to wait a single minute for an email to arrive.
SocialBee for Scheduling Social Media Posts
We use SocialBee for scheduling content for our Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and Twitter account. This is mainly the online music marketing efforts of other artists. A lot of them are YouTube videos and blog posts. These are usually aimed at bedroom producers and aspiring producers (the same kinds of people who I am targetting).
I paid $49 for a lifetime account through AppSumo, but I think the usual price is around $20 to $30 per month.
Find Spotify and Deezer Playlists Through SoundPlate
SoundPlate is a golden nugget in the world of online music marketing. This is because you can find great playlists among loads of different genres. For instance, for us, we mainly produce EDM music. We have won placements on many playlists simply by submitting them for free through SoundPlate. You don’t pay a penny and you can generate loads of Spotify streams as a result.
Should Blogging Be a Part of Your Online Music Marketing Strategy?
The only downside I have discovered with blogging is that it takes up a lot of time. However, it is time that I enjoy. I am making new friends through related services like Tailwind and I am learning more too.
Blogging can bring thousands of new fans to your music. In fact, the longer you keep pushing your blog content and developing new posts, the more traffic you will get, the more interest you will achieve and the more income you will generate.
Pinterest Can Be An Important Part of Your Online Music Marketing Strategy
If you keep a blog as a part of your online music marketing, you will reap the rewards of added exposure. In the beginning, you will be able to generate a lot of traffic from Pinterest.
Pinterest is simply a marketing platform where you can advertise your latest blog posts. This post will be marketed on Pinterest and the major reason for that is that blog traffic does really well on Pinterest.
Tailwind App
Part of the reason why Pinterest does so well is because of Tailwind. This 3rd party app allows you to schedule your pins to be published on Pinterest at optimum times. Therefore, you will generate more pin impressions. The ultimate goal is to generate more followers, click-throughs and repins.
Tailwind has a cost, but it is well worth the cost if you can generate a good amount of traffic to your site.
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