Image credit: Jalen Terry

In a world of marketing advice, cut the wheat from the chaff with your essential checklist of what you need to be doing.

Effective marketing is crucial to reaching listeners, making an impact, and staying relevant. For a thriving career as an artist, you need to make sure you’re reaching the right people and doing it in a way that matters.

Whether you’re a solo artist, part of a band, a producer, and anything in between, music marketing is essential. Thankfully, with the internet a great marketing strategy is also easy, accesible, and as free as you want it to be.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy making sure you’re doing everything right. That’s why we’re writing this article as an easy checklist. Make sure you’re doing each of these things for your best chance at lasting stardom and a huge fanbase.

Go through and check off each topic, or read the section for more detail on how you improve in that area. If you’re even doing half of these things, you’re making great efforts to reach musical success.

1. Know Your Audience

Understanding your audience is often key information for reaching out to the correct people. Finding your audience goes two ways: For a start you must understand who you are as an artist to know who you want to reach and what sort of person likes what you do. Then you can use that information to try and reach those sorts of people for the best chance of having an impact with new listeners.

Find out these things about your primary audience:

  • How old are they?
  • Where do they live?
  • Are they a specific gender?
  • What do they want?
  • Where do they spend their time?

Finding out this information can come from intuition based on the sort of people you know that like similar music to yours. However, don’t underestimate the use of actual data. You can analyse your stats on various platforms to see who you are reaching.

This information allows you to create content that specifically appeals to your target audience. It allows you to focus your time on the platforms that your target audience are most likely to spend time on. It allows you to market in the right direction for the best results.

2. Act Professional

We aren’t talking about being stuffy and wearing a suit, especially if it doesn’t suit your artist persona. Being professional means making sure you have your online presence available and well done, so that any fans or professionals know you’re the real deal and can easily find the content of yours they are after.

Put effort into these areas to look professional with character:

  • Website: Your website is a hub that should be easy to find and contain everything people want to find – bio, links, images, shop, music.
  • Streaming Platform Pages: Artists in the modern age need to have their music on streaming services to reach listeners around the world. Thankfully, you can upload unlimited music to all the world’s top services for free with RouteNote.
  • Branding: Consistent visuals are a fantastic way to bring fans into your world and connect with them across platforms. A logo or a specific aesthetic approach creates cohesion across your websites, pages, and products.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are free billboards to the world. A good social media strategy can mean everything for your career. Social media is also free to use, so no big marketing budgets just to reach some extra eyes – unless you want to pay.

Find out what works for you from these areas:

  • Apps: There are loads of platforms to get involved on but using them all is difficult. Find the apps and platforms that your audience engages with the most.
  • Strategy: Think about things such as when you post and how often to make sure you keep engaging at the right times, without overwhelming people.
  • Content: You have the freedom to post any type of content you like. Find out what sort of content your fans like and that you enjoy making. Consider tutorials, BTS, teasers, updates, and artist info.

4. Email marketing

It might seem old fashioned, but do not underestimate the power of the mailing list. Emails are a fantastic way of reaching out to many people at once, but in a way that each communication ends up in a personal inbox rather than lost in a social media feed.

Try these tricks to level up your email marketing game:

  • Build a List: Collect a mailing list of your fans that you can use to correspond with. There are many ways of collecting emails from your audience, check out PUSH.fm for unique and engaging free marketing tools that can help build your mailing list whilst deepening connections with fans.
  • Segment Your List: Where possible seperate your mailing list by details that you know about them: Demographics, where their email comes from, preferences and interests, etc. This information allows you to tailor different emails to different groups for the best chance of engagement without turning people off.
  • Newsletters: Keep your fans updated on the reg with a newsletter containing the latest about you and your music. This is a great place to tease new music, send fans to merch shops for new drops, and update on gigs and tours to drive feet towards your shows.

5. Collaborate

Never feel alone as an artist. There are millions of people around the world with a huge love for music and by taking part in that community you can only broaden your horizons. Collaboration with other artists is a powerful resource and a sure-fire way to bring in new fans.

Here’s what you should be doing to collaborate with others and why it works:

  • Cross-promote: When you collaborate with another artist, you both welcome an entirely new audience into your music. The artists you collaborate with have a unique set of listeners and with a collab they get the chance to discover you and become huge fans if they like your stuff.
  • Events (online & offline): Gigs are an obvious place to collaborate with other artists and bring together fanbases. Coming together with other artists for events that bring your fans in, and you can even do them online to expand their reach.
  • Influencer Marketing: Collaborating with influencers can be a great way to get in front of a lot of people. Whether you collaborate on some content together or offer up your music for use in their content, influencers have a massive audience to tap into.

6. SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It refers to how well your content is formatted and published to be easily found in search engines. Playing the SEO game is fairly easy when you know what to do but can have huge results – you want people to find you when they search for you right?

  • Optimise Your Website: Make sure your website has been optimised so that fans and new listeners can easily find it when they search you. This includes clear titles and relevant keywords, good linking in and out of your website, and images with alt text. Find more information on this online to really boost your SEO.
  • Create Blog Content: Build a blog into your website where you can post articles about your music and other topics that interest you. Keep it relevant and use keywords and good formatting to bring readers in who can translate into fans if your content relates to your music. For example, tutorials on making beats like the ones in your music can bring in interested creators who also vibe with your tracks.
  • Local SEO: If you’re active in your area then work on your local SEO. This will ensure people in your area can easily find you, great for growing a fanbase around you and for helping people find gigs near them.
  • Keywords: Whether it’s on your website, social media, blog, or social media posts; use keywords to ensure that people can find your content when its relevant to words that they’re looking for.

7. Exclusive Content and Experiences

Listeners are great, but fans are what will make your career happen. The music is the most important thing, but creating lasting connections and reasons for fans to care about you especially will go a really long way. As everyone talks about the power of “superfans”, exclusive content and experiences can upgrade your fanbase into special supporters.

Here are some ways to connect with fans:

  • Limited Edition Merch: Let fans show off how much they love your music with exclusive merch. It’s a great source of income, walking adverts, and a great way to make fans feel special with limited availability.
  • Fan Platforms: Explore platforms that allow your fans to subscribe for exclusive content. These direct connections can allow a special relationship with a great source of income. Regular updates, behind-the-scenes content, unreleased tracks, and much more can entice your biggest fans to pay.
  • Workshops and Tutorials: People who really like your music are likely going to be interested in how you do it. Inspiring fans with creative content that gets them creating themselves can be a great source of content and bring in new audiences who want to learn. You never know, you may end up playing together in the future.

8. Online Communities

Music is communal. We sing together, dance together, listen together, share our love for it together, and create it together. Take part in the huge communities available online to connect with people around the world.

  • Forums: Music forums bring people together to share and discuss music. If you find a community that enjoys the kind of music you make then it’s a great opportunity to connect and introduce your music. A subreddit for your music is an example of a great place to introduce discussion about your music. Posting your content in a relevant subgenre subreddit could also allow you to reach the right new listeners.
  • Discord: Create a Discord channel that allows your fans to come together. In a community they will share content, discuss your music, present theories, and keep conversations about you going.
  • Challenges and Competitions: Users thrive on taking part in challenges especially on platforms like TikTok. Creating challenges and competitions is a really easy way to spark interactions with your content. Why not start a TikTok dance challenge set to your music that is guaranteed to get people creating new content that uses your tracks?
  • Live Streaming: If you have the time, streaming live can produce some authentic connections. Whether you’re streaming something that you’re doing live, or just at home chatting with fans, it lets your audience into your life in a way that deepens their bond with you.

We hope that this article provides some handy advice and direction to take your marketing to the next level. Use this page as a checklist to ensure you’re doing the most important things you can to boost your music stardom.

Let us know in the comments below if this has helped you, which techniques work the best for you, and what sort of advice you’d like to see in future.

Check out the RouteNote Blog for much more artists advice and our YouTube Channel for great videos helping you to advance your music career.