How to market your artist brand for under $300 per month
With many producers in the music industry having relatively small budgets for marketing their artistic brand, it comes as no surprise to learn that they are unable to spend thousands of dollars every single month simply on marketing. During this article, we’re going to discuss some effective ways to market your artistic brand, and how to keep your budget at below a low price of just $300 per month.
Firstly, having a place to write content can be an absolutely incredible way of promoting your artist brand & becoming a thought leader within the industry. If you don’t have a blog, writing pieces on Linkedin can have a profound impact on your career. If you add a lot of people at major record labels to your network and then create content that would suit a business audience, it can attract a lot of attention for your artist brand from people at the top of the music industry. For example, you could write an article on “a producers thoughts surrounding artist management”, and then add a lot of people from big management companies directly to your network so they see your content in their news feed. By creating meaningful content that resonates with the target audience, it makes it much easier to attract attention from people at the top tiers of the music industry. Of course, this can be done at zero cost.
A tactic to market your artistic brand at zero cost is to have your new tracks featured in blogs. Admittedly, cold emails have a limited amount of success due to the lack of a personal connection. Therefore, a good strategy is going to the website of every major EDM blog and writing down the names of the writers. Then, add them on Facebook (if you have mutual friends) and form a genuine relationship with them. This will make your chances of getting featured on blogs a lot higher. Or alternatively, you can just hire a PR agent to pitch for you if you have a few hundred dollars laying around.
Offering great advice on social media can be an incredible way for your artistic brand to be noticed by a multitude of people within the industry. Simply self-promoting yourself is not a viable way to get known amongst the masses. Instead, sharing knowledge in a public manner can encourage people to share your content. For example, you could create a production tutorial, give advice on marketing, or talk about how to collaborate with other people in the music industry.
Instagram influencers are a great way of promoting your artist brand. As they have thousands of followers, it can provide a great outlet to market your music to a much wider audience. Simply search for the top posts in your city, and get in contact with as many as possible. You could arrange meetups, them to attend your gigs or anything else that would encourage a collaboration between the two of you. Another way to get them to promote your artistic brand is by simply asking them to include your music in their content & vlogs on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. However, it’s understandable that they may decide to charge a small fee. In order to find influencers that will use your music, firstly consider the genre that you are producing. As a general rule of thumb, deep house/tropical etc works really well with travel videos. Meanwhile, bass music compliments gaming videos and intense sports. Therefore, finding Youtube & Twitch channels to promote your music is a great way to go about gaining exposure.
Another great way to market your artistic brand is by appearing on multiple podcasts that are centred around the music industry conducting interviews with the host. Often a long-form piece of content that can last from 30 mins to several hours, it provides an incredible opportunity to talk about your rise in the music industry, thoughts on the world, upcoming music etc. To find relevant podcasts, search industry influencers such as “Scooter Braun” to see what shows they’ve appeared on, and get in contact with the host. If you’re able to appear on 2 episodes a week, and each one has an average of 5,000 listeners, that’s 520k people discovering your artist brand each year. Although it may be time-consuming, you have to remember that everybody listening will be fixated on what you have to say – due to them having it playing whilst on the plane, in the car etc.
Finally, running Facebook and Instagram ads is a great way to promote your artist brand & grow your audience. Although the likes of the US & UK are generally expensive to promote in (due to supply and demand of the market), there are dozens of countries with great music scenes in which you can gain a strong audience. For example, Australia, South Korea, Brazil & Mexico all have very low costs of running Facebook ads – despite being regional economic powerhouses. With a good knowledge of consumer psychology and targeting, you could easily get 10,000 followers on a $300 ad budget (0.03 per like). This is certainly very cheap compared to the 10 cents (or more) that you will often have to pay in the United States.
Marketing your artist brand does not need to cost thousands of dollars a month in order to get a great result. By optimizing where your money is spent, it can provide endless opportunities of low cost (and sometimes free) promotion to draw attention directly towards your music.