Rock Your Band’s Marketing: 5 Ways To Promote Your Music

The music business is one of the most competitive arenas in existence. With new artists emerging from every corner of the planet daily, you may be wondering how to make yourself or your band stand out from the crowd. The good news is, with some quick and affordable strategies, you can capture the attention of your audience (and new followers) and create a tribe of people who are anxiously waiting to hear from you.
It is important to use a combination of digital marketing strategies as well as traditional marketing to find the perfect mix that works for your audience. With music, there are many times when good old-fashioned grassroots marketing can be just as effective as utilizing social media.
Utilizing these effective strategies, both online and off, is much easier and cost-effective than you may think. Today we’ll take a look at some of the creative strategies you can implement to get more people cheering your name at your next gig.

Let’s Get Creative!

With the advancement of internet and digital applications, endless possibilities are now available to promote your music. Don’t let that overwhelm you. These strategies allow you to experiment and let your creativity run wild. Have fun while you’re at it!
To successfully promote your music in today’s industry you need to continually evolve and try new things. Test out a couple of strategies, learn from those promotions or campaigns, look for opportunities or changes to be made, and fine-tune your strategies to fit your unique career. Let’s dive into some effective and affordable strategies you could be using to promote your music right now.

Strategy #1 – Create Posters & Flyers That Stand Out

If you can catch your audience’s eyes, you can capture their attention. One of the powerful digital resources available today are professionally designed customizable poster and flyer templates. You can customize these digital templates and create stunning visual graphics that can be utilized both in print form and across digital channels. Hand them out around your city, post them on every corner, post it across social media, spread the word anywhere and everywhere you can.
Here are some popular PosterMyWall templates used by musicians to promote their bands and events:

One important thing is to remain consistent with how you are utilizing your attention-grabbing visuals. Once you have created a perfect design for your next gig, utilize that same design across both traditional and digital promotion. To avoid confusion, don’t use more than one design for each individual event. Simply re-size the design you have created to other social media sizes and download. Post your design digitally to your website, your social media channels, and in print. The more people see that same poster, the more it will stick in their memory and help the hype grow.

Strategy #2 – Don’t Forget Live Promotion

With so many ways to promote your band online, you can’t forget about live promotion. Take advantage of person to person interaction and relate to your audience and fans.
Your next event is the perfect opportunity to capitalize on an already captivated audience who is interested in you and your music. Use your latest gig to promote your new song or album and give the audience a taste of what it’ll cover.
Premier your new album at a select live event and have the new album for sale on site. Another creative live promotion strategy you should implement, especially in a new city outside your home base, is to do a headline swap with a local band. Team up and promote that local band as the headliner and your band as the opener. Then have that local band open for you in your home city. It’s a win-win!

Strategy #3 – Use Videos To Create Hype

They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. But a video paints an entire story. You can easily weave a visual story for your audience and give them a taste of your band and your music, without being a professional designer. By utilizing engaging video templates you can create great looking promotional videos to promote your band and still have time to focus on what matters most…creating great music.
Here’s an example of a video template you can post on your social media to promote your upcoming concert:

You can use these digitally created promo videos in many situations for effective marketing both on your own website and across your social media channels. You can promote your new album or song, release teasers for upcoming events, show behind the scenes clippings, etc. These videos will keep your followers engaged and excited.

Strategy #4 – Create An Eye-Catching Album Cover

As with many of these strategies, the main thing is to make your music stand out, even online. Good music alone will not do the trick. You need to get creative and put together an eye-catching album cover for your latest tracks.
Your album covers need to reflect your vibe and urge people to give your music a shot. This is a great opportunity to get creative and personalize your designs. You can easily do this by using professionally designed customizable album cover templates. The good news is that you can do this without it costing you an arm and a leg. These templates are super affordable and easy-to-customize.
Here are some album cover templates from PosterMyWall:

Strategy #5 – Mixtapes Aren’t Just For Hip Hop

Those songs you recorded months back and haven’t done anything with…take those and combine them with something new. Most artists have some unreleased sounds hiding away. Create a digital mixtape consisting of mainly those hidden tracks, plus a few of your latest releases and give away the mixtapes for free.
Music is becoming more and more accessible to fans, free of charge. Make your fans want to pay for more. Giving away free mixtapes won’t cost you much and it’ll show your fans that you appreciate them, and will actually drive them to buy more music from you. There are a ton of reasons why a mixtape is a great promotional tool.
These unreleased tracks can also be added to your upcoming full album as bonus tracks. This is a very effective way to provide more “bang for your buck” for your listeners and get them more excited to follow you and your music. Cat Stevens is one artist who has found great success and set the standard in including bonus tracks on albums.

Wrapping it up

The music industry is very cutthroat and competitive. You have to utilize as many tools as you can to effectively market yourself and your music. The key is to get creative and ensure you stand out from the crowd.
The internet and digital tools have given musical artists a plethora of opportunities to think outside the box. By using some of the strategies we’ve mentioned above you can easily and affordably create a buzz and grow an engaged tribe of followers. As Dr. Dre said:

“You just have to find that thing that’s special about you that distinguishes you from all the others…”

Courtesy of Alina Jamshed

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