4 Steps To Follow When Planning Your Music Release Strategy
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Having a solid music release strategy in place can help you build a concrete fan base and connect with your target audience. Effective music release strategies are based around grabbing attention and increasing engagement.
Promoting new music should never start on the day of the release. Having a music release strategy in place is beneficial because it allows you to create conversations with your fans, build up excitement and convert casual listeners into super fans.
Snippets and previews help you to create a story around your music and brand. Videos that are native to social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. are great for establishing a presence within your target audience.
One of the main components of a music release strategy is to build brand awareness and put you in a position to achieve a high percentage of conversions. Music release strategies can help artists answer the following questions:
- How can you reach new fans and automatically build a fan base?
- How can you build a brand and stand out in your city, state, region, etc?
- How can you turn casual fans into brand advocates?
- How can you use economics to build a fan base?
- How can you engage your current fans and build a deeper connection with them?
Below, I am going to deep dive into the ‘4 Steps To Follow When Planning Your Music Release Strategy’. This formula can be applied to video marketing, product promotions and live events.
1. Determine Your Budget
When planning your music release strategy it’s important to determine your budget. Budgets are important for a number of reasons including the following:
- It helps you visualize your goals and remain focused.
- Spend money that you don’t have and creates a habit of saving. (It’s not what make — it’s how much you spend.)
- It helps you prepare for unforeseen events and emergencies.
- It helps identify bad spending habits (by you or members of your supporting team)
Anything that can be measured, can be improved. If you plan to advertise your release on Facebook (locally), budgeting is a great way to keep track of your results. You can start with $100 and grow from there. Every penny matters, so be precise and well thought out.
2. Choose Social Media Platforms
It’s essential for you to choose which social media platforms you’re going to promote your music through. With the rise of digital distribution, having a presence on social media can be a great way to increase engagement.
Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can play a big part in shedding light on your content and growing a core fan base. The key is to interconnect your social media platforms and streaming services to create an ecosystem for your music to live.
Create a plan to make sure your content and links are creating a path for users to discover, advocate and show loyalty.
3. Create Promotional Content
Releasing promotional content is comparable to playing a game of Chess involving your audience, your brand, other artists, social algorithms and the real world. The play is to create around 10–15 pieces of content that are specific to platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Promotional content can include lyric videos, animation, reaction videos, etc. Make sure that the content is native to your social media platform of choice and fits naturally within the design. One of the bigger names to benefit from this scheme is the rapper Russ. Every time he dropped a song, he would go on Twitter/Instagram and record himself singing/rapping the lyrics.
4. Develop A Content Schedule
Last — and most importantly — create a content schedule. Content schedules are great way to strategize around when you’re going to release content. It give fans a timeline of events, allows media outlets and other artists to follow your journey.
Internally, this process creates a designated scheme with everyone on your team operating as one unit. Each member of the organization will have a clear understanding about who is doing what during the production process.
Content schedules are mainly about creating a routine and are a great way to measure success. An importance should be placed on content schedules because they are a big part of your ecosystem and can help amplify your marketing funnel.
A lot of what goes into the success of a music release is artist development and infrastructure. The process is time consuming and very much worth the effort. Once you have a music release strategy in place, you can focus on refining, creating value and continual growth.
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