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Hello. My name is Ibrahim Jawara. I am highly motivated about learning and implementing businesses that will enrich and transform the lives of my fellow man (YOU).
This is my life mission and I am very thankful for the people and the experiences that have brought me to this understanding.
I am what you will call a 21st century digital entrepreneur. Constantly learning and striving to enact actions that are customer focused (YOU). I am the founder at Jmusic- singer and songwriter and sidehustle-reviews.com; brands promising to provide the strategies and ideas that will enrich and transform Your life.
Before You continue reading, I want to recommend some books that I believe will have the greatest impact on your life:
1. W. Clement Stone “The Success System That Never Fails“
2. Ryan Holiday, “Growth Hacker Marketing“
3. Ryan Holiday “The Daily Stoic“
4. Bob Proctor “You Were Born Rich
Have you ever gone to a movie premier geared and ready to watch a specific movie title and showed up to the theaters 30 or so minutes earlier?
Well, if you are seated in your seats with your popcorn in hand, you may have realized that before your movie starts playing, you will have no choice but to see commercials of other upcoming movie titles.
They are usually very captivating and even persuasive in sparking your interest.
Well, this is no accident; this is genius marketing at work by top movie promoters in the industry.
If you are a musician aiming for a music career, you are in a business. That is a fact; so, if you are in a business, you will need to learn marketing the right way. From the movie scenario above, there are numerous key principles you should take away from these billion-dollar genius promotion marketers.
Let us now dive into music marketing on the genius level. I will give you my take on the best practices to develop when promoting your music as an independent artist.
In the simplest form, marketing is simply the act or processes a business undertakes to get customers to interact (purchasing products and or services and other forms of customer connection) with their brand.
Overall, marketing focuses on the end goal of customer acquisition and retention.
As a new independent artist, however, you may be primarily focused on generating traffic to your single release or set of music catalogs.
This is a tactic and not a method encompassing the full definition of marketing. Remember, marketing is not just about customer acquisition, but also customer retention.
We will dive in to how to acquire more music listeners (traffic sources), but first we should get your music marketing approach done professionally as a genius.
Your objective will be to get an audience for your music brand and make money with your products and services.
Just like any other business, you will need to formulate a system that can be repeated and implemented over and over again with better and better results.
I don’t just want to show you how to generate traffic but also how to retain (keep) that traffic and make money from your music and other viable products and services.
You must understand, you are in the money business, so, it will not make sense to spend a lot of money on a whole lot of music promotion tactics and not get a return on your money.
You first need to establish your brand. This is a fact you cannot refuse.
Do you know how many musicians there are in the industry? Trust me, the number is astronomical.
Have you realized that, just as you are active in searching for music fans for your single release, there are 100x more musicians fighting for the same music fans that will give them that same attention?
The problem with most musicians online today is how they view their rise to fame from just posting a song out there. I get it, you think your music is the best. There is no competition.
Which is why you believe that as soon as your music is mastered professionally and its promoted online and even offline, then your rise to fame is guaranteed.
The truth is the number of great songs and musicians out there that don’t get the deserved attention is just as large as the amount of musicians you are competing with.
You can blame it on the artist, their likability, their team members, music fans, and much more.
You may even be right when making that assessment; but the one thing that separates most of the great and famous stars today and the new independent artist is simply due to proper music marketing.
Branding is one of those pitfalls. In fact, do you know that if you were signed to a Music Label today, the first thing that music labels will do for you the artist, is to establish your brand?
Yes, it is that important. Branding allows the independent artist to first understand their music and what they are about. In addition, branding allows you to answer specific questions about your approach to music.
These are the things even small to large corporate businesses would have to do in the market, in order to stand out and be recognized. You cannot sell your music to everybody, that is just another fact.
Do not be one of those musicians that believe that a great music video is all you need to get famous. In fact, the idea of getting famous from your music right off the bat is a bad idea.
For example, if you posted a music video on YouTube or Instagram and I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you really did a great job with that music promotion. You may have paid for ads, influencers, and other big marketing agencies to get that video out.
We can also assume that your music video did well. Meaning, you had a lot of people listening, commenting, sharing, and viewing your video. Well? Does that now qualify you as a successful musician?
For the most part, you have not made your money back. Millions of music streaming dose not equate to receiving money for all the music promotion services you had paid for.
Are you going to depend on YouTube monetization, if you had even thought that far ahead?
Also, what about the thousands of other videos out there, generating the same number of views?
How many music videos have you seen online to the point where you just listen, maybe comment and shared, and then forgotten about the artist.
I doubt if you would even remember the artists’ name, or the song title. Without proper branding, and business etiquette, you become the stereotypical starving artist.
I will not go in-depth explaining all the steps, but at least I can point you in the right direction to forming your brand. I implore you to read business books, learn more about your chosen music career, marketing, and proper music promotion for your single release to your entire music journey.
The starting phase of standing out as any brand is knowing your marketing message. Your marketing message is simply knowing who you are, what you do, who you do it for and why you do what it is that you do.
Understand and develop your marketing message. Who you are? what you do? who you do it for? why you do it should be answered with that message.
This step is very important. This will help you when you are developing or creating your logo, website, artist name, colors that represent your brand, and even understanding the people or other businesses you would like to partner up with.
Again, you are in a business. When you have a brand that stands out, you make more money not just from a single release of your music.
I cannot stress enough that you are in business and that you should act as such. So, it would be wise to form a proper business entity. (That would be either an LLC, or another form of corporation.)
I do not advice for you to stay a sole proprietor especially in the music business. This is the business where many participants are extremely passionate about their creative works, as such the likely hood for lawsuits is high.
So, protect your business and your creative works under the umbrella of a separate entity from you personally.
We are in the age of streaming services. Meaning, most music listeners are now discovering artist on music platforms and as such, you need a brand presence online not just offline where you may be doing a lot of live events.
Develop your website with your chosen colors that closely follows your brands marketing message. Your website is the go-to channel that would allow you to sell merchandise, other services and most importantly to create a lasting relationship with your fans.
Emails, for the longest time now, has been the one guarantee to reaching your fans and letting them know of your single release or other music promotion services you are doing.
Speaking of websites, its especially important that you also include a blog with your website. Currently, a blog is the content strategy that brings attention to your website brand.
A billion plus searches are done through google and other search engines for specific topics.
If you can answer some of these questions or provide the services that are in demand, it would bring a lot of attention to your brand and it may get you an outstanding email subscriber list of people that would love to listen to your music.
When you are in the music business, music is not the only thing that you can sell. You are going to need a lot of money, and as such, you need to position yourself to acquire it.
The best time to promote your single release is two to three months before you have even created the music. I will explain.
See any form of promotion requires time to embed in the minds of prospective customers your intention or upcoming music so fans have the time to find out about you and let you know that it’s ok to contact them on the day of your single release.
Remember the scenario at the start of this article of how movie promotions are done? Well, you should be doing the same things.
From the scenario given, I had said, you can learn a lot from this simple promotion hack from experienced professionals in marketing.
First of all, these movie promotions are “trailers” showing you what is to come. It gives movie promoters the time to build interest in you as the movie watcher.
Another important aspect of this type of promotion you should learn from is the fact that, these trailers are not being showed on every movie premier.
It goes back to the branding. You would not put a movie commercial trailer for an upcoming action movie on a movie premier that is not targeted to the right audience.
For example, and action movie trailer would not be suitable for a movie premier that revolves around something less dramatic and completely not for movie watchers that are into action movies.
That would be a waste of marketing dollars. So yes, the movie trailers shown before the movie you came to watch are specifically targeted to you because you have shown interest in that type of movie selection.
That is marketing 101; reaching the people that are most likely to like and appreciate your style of music is the best approach to take when it comes down to music promotion of your single release.
Therefore I recommend you give enough time, before your single release, to find these music fans and for you to build interest.
The best-case scenario would be, that these music fans start searching for you as a brand, and even giving you their emails so you can contact them on the day of your single release.
This helps to rank your music on these streaming platforms because it looks popular in their eyes.
Imagine putting out your single on all music streaming websites and getting hundreds of music listeners streaming your music on that day.
That is what it takes for the streaming platforms to push your music to even more listeners that are like the individuals that you have purposefully told to go and stream your music.
That is the essence of a genius music marketing strategy.
It all starts with building a presence online and offline and creating a connection with individuals; aka directing and retrieving emails through your website.
Building a fan base should be your first objective before you put any effort into your music promotion strategy. Let us talk about the different ways you can do that.
This is perhaps the best method of building a fan base. This is because, you are doing live shows where music lovers get to see you, and hear you perform in front of them.
From there you can ask them in person to provide their emails so you can contact them when its most important for your single-release promotion or to follow you on your various social media profiles.
Never forget, that getting fans’ emails and other forms of contact during your live shows is the most important aspect of your music marketing promotion strategy.
It goes without saying that building a fan base online is particularly important and as such you should have your brand on all the most important social media websites and apps that cater to musicians.
You should also put in the work by interacting and engaging with the people that comment and love your videos.
The main objective again, is to build trust and a solid relationship with fans so they can work with you in providing their contact information on your website and pushing out your music to other enthusiastic music listeners.
Below are my chosen favorites, but you should explore for more options that match your brand. The type of content you provide on these social media profiles is entirely up to you, but it goes without saying, that your content should promote your music.
This also makes it easier for your fans to consume your music promotion efforts.
*It is also important to note, when you have a branded logo, it makes sense to interact with other users’ videos. Just commenting alone, is enough to bring brand recognition and will aid users to check your page and return the favor by following and interacting with your videos.
Do further research into how to gain more followers, and remember once again, that your goal is to get a solid connection in the form of website email acquisition.
Users can use your music to create their own creative videos and if you’ve done everything you are supposed to do when licensing your music, (I will talk about music licensing soon) their popularity becomes your gain. Meaning financially.
A platform of business geared folks is more open to hear different perspectives with whatever your chosen topic happens to be. Video is also welcome.
Keep in mind, the number of social media accounts out there is tremendous, so I recommend you have your brand on 4 -5 and really hone-in on the platforms most suitable for your brand.
This is because, YouTube which is a platform that is owned by Google, is exceptionally good at monetizing your videos, making sure your views are real, and it’s associated with Google’s search engine.
You can get a 1000views on an Instagram video but that does not mean anything at the end of the day.
With YouTube however, since its also a search engine, that 1000views pushes your brand at the forefront of some search topics if you had planned it out right.
You should optimize for search engine traffic. Heck, I literally wrote the book on Search Engine Optimization.
Soundcloud is great because you can build relationships with other independent artists, and this is where users go to find and discover new music.
It is a no brainer. Again, remember, all these social media profiles should be branded and work to transition loyal fans to your website domain and for a lasting relationship to manifest.
The best way to do music promotion for your single release or entire music collection, is to do music marketing with a business mindset.
You do not want to start today to promote your single release without an audience, a brand, a system to weigh the results, and enough time to build interest or even time to find the right audience.
What we have talked about today, is building your foundation, which will allow you to continuously promote singles upon singles whenever you would like.
Your approach to building an audience first, amplifies your music promotion efforts, and would allow you to make more money than you spent on marketing your music. The golden rule to any success in business is audience (customers) and money. They go hand in hand.
Now that we are done talking about the foundation of your music marketing strategy, which is your brand, your audience, and your money, lets dive into the steps you should take to make money from your single release.
I am going to assume; you already know how to properly license your music to make sure you collect all royalties. Royalties from all the specific streaming services and the videos you create on whatever chosen platforms.
I will repeat it again, you have to focus on the money you should make from your single once its released.
Below are just some of the steps you should take when you create your music single, but I would implore you to do further research to all the other ways to collect all the monies due to you as a producer of a music single.
I may be a bit bias since as a brand we also offer blog content for new singer songwriters, and independent artists but the results are in the pudding. Visit our blog promotion page and choose the package you can commit to. Click here.
In addition, I want to introduce you to an industry professional called, Kristine Mirelle.
She is an artist that has created an extensive list of other blogs and relevant music industry professionals that will benefit you if you connect with them.
Look her up, she is a musician as well that has done several live events and is immensely popular on social media.
She offers this information in the form of an eBook.
Do not worry, for the valuable information she provides, she is charging way below market value. I love her offer. Click here.
🛑ATTN ALL ARTISTS!! Do You Want Your Music To Go Viral? 🛑
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Remember as a business brand, you need a system that will test how effective your marketing campaigns were.
Through the creation of a smart link or landing page on your website, you should be able to include a tracking code that will give you all the relevant data you will need.
Before the launch of your single release, you need to do announcement content posts on your various platforms.
This will include, populating your social media pages with a banner that tells fans of the date of your upcoming single release and posting a video advert (like how the movie trailer marketing professionals are doing) on the forefront of your social media pages.
That my friend is the essence of proper genius level music marketing you should perform.
Although, I did not go in-depth explaining every concept, you should now have the idea as to how you should do music promotion for your single release efficiently and effectively.
The only other things you will need to do from your pre-launch stage to your actual single release date, is all the activities you have been doing to build your brand presence and attaining life-long music fans.
WORDPRESS: PLANNING MARKETING SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)
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