The sheer variety of marketing options online may seem intimidating for an artist, which makes it all the more necessary to develop a comprehensive promotional strategy beforehand in order to get the most from your promotional activities and online presence.
If you’re an artist or band it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by all the options online. That’s why you need a solid strategy to make sure you don’t spend more time than is necessary spinning your wheels, and really get the promotional value you want from your online presence. My Social Media Promotion for Musicians book lays out a promotion strategy for this, and here’s an excerpt that provides an overview of the 3 elements of online promotion that should bring it all into focus if you have any confusion at all.
“There are a lot of online elements that every artist, band or brand has to be involved in these days in order to be an effective online marketer. It’s pretty easy to get confused and either not know where to begin, or throw yourself scattershot at all of them, which usually means that your efforts will be ineffective when it comes to promotion. If we just look at the major components, it looks something like this:
Your website
Your email list
Facebook and Google+ posts
Twitter
Music releases
YouTube video posts
Blog posts
Throw in any of the 100+ additional networks available and it’s no wonder why artists, bands and music execs become bewildered by it all. We can make things a bit simpler by separating these components so they fall into one of three categories; content, interaction and tactics. If we break all this out, it looks like this:
1. Content: the places online where you place the material that you generate, like information about your band, music, videos, or blog posts. Interaction is all the social networks where you might interact with your fans and followers. These include:
Your website
Your mailing list
Your blog
Your videos on Youtube and other video sites
Your music files on Soundcloud or other music hosting sites
2. Interaction: the places where you regularly communicate with your fans, followers, clients and customers. These include:
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Pinterest
Bookmarking
Instagram
Any other social network
3. Tactics: everything required to define and refine who you are and your position in the online world. These include:
Branding
Strategy
Measurement
All this gets more interesting when we put into the form of a Venn chart on the right and watch how the categories intersect. As you can see, where all three category circles cross, a new element pops up – promotion. This isn’t possible without all three elements combined, which goes to show just how synergistic they all are. Use only one or two and you fall short; use all three and new possibilities for promotion arise. That’s not the promotion strategy though, only the general overview.”