Marketing Plan Development for Musicians and Music Groups

 

Regardless of your advancement in the music industry, whether you are a musician or an independent band, you must fine-tune the marketing of your music.

Although I agree that the mere mention of the term "marketing" can cool the three-quarters of artists wanting a career, it really is what will make the difference in the long run for you.

After all, marketing is all that will help you attract more fans and attention to your music: your branding, your online presence, your content strategy, advertising, press relations, your monetization strategy, your fan-artist relationship, etc.

To help you formulate your marketing strategy, today I propose that you go further in the development of your marketing plan musicians.

What is a marketing plan?

According to Wikipedia, this is the " plan concretely identifying operational actions planned for a given period (eg a year)".

In short, it allows you to visualize your strategy for the coming months (for example for the launch of an album, a crowdfunding campaign, a PR campaign), allowing you to federate more fans, to sell more tickets, supplement your income, get more press and/or have more subscribers, depending on your goals.

In this article, we will return to the essential points to consider when developing your artist marketing plan.

Table of Contents

• The results of your musical project
• Analysis of your musical niche
• Your target audience
• Your goals
• Your budget
• Your provisional schedule
• Example of a Music Group Marketing Plan
• Conclusion

The results of your musical project

First of all, it's vital to start from scratch and put words on your music and your career:

• Briefly describe your career (name, style, city of origin, etc.)
• List some of your accomplishments
• What are some names of artists or bands similar to your music?
• Give the strengths and weaknesses of your musical project
• Mention contacts, media, and assets that you can use for your promo

You can also add to this part your electronic press kit (EPK) .

Analysis of your musical niche

Before going further, it is crucial to understand the market in which you operate.

You need to analyze what is happening in your musical niche, that is to say, both at the level of your local scene and in your musical style in general.

Seeing what works and what does not, you can better differentiate yourself and stick to the expectations of your ideal fans.

Here is a list of things to study about your market:

• Who are the most famous artists in your musical style at the local, regional, national and global levels?
• What do these musicians do to engage their fanbase and develop their daily career?
• What do musicians who struggle to break through do?
• What are the standards of the music niche in terms of concert, merchandising and online presence?
• What is the content strategy of artists focusing on web marketing?
• Who are the influencers in your musical style?

By doing this, you improve your understanding of the market in which you operate, both locally (in your area) and globally (on the Web), which will help greatly for the future.

Your target audience

It can not be repeated enough, but you must know your audience. You must know who you are talking to. You must know your ideal fan.

Because it is by knowing your target by heart that your communication will evolve and that it will be much easier for it to identify with your musical project.

You will know which media to focus on, which tone to adopt, which offers to offer, etc.

However, do not make the mistake of targeting a lambda fan. If he is not engaged with your musical project, he is not your ideal fan. So, focus on your super fan, the one who works word of mouth, who comes to your concerts and who buys your music.

• How old is your ideal fan? Is it a man or a woman? Where does he live?
• Is he more introverted or extroverted? What makes him passionate outside of music?
• What would he like to buy you? What other artists are similar to your favorite musician?
• On which sites and social networks does he spend his time online? How does he discover new artists? How does he listen to music?

We could go on for a while, but you can see where I'm going.

Do not go into too much detail either, to the point of being stuck on this stage. The goal is above all to have a global understanding of your ideal fan to whom you wish to address.

Your goals

In the end, what differentiates the marketing plan from the marketing strategy is that the plan revolves around a single marketing campaign over a given period. He has a clear mission.

Thus, you must be able to set concrete goals for this promotional campaign.

If you release a new album, what is your real goal? Knowing that it must be a SMART objective, that is to say specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and defined in time.

For example, it may be selling XXX albums in the X months following the launch.

By defining your goals in this way, you will easily measure the effectiveness of your marketing plan. In addition, we can also formulate goals related to streaming or views on your clips.

In this example, the number of albums sold is our key performance indicator (or KPI) . It is this indicator that we will monitor daily to see if everything is fine.

But we can also add other more secondary indicators, to better analyze the results, such as the conversion rate or the size of your fanbase.

Your budget

It's nice to have goals, but if your budget does not allow you to reach them, then they are not realistic and should not be considered in this form.

One thing that many musicians do not realize is that they need to budget. The main goal is to not end up with an overdraft in the middle of your campaign. It's better.

This serves to minimize risks, but also to consider at the right time all sources of income to finance your project.

So, it is best to determine your upstream budget to find out what you can afford.

Consider all the alternatives to get the best value for money, but make sure your plan is realistic or you will never achieve your goals.

Your provisional schedule

Now that you know who you are talking to, that you have estimated your budget, and that you have set specific goals, you can put your plan into action.

In short, we are talking here about all the operational actions that you will perform to achieve your goals.

And this can bring together many areas depending on the purpose: advertising, networking, booking, press relations, community management, content creation, branding, distribution, etc.

First define the points that you will prioritize over the weeks and how. If your marketing plan is for a long time (6 months to 1 year), spend more time in the first quarter, even if you have to update your marketing plan after several months.

Indeed, you risk losing too much time planning everything in advance, since there is a good chance that the situation will evolve and put your schedule in bad shape.

The easiest way to proceed is to create in a spreadsheet retro planning, that is to say, a kind of calendar, with the main categories of tasks to be performed on the X-axis and the ordinarily the months or weeks to come. At the intersection, you can detail the type of specific task to be performed at that time.

This retro planning will allow you to have a global vision of the work to be done on this period.

A promo campaign can be quite heavy and laborious, the more you can gain in simplicity, the easier it will be to take action effectively.

Afterward, your role will be to analyze the results of your efforts in relation to the objectives that you have defined. It may be necessary to adjust the formula to remove what works the least and amplify what works best.

You can also possibly cut out your marketing plan in several phases according to the nature of the campaign (example: pre-launch, exit, promotion).

Example of a Music Group Marketing Plan

On this page, you will find the marketing plan of the alt-J (Δ ) English alternative rock band.

This plan describes how the group set out to become known in the US market, after conquering the United Kingdom. To read!

Conclusion

Naturally, artists do not have the reflex to create marketing plans when they really need, that is to say, to design promo campaigns worthy of the name.

However, trust me, any efforts you make in the realization of such a document will pay off in the future, if you follow these various tips.

This will save you time, money and peace of mind. Nothing beats a prepared musician.

Musically,