Tips to Master Music Marketing As An Independent Artist

So, you wanna master music marketing? As an independent artist, getting to grips with the fundamentals of music marketing is key if you want to reduce chaos and embrace a sense of calm as you scale your career. Below we outline 5 useful tips for mastering music marketing.

1: Pick up to two (maximum 3) strategies at a time.

To begin with, creating and sticking to a marketing strategy can be confusing, especially if you don't have any marketing experience. Once you've identified up to two strategies to market yourself, say, engaging with potential fans every day for 60-days and running paid ads for 30-days, you should stick only to these two during that time period.

The reason for sticking to 1 to 2 strategies at most is because you don't want to fatigue your brain and keep up with several things at once. Once your marketing becomes confused, you lose control over everything and sadly it's downhill from there.

Be sure to stick to a couple strategies at a time, and focus on executing on them really well.

2: Track before & after Metrics

You'll never know whether a marketing strategy was good or not if you don't track your key performance indicators (KPI's) before and after your campaign.

Using the example above once again, if my strategy for the next 60-days was to engage with my potential fans on Instagram, I'd want to make sure that before I start engaging, that I write down any metrics I want to grow. For example, what's my current follower count on day one? How many streams am I getting on day one? How many impressions is my page getting on day one?

Once you write those down, you can then begin your marketing strategy. After 60-days (or whatever time period you create), you can compare your results and see if you did well or not!

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3: Plan Tasks Before-hand

Once you've identified a marketing plan (either paid or free), you'll want to plan out each task you'll need to perform in order to reach your goals. For example, if your marketing goal is to reach 100 followers by next week, your tasks could be:

• Engage with 100 people per day on Instagram
• Post 2-3 new pieces of content this week

Once you've identified your tasks, simply plot them out in a document or calendar so you know when you'll need to do them. This helps keep you on track so you meet as many of your marketing goals as possible!

4: Keep It Simple At First

The reason for using the Instagram engagement example so many times in this article is because it's easy. As an up & coming artist, the last thing you want to do is to overcomplicate marketing and get so in-depth that you burn out.

Do your best to keep your marketing strategy simple, achievable and minimal. By taking this approach, you'll allow yourself plenty of time for planning tasks and executing on them with great effort.

5: Embrace Failure + Patience

If every artist succeeded with their marketing plans, there'd be no failures. But there are, so try not to get caught up in them. From time to time you'll miss your goals/targets. It's normal and all a part of the process. Instead of letting failure define you, allow it to teach you.

Just as people say, "Success leaves clues", so too do the failures of those who have succeeded. (Share this on Twitter).

Over time and with experience running your own marketing plans, you'll get better and predicting more accurate goals as well as understanding which tasks will take up more or less time to complete. Marketing as an independent artist is all a process of refinement until you find something that works well.

Recap: How to Master Music Marketing As An Independent Artist

• Pick a small number of strategies to focus on at once. Ideally one, but at most 2-3.
• Track your before and after metrics for every campaign to see your growth.
• Plan tasks before starting a marketing campaign, this helps keep you organized and focussed.
• Keep your marketing plans simple and easy to follow so you avoid burning out.
• Allow failure to guide towards making better goal predictions and marketing plans in the future. Embrace failure and let it teach you valuable lessons.