Setting Realistic Goals For Your Music Promotion: Musician’s Guide
While cultivating a huge audience is typically the end goal of your music promotion efforts, having that as your only milestone can be discouraging, and overall detrimental to the furthering of your music business career. Here we look at how to set more attainable goals for your music promotion.
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Guest post from LANDR
On the surface, the goal of your music promotion seems pretty straightforward.
You want to grow your following enough to bring your music to a huge audience.
But treating your goals as benchmarks for success when you’re starting out is a huge mistake.
You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment if your music promotion goals don’t fit the scale of your project.
You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment if your music promotion goals don’t fit the scale of your project.
The only way to be effective with your promotion is to set realistic goals that build on each other to give you a clear path to growth.
Here’s how to set meaningful music promotion goals in 5 steps.
1. Outline your key channels
You already know you want growth. But it’s difficult to know where to find it.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the different places to promote your music take the time to pause and take a step back.
Music promotion is time consuming and expensive. Find the channels that matter most and focus your efforts there.
The most meaningful channels can vary for different genres, styles or communities. There’s no easy answers.
Find out where to put your promotion muscle by researching where successful artists in your niche are doing well.
Find out where to put your promotion muscle by researching where successful artists in your niche are doing well.
Pay attention to artists just above your level—not to copy their techniques, just to get an idea of what growing in the right direction looks like.
Realistic and significant success might be less ambitious than you think!
2. Find the metrics that matter most
Once you know which channels to look at it’s time to decide which numbers actually matter.
On Spotify alone there are multiple ways you can measure engagement with your music.
Number of streams might seem like the clear winner, but Followers and Monthly Listeners also have a big impact!
Adapt your goals to which metrics make most sense to you and your fanbase.
Adapt your goals to which metrics make most sense to you and your fanbase.
Of course, none of that matters if your main focus is a different platform.
Spend some time getting familiar with the mechanics of the channels you’re targeting. It will help you connect your promotion efforts to all the important metrics and show you which metrics you’d be wise to avoid.
When you know where to look and what to look for you’ll have a much better idea of what a realistic goal is for promotion on that channel.
3. Track your progress
Explosive growth or viral success is always possible, but it’s much rarer than the steady increase you get from giving your music promotion consistent attention.
Track the progress you’ve already made and pinpoint the reasons you saw increased growth during a certain period. You’ll never know where to go next without identifying trends in your growth.
Use your streaming analytics in LANDR’s distribution dashboard to get all the insights you need.
Watch how your key metrics evolve over time and pay attention to how your initiatives make an impact.
Watch how your key metrics evolve over time and pay attention to how your initiatives make an impact.
This will give you some surprising insights into how to keep your music promotion on track.
4. Celebrate milestones
The best part of having clearly defined goals is that you get to celebrate success early—and often.
But it’s not just to pat yourself on the back. Documenting your milestones is how you evaluate your timelines.
If things aren’t growing as fast as you’re expecting, adjust your plans to make them more realistic.
For example: doubling your followers isn’t too difficult when you’ve still got a small audience—but it gets harder the more attention you get!
Soon, the scope of your milestones will shift together with your progress. That’s always worth celebrating!
5. Double down on what works
When you’ve seen what works and how it affects the pace of your growth, you’ll know what initiatives to stick with and which to ditch.
With a handful of successful promotion techniques in your toolbox you’ll have a clear idea of what methods to spend more time on.
With a handful of successful promotion techniques in your toolbox you’ll have a clear idea of what methods to spend more time on.
This will give you the confidence to know when your promotion goals are realistic and achievable.
Did your YouTube subscribers grow when you started posting once per week? Great! Time to figure how you can post twice next week.
Real results
Set goals for your music promotion. It’s one of the most important parts of moving your project forward.
There’s no way to make strides with promotion if you don’t have an idea of where you hope to end up.
And if you set goals that don’t make sense, you’ll get discouraged even when you’re making meaningful progress on a scale that’s more relevant to where you are.
Use these tips to help yourself plan to win with your music promotion goals.
