5 Easy Steps You Can Do Right Now To Market Your Band
Since the Covid-19 virus turned the world on its head, everyone in the music industry has faced challenges that they’ve never encountered before and as a result it’s not easy to stay positive and think practically for the future when dealing with worrying global situations as unusual and unique as this.
I often find that what helps me to focus and keep things in perspective are just simple lists of tasks I know I can write down and get done every day, so I stay productive and maintain a sense of control and accomplishment, no matter how small it is.
If you’re in a band or working for a band, then you’ve probably had tours, festivals or gigs cancelled, releases delayed, jobs fall through, studio time cancelled, in short a lot of unexpected changes that have forced you into a new situation that’s driving us all to rethink our plans of action.
Despite the financial loss many of us are facing, there are in fact plenty of tasks that we can do, and must do, to try to take advantage of this situation and keep ourselves going so that we can come out of this on the other side fighting and ready to hit the ground running.
If you’re in a band and find yourself with time to spare, go through this list and I promise it will pay off for you in the future. Now is not the time to stop, hide or give up on the music that you’ve worked very hard to make and promote. Now is the time for action.
Here are my top 5 things that you can do today to help yourself tomorrow:
Get organised
Install tracking
Design & create
Free content
Advertise & promote
Get Organised
Firstly, it’s time to tackle your band’s admin! Go through all of your social profiles and make sure that everything is up to date. I’m talking ALL OF IT. Yes, even that pokey little info blurb to the right hand side of your Facebook page that no one ever reads. Well, now is the time to add a picture and put some information in it. Make it useful information at that. Links to your music, name of your latest single - something a fan would find valuable. Just don’t leave it blank!
Make sure all of your ‘Contact’ and ‘About Us’ information is up to date. Get rid of any old crappy looking pictures from when you first started and couldn’t dress yourselves properly. Remove any ugly, dodgy or ‘off brand’ content from your news feeds and images.
Update your website! If you're rocking a website for your band that you made back in 1999 and it still looks like it's from 1999 - change it! Or get rid of it.
If you’ve got merch, make sure it's all on your website, make sure all of the inventory is up to date, make sure you’ve linked it up to your Facebook page, so that people can buy through that.
This is important for step two.
Add Tracking
Go to YouTube and type in ‘How to install a Facebook pixel’, then go through the steps to install it onto your website. Open a Facebook business manager account and set it up on there. This will pay off IN SPADES! (not literally spades) Everything will become so much easier if you organise your band’s Facebook and Instagram through the business manager platform.
The pixel will provide you data, information on what pages and what actions people took on your site such as clicking buttons to buy tickets and what items they added to their shopping cart.
Selling merch is literally one of the only ways bands can make decent money and just because people can’t come to a show and buy it, doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t support you by buying online.
If you get super into this, go and research how to install the ‘Google tag manager pixel’ as well.
Design & Create
If you're visually creative, if you have design skills, can draw, paint etc or even if you don’t - go to Fivver.com and search designer, logo design etc and hire someone for £5.
Revamp your logo if it’s old, if it looks out of date or cheesy. Now might be a good time to start coming up with new alternatives.
The same goes for your merch designs. Time to improve. Shake things up and try different images. Have a look around your favourite bands or others in your genre and do your own version of what they do. Just because someone buys your t-shirt doesn't mean they like it, most of the time they're just being supportive. A band is a brand etc etc. If you can actually sell something that looks good, you’ll sell more. Simple.
Free Content
I love this one. It’s time consuming and requires effort but so many people are doing this right now and it’s awesome.
Going live on Instagram for live Q&As with your fans. Live jam rehearsals. Play throughs. There are so many ideas! So many of us are stuck inside at the moment, it’s a great way to interact with fans by uploading a video of you playing your tracks so in turn your fans can do the same. Maybe some people in the band have other interests and skills outside of music and want to create a VLOG about it that your fans might find interesting.
It’s free to record a video on your phone and upload it online. Maintaining a presence is key because it lets people know you still exist and you care.
Advertise and Promote
I’m not saying you should spend lots of money on advertising. Although I do believe that if you have a release scheduled and the plan was to drop a video or whatever then still go ahead as planned because a lot of people are online right now and Facebook & YouTube are still the best ways of reaching new fans.
But you don’t have to spend a lot if you can’t afford to. Just pick one platform. If getting views for a new video is important then choose YouTube. If growing a fanbase with whom you can share more detailed offers like a merch sale campaign is your objective then pick Facebook because the targeting is more specific there.
Go smaller. Why not try running a very small local campaign aimed at your specific demographics in just your local town for £5 a day? You can do this on either Facebook or YouTube by selecting your specific town or city from within the locations options inside the ad platform when creating your campaign.
I'll be putting out further videos on this topic in the coming days so subscribe to our YouTube channel here to stay up to date on our content.
Why not promote your live streams to your pre-existing fans and create a lookalike audience to retarget with the same content to reach news ones.
If you're making the content anyway, reaching a more focused smaller group is cheaper and less expensive to run.
Maybe you had planned to film a video that got cancelled but the track is still coming out and you want to promote it. Try running it as an audio ad on Spotify. We now provide that service for bands and it's a great means of getting your music heard by the millions of users on Spotify's free platform.
A lot of these tips are FREE to do, they just require time and effort. There’s never a lack of resources, just a lack of resourcefulness. So learn to delegate and think as creatively as you can.
Hell just learn to use Tik Tok - that's next on my list!
Share tasks out amongst your group, don’t try to do everything in one go. Just take it one step at a time and make the most of what you can at your disposal. The winners are the ones who take action and make an effort.
Have you got any more ideas to add to this list? Maybe you're already doing them. If you need help or advise in any area of digital marketing for your band then I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch and reach out, my email is darren@holdtightpr.com.