The dangers of over-promoting your music to your audience
As an artist, you’ll often be told about the importance of promotion. Whether you’re releasing a track or starting a new campaign, promotion will be at the forefront of your strategy. This may be in the form of advertisements, email campaigns, paid social media posts or even just an Instagram story. What you won’t usually be warned about is the danger of over-promoting your content by spamming your audience. We’ve taken a look at why over-promoting can damage your branding and repel your audience, causing long-term damage to your brand.
On social media, most people log in for entertainment. Whether useful or not, advertisements can generally be an irritant for social media users who are just looking to relax and unwind. People don’t log into Instagram in the hopes of purchasing a new product, people log in to connect with family and friends and keep up to date on the world. A lot of artists fail to realise that the majority of posts you publish are, in fact, advertisements. You may be excited to tell people about your new single, but to outsiders, this is not entertainment at all, this is an advert. For your most dedicated fans, your content will always be enjoyable, but to others, it may not be.
Whether you pay for advertising or not, posting a link to your new song is promotional content and may not be of interest to the majority of your following. Promotional content is great when you’re running a campaign, but there is such a thing as too much promotion. When you spam your timeline with the same link day in, day out, it gets boring for your audience. You may even lose loyal fans who are simply tired of hearing about the same campaign over and over. The fact is, if you’re releasing a new song, the majority of your loyal fans will already know about it.
Over-promoting can also make you appear desperate, which is the last thing you want. People will start to wonder why you are campaigning so relentlessly and will realise that your track is not performing as well as you had hoped. It is incredibly easy to fall into the trap of over-promoting due to enthusiasm, so make sure to avoid it. Let’s take a look at some of the simple methods you can employ to ensure that you promote at an effective level without going too far.
Particularly on social media, it is important to balance the content you publish. If you’ve been heavily promoting, break up your posts with a bit of entertainment and light-hearted content. This could be in the form of humour or even a selfie. The most effective social media profiles combine formal with informal. Promotional posts are formal, relax your persona and let people get to know you by throwing some informal posts into the mix.
Another important aspect of balancing your content is making sure to vary your promotion as much as possible. Don’t simply copy and paste your tweets over and over to promote the same track. Think about unique campaigns that you could run in order to promote the track. You could publish a video or run a competition, don’t simply post a link to your Spotify multiple times a day with the same text to accompany it.
When you over-promote you really risk losing your core fanbase. Losing fans is a lot easier than gaining them, so it is important never to risk losing your audience. People will quickly grow tired of the same repeated content day in day out, don’t let this happen. Always provide variety in order to hold onto your core audience while expanding and generating new fans.
With email campaigns, be careful not to repeat yourself too much. If you’re releasing a track, one email prior to release, followed by one email on release day is enough. Don’t keep reminding people to listen to the track once it’s out. If they didn’t engage with your first email, they definitely won’t engage with the fifth. In fact, they will likely unsubscribe from all future content from you. Repeating yourself will never increase the success of your emails and will be seen as spam by your audience.
When paying for social media adverts, over-promoting can result in over-spending. Paid advertisements are great, but don’t repeatedly campaign towards the same audience. If they don’t connect with your content the first time around, providing them with the same content won’t provide better results the second or third time they see it. Look at your results and gage the reaction, try to understand whether your advert has succeeded and failed. That being said, you can advertise content to the same audience again, just ensure to vary it so that it doesn’t come across as unnecessary spam.
Ultimately, over-promoting can be just as damaging to your brand as under-promoting. It is vital to find the right balance and ensure to promote at the right level. By over-promoting, you risk losing your audience’s interest and coming across as a spammer. By under-promoting, you risk not advertising your content to the fullest and losing out on valuable engagement. Don’t be disheartened; your level of engagement will soon reveal whether you are campaigning effectively. If you make mistakes, you can learn from them. What is important is your ability to go back and analyse your campaigns and improve in the future.