Musician’s Guide to Inbound Marketing in 5 Steps

So you are a musician and are looking for ways to promote your music and your act. Music means business to you and like in any business, it can be hard to attract new customers initially and generate interest from venues, music festivals or events. This can become even more difficult when you have to compete with thousands of other promising acts for your slice of fame. But before you hire a  manager, there are a series of methods you could try to drive interest in your music and lead people to you. That’s right, this is where Inbound Marketing comes in!

What is Inbound Marketing?

If you’re new to digital marketing, the concept of inbound  might seem a little fuzzy as it’s a relatively new concept that’s almost exclusive to the Internet. Inbound marketing, effectively, is a means of enabling your brand/music to get found by customers. There are a couple of ways to go about doing that.

According to MoZ, “Inbound marketing, in general, means finding ways to come to your online content, First step, “Attract” people (personas- fans or others you want to reach) ,rather than “pushing” them towards you with overt advertisements (outbound marketing). The heart of it is to earning your customers instead of buying them. Then use “Content Driven Lead Generation” and nurturing activities to attract customers. In other words: attract fans, venues, festivals, labels, music professionals, media etc to your blog/website or eventually your social media profile. Further motivate your unique visitors to sign up a form (convert visitors to leads), and follow them up with more interesting and relevant content (nurturing). The next step in your plan is to convert your leads to become real fans or customers.”

1. Know Your Fans

Knowing who your fans (or personas as we would like to call them) are is the first step in the right direction. You need to know who you want to reach. Here are some categories you could consider:

  • Age and Gender
  • Background and Demographic Information
  • Personality and Interests (music lover, music taste, culture behavior regarding concerts, festivals, etc)
  • Music Buying Preferences: How do they acquire and listen to music? Do they stream music or download it? Do they prefer CD`s or Vinyl? Would they be interested in live streaming?
  • Behavior: How do they find music and artists? (social media, search, through friends or other sources).

To get access to this information, ask people around you, or other artists in your genre or music professionals.

2.  Create Amazing Content

Great content is a prerequisite to attract any audience. Focus on creating unique content that could attract your potential fans. Your content needs to be so remarkable that people find it, read it or watch it, and hopefully share your content link with others.

3. Nurturing (follow up) – With New Relevant Content

4. Convert Visitors

To Leads You could also insert clippings towards the end of those videos announcing new content, upcoming gigs and related stuff..  

Constantly update them with new relevant content like videos, promote new songs, tour dates, gigs, limited edition merchandise etc. The goal is to bring them one step deeper into your marketing funnel, and you keep on marketing to them until they are ready to take a decision on becoming real fans or customers.

You can also create playlists on Spotify or Youtube publish it on your site or blog. This way newer audiences would have easy access to all your  older content. Remember to let people post feedback on your content and engage with them.

The fact of the matter is that people use the Internet to search for information. When you just play along and provide exactly the kind of information that they’re searching for, you’re just blending in and not coming across as salesy at all.

other words, with inbound, you’re meeting people where they’re at. That keeps their defenses down.The key here is to provide content that ranks well with the search engines, offers unique information not found elsewhere, and generates curiosity with its headline. Sometimes, providing that type of quality content requires professional assistance. As a result, you might need to make an investment in your content marketing efforts.

However, the payback is worth it. second largest search engine BalconyTV.

In other words, the key to inbound marketing for musicians is to create buzz. If you manage to harness the power of the Internet to get people talking about you, that will drive new listeners to your pages (basically get inbound links), and get you more fans and gigs.

Team Znbound
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