After the creative outlet and thrill of making good music, the best feeling is sharing it with the people who will appreciate it—your fans—and you’re looking for more of them than just friends and family!
Building your fanbase is a very strategic endeavor for any business. It’s where labels spend most of their money on an artist and where businesses make significant investments of money and time to get their name and product out there.
As an artist, you are a small business, so your task is no different. While you may not have the money or resources of a major label, you do have just as much—if not more—passion, hustle, and creativity. This, along with available technology, can allow you to create a significant impact. Music is more democratized than ever, and getting your product out is easier than ever.
You successfully build a strong fanbase by creating a strategy that lets potential fans find you through many different channels.
If you have read The Primer: Marketing 101 - Branding and Strategy, and implemented its lessons, you have already begun building an authentic brand and playing to your strengths. Now it’s time to tie that into your social media, website, emails, and networking to share it with the world.
The strategy I suggest employing is content marketing, for many reasons. Most importantly, it will help elevate you from a music artist to a media company. In today’s world, you’ll need to be a media company in order to successfully engage fans/customers. Throughout this book, we’ll detail why that’s important and how you can adopt this mindset today!
Content Marketing Defined
So what is content marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as, “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and ultimately drive a profitable customer interaction.”
The music industry has actually been doing this as a foundational element of its marketing for years by making and distributing songs and music videos.
That makes it a perfect strategy for you because fans are already familiar with it.
Why Use Content Marketing
Look at your music as the minimum viable product or the foundational product you offer. The minimum viable product is the foundational product you can make that you offer that delivers a customer value. Now when we say minimum viable product, we don’t mean that the music is not important. Simply put, your minimum viable product is the base everything else is built on.
Music’s your main focus, so doesn’t it make sense to use a marketing strategy that enhances your focus on that foundational product?
Content marketing fits seamlessly into what you as an artist are already doing; in fact it gives you more avenues to create, using other mediums.
In the marketing world, some are claiming that content marketing is dead. Content marketing is alive and well, it is just evolving. Like with traditional marketing, which uses as banner ads, magazine ads, and commercials that are easy to ignore, audiences are more selective in the content they consume. Your content can’t rush to push a sale to be effective, but instead should provide consumers value, an experience, and show authenticity first, and then a sale should come later. Those saying that content marketing is dying and point to influencer marketing as the next frontier, fail to realize that people become influencers because consumers connect with their content.
Customers—or in your case potential fans—are consistently searching for content. Providing it for them is what you do anyway; so why not get those creative ideas out and create content that boosts your music and your brand while expanding your reach?
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This was an excerpt from The Noise Complaints Group’s 2nd ebook, Primer series: Music Marketing 101: Building a Fanbase. In this book artist can learn how to use content marketing to build their fanbase using practical strategies to begin building an army of loyal fans by using both digital and physical marketing tactics. To read the full book, visit our online store.