These Digital marketing tips are essential for independent musicians to succeed

Hitting the right note as a musician when creating a song is only half the battle. If you want that song to be heard in a very competitive music industry, you need to know how to promote it. A lot of independent music artists have strict promotional budgets though, so you may need to handle your promotional needs on your own. Here, we will give the essential digital marketing tips for independent music artists to succeed.

Top 10 SEO & Digital Marketing Tips for Independent Music Artists

There is a lot that goes in to building your SEO and digital marketing campaign, but we tried to condense the list to the main top 10 that you need to know. Hopefully, you’re already doing a lot of this, but every little bit helps. If you’re missing anything, hopefully this can help you to sharpen your marketing plan.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t just for content creators and bloggers. It’s for everybody with an online presence. Any time you’re able to come up in search engines, that’s free promotion for you. But it takes a long time to correctly build your SEO, ya need to always keep it in mind when creating content.

1. Creating a strong online presence is key

• This means you need to have all the essential pages for your music project. You must have a website, that’s mobile and user-friendly.
• Plus, you need the main social media pages at least, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (X) and TikTok. Not only do you need those pages, you need to regularly promote on them.

2. Engage with your audience so they become loyal fans

• This is one of the most important things you can do on social media. Respond to your comments and messages. They took the time to reach out to you, it goes a long way to reach back out.
• Plus, comment on other pages and artists posts. It will help their fans to see your profile, plus builds a positive relationship with artists you may collaborate with in the future.

3. Consistently build your brand

• Your music project is a brand, it is your product that you’re selling. This means you need a specific brand to better market yourself. Develop what that is right away, and continually build around it.
• This brand should fit who you are, and represent your musical vibe. Plus, if it can help you stand out from the very competitive crowd, that’s huge.
  The brand should be highlighted in your images, especially your profile images throughout your social pages, it should be the same across all your platforms and website.

4. Content marketing to stay relevant

• Content is king, that is known throughout marketing regardless of the market. You need to continually be creating and promoting new content to your website and social pages.
• This content for you will be new images, music videos, live performances or engaging blog posts.
• Let your fans see behind the scenes content on who you are. Tease new releases by showing small bits of your new song, like releasing a video of a new verse you wrote, or the beat.

5. Email Marketing to stay in touch

• Continually work to build your mailing list. Harvest emails through your website. Offer a free track or information to artists that sign up to your mailing list so you can then promote your new releases to them in the future.
• Once you have your own strong mailing list, of your own specific engaged fans, it will be one of your most important marketing platforms.
  Send your mailing list special offers and exclusive content to keep them engaged.
• Use platforms like Mailchimp or Brevo to build your mailing list and sending out emails to avoid landing in spam boxes.

6. Streaming platform optimization

• Obviously, the way fans listen to new music now a days has changed. You need to have your music on as many of the major streaming platforms as possible. Platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and Soundcloud.
• Make sure your profiles on those platforms link back to your website or link tree, also have a quality profile picture that fits your brand.
• Promote widgets from these platforms to your website and in press you receive through blogs.
• Continually work to get your music added to streaming playlists.

7. Create and use visual content

• This goes hand in hand with the “content is king” idea. People want to see visual, eye catching content now a days. You need to have quality images (use apps like Canva) and videos to promote.
• Live stream your events and new songs.

8. Paid advertising, time is money

• Paying for advertising is investing in yourself. There aren’t any businesses that don’t invest in their marketing. You want to invest your time in your music, and when you pay for advertising, you’ll save a lot of time.
• Create ads on social media or through Google to find more fans
• Pay for features in blogs and magazines, these features will create an immediate impact and massively boost your SEO.

9. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

• This is the longer play, but arguably most important. You’ll need to stay focused on building your SEO every time you create content. Stick to key words around your brand. Get features with your artist / band name in headlines, with links back to your website and social pages.
• Post content to your website like blogs that are key word rich and help you to come up in search engines.

10. Always stay informed and adapt

• As with anything, practice makes perfect and you need to continually stay informed. You’re doing that right now by reading this and other articles like it. Continue to learn new techniques and trends in the digital marketing landscape.
• Continue to adapt with new strategies and opportunities in technology. Stay ahead of trends, jump on board to new social media and streaming right away to beat the crowd.
• Use data analysis to hone in on what works for you. Do this through analytical apps for your websites traffic, and through social pages. It will really help you to learn your fan base and how they find you.

Building a successful digital marketing campaign takes time, but it will launch your music career like nothing else. It is essential for all independent music artists to have a strong online presence and SEO. If you focus on these 10 digital marketing tips above, you’ll find success! Stay with it, keep working.

We’re here to help!

Everything above, may seem a bit overwhelming. But if you just focus on a little something every day, you can do it. Develop a plan, and a strategy with things so that it becomes routine and easier. If you have a promotional budget and you’d like some help, we can do yourdigital marketing for you. We have a digital marketing service that can give you a huge boost up on things. Your can also choose whatever size plan you need to fit your needs. This helps to fit in to any independent music artists budget. But if you’re unsure about investing, or what exactly we do, or even what you should do. Reach out to us, and we will help. Hit up our contact form here and we will try to get back to you soon as we can, or you can contact us through one of our social media pages.