Marketing Plan Step 2 of 3
Step 1 of drafting your marketing plan provided you the fundamentals, which this step (step 2) will now build off of to plan out which routes to take, when marketing your music.
Now that you have a clear understanding of your music, including your objectives and target market, you're able to take the guess work out of planning your music release.
It is as if you have a blueprint for the success of your release now. We can assume that in your prior releases (assuming this is not your first one), you did not know what language to use when promoting it, what emojis to use in the captions, what hashtags to use, or more specifically, what distribution channels to use, and what type of content you should be releasing (videos, pictures, carousels, reels, TikToks, blogs, doing interviews etc.)?
That will all be crystal clear now from the work you have already put in, in step 1. Just be sure to refer back to the answers you have on step 1, when answering the below questions, to ensure a cohesive overall plan.
You already know what message will resonate with your target market, because you have pinpointed exactly who they are. All you need to think about now, is how you will reach them?
1. Determining How to Reach Your Target Market
What distribution channels will you use?
You know who are your target market is, but you might not be exactly sure where to find them yet. Do yourself a favor and spend some time researching all the potential distribution channels, to learn about the audiences that are most often associated to each.
Remember, distribution is ultimately where your fans will go to find your music. In addition to that, learn about the pros and cons of each channel. You may find that splitting your budget between a few channels will be your best bet.
This is also recommended initially, so that you can see which channel provides you the best results. If you only pick one channel, as you will have nothing to compare it to, you will not know if it is a good use of your resources, whereas if you compare multiple channels, you can clearly see which performs best (assuming all other variables are the same).
When testing, it is critical to only change one element, to be certain that the one element is the driving force of the results. In this case, that one element would be the distribution channel, whereas everything else would be identical, such as the message and target market.
What promotional practices will you use?
Once you know which distribution channel(s) to use, you can then plan out the promotional practices you will use. In other words, how will you promote your music to your audience?
Does mass marketing work, or do you need to be more personal? Do your fans like to get information from emails (which would then involve gathering emails to create an email list), or would they rather get information through social media, or some other medium?
Remember, this information should now be as clear as day to you, given the brainstorming and testing of assumptions you would have already done in step 1 of your marketing plan.
What content will you release?
Next, you need to determine the type of content you will release, to best reach your target market. Do your fans resonate best with video content, interactive posts, long text explainers, or something else?
As you know your target audience, you can most-likely make a quite educated guess regarding this, however testing various methods and assessing the form of content that does the best is still a solid option, to confirm your assumption(s).
You could also look at what other artists are doing (who may share the same target market as yourself), however there are many things to take into account if you decide to do that.
The biggest is that no two artists are the same, and even if you have the same target market as another artist, you are most-likely not at the same stage as them, whether you are further along in your career, or vice versa, or they are marketing for a tour, and you are marketing for an album release, etc.
During this phase of finding out what content is best, continue to do what works, tweak what is working okay (to make it better), and completely stop anything that is not bringing in positive (or beneficial) results.
When will you release that content and how much content should you release?
Now that you know what content to release, you need to understand when to release that content, and how frequently.
As for when to release that content, look at all the data you have, in terms of which days, (and time of day) you receive the most exposure and engagement.
Whatever time that is, release your content just prior to that, (about 30 minutes before), so that you catch all your fans who will be on during the "hot" period, so to speak.
As for how frequently to release content it will come down to studying your target market and identifying any trends. For example, do you notice a falloff in terms of engagement after a certain number of posts each week?
Or are your fans opting out of notifications, such as email notifications after a certain number of emails sent?
Another way to determine this is simply ask your fans through polls, direct messages, or prompts. This will give you the most accurate information.
How will you nurture your audience, to create a long-lasting career?
This is the last important question to answer, but arguably the most important. Whenever you are "selling" anything (especially for the first time), the majority of customers, or in this case listeners, may not be ready to support you on your music journey.
What you will find is that the majority of people you market to will be at the top of the funnel (which is ultimately those that are just learning about you, your music and your journey).
There may only be about 10% that are ready to support you (or as known in marketing terms, those at the bottom of the funnel). These are those that know about you, resonate with your music and as a result will stream it, buy your merchandise, attend your concerts, etc.
Since the majority of your audience will be at the top of funnel, you need to develop a way to nurture them, so that when you draw new people to your music (or to your social page), you are able to continue to provide them value, (however that may look to them), to move them along the funnel.
This could be done by sending them personal messages, liking their content, including them in your music decisions, are something else, which step one of the marketing plan you had already completed, should reveal.
That is all for step 2 of 3 of drafting your marketing plan. We have another blog on the third and final step, which is the execution of everything you had already drafted.