6 Steps To A Successful Online Music Strategy

Here we break down six essential steps every artist needs to take in order to prepare a successful online marketing strategy for themselves and their music.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Although you’ll find plenty of detailed information about most aspects of your online promotion in the latest edition of my Social Media Promotion For Musicians book, here are the six basic steps you’ll need to take in order to prepare for a successful online strategy.  

1. Make your website your main online focal point. Make sure that all your important information is curated there and is easy for a site visitor to find. Chapter 4 will describe what a modern artist website needs to look like and how it should function.

2. Create accounts on the “Big 3” social networks (Facebook, Instagram and YouTube). You can’t be everywhere at once. Even if you could it would take so much time that you’d never have any time to make music, which is what we’re trying to avoid. That said, in order to get the most out of social media promotion, you need the following:

• A Facebook page. Regardless of how you feel about Facebook, you still need a presence on it if for no other reason than it’s easy proximity to lots of potential new fans. If you’re just starting out, you might want to start with a personal page instead of a fan site though. It can be embarrassing to have a fan page with only a few followers, and a personal site is a way to gain some momentum before you make the leap. We’ll cover the ins and outs of Facebook in Chapter 6.
• A YouTube channel. Videos are such a major part of any musician, artist or band‘s online presence that you really need your own channel to exploit them successfully. Chapter 8 will describe how.
• An Instagram account. Instagram is now an absolutely necessary network to participate in. It’s still growing and has a number of unique features that work particularly well for anyone in the music business. We’ll delve into Instagram more in Chapter 7.
• A look at other networks. As I’ve pointed out previously, there are a ton of other social networks and a many of them might deserve your attention at some point. There comes a point where the amount of time invested versus the potential outcome just doesn’t balance out, which is why you should probably stay with the previous three networks, or even just a couple of them, until you’re really comfortable before you decide to take on another one. The only exception to that would be if a big portion of your audience is on a particular network other than the “Big 3,” then you might want to substitute that network for Instagram.

3. Use a social media broadcast app for all your updates. An app like Buffer or Hootsuite is one of the keys to streamlining the process that saves time and makes what you do online more efficient. We’ll discuss these and other similar apps throughout the book.

4. Develop your social media sites so they all feed viewers into your main site. The key is to make sure that any viewer on any site is aware that you have a website and knows that it’s the main repository of information about you.

5. Be sure that email list subscribers from all sites go to same master list provider. Different mailing lists don’t do you much good if you have to create a separate newsletter blast for each one. We’ll look at mailing lists, list providers, and newsletters in Chapter 5.

6. Get third party help when you get to the point where you’re overwhelmed. If your popularity as an artist is growing, at some point social-media management gets too complex to maintain and third-party help is needed. This is usually a good thing, since that means you’ve progressed to where things are so massive that you can’t keep up. Furthermore, a company that specializes in social-media management can keep you current with new tools and techniques that you might not be aware of. Even when outside help arrives, remember that you’re still the one that drives the bus. Be sure to take part in all strategy discussions, but leave the actual facilitation to the company or person that you’ve hired.

Having a sound online strategy is the key to successful promotion. The upcoming chapters of this book will examine each of the above points in much more detail as you learn the ins and outs of how this is accomplished.

TIP: The order of importance of your online components is (1) website, (2) mailing list, (3) Facebook, (4) YouTube, (5) Instagram, (6) blog. The order of importance of numbers 3 to 6 may change, but your website and mailing list will always be the most important.

You can read more from Social Media Promotion For Musicians Third Edition and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.
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