10 Marketing Tips To Grow Your Fanbase

As a musician you want to grow your fanbase, and have successful releases. But the modern marketing landscape can seem bewildering and a mountain you don’t really want to climb. Maybe you aren’t sure what to do, how to do it and you don’t want to commit lots of time. You want to spend time making music, not social media content.

Here are some tips to make the process less painful, and more efficient, so you can spread the word about your music, grow your fanbase, and spend more time doing what you love, writing songs.

Get Clear on Your Brand Identity

To grow a fanbase, it helps to have a clear brand identity. Your brand identity consists of your sound, your visual aesthetic, your story, and your motivations for making music.

Having this solidified, and clear makes it obvious what you do to potential fans, shows that you care about what you do, and gives you a clear direction to take your marketing in.

Know Your Audience

Successful marketing needs a plan, and to plan effectively, you need to know your audience. Take some time to research your target audience.

• Who are they?
• What social platforms do they commonly use?
• What are their common interests?

Knowing these things can help you to create more effective content, content that reaches the right people and promotes engagement.

Be Consistent Across Channels

Keeping your tone of voice, content, and visual aesthetic consistency across your marketing channels, such as social media and email, can have a number of benefits, it:

• Makes you look professional, and shows that you are invested in this process as an artist.
• Makes your brand identity clear.
• Multiplies your marketing efforts when promoting things like shows and new releases.

Start an Email List

An email list is a great way to update people on gigs, releases, and more, and grow a fanbase. There are a number of email marketing platforms out there with a variety of tools to make email marketing easier. You can schedule emails, build campaigns, and segment your list into different groups of people.

Grow a Relationship with Email

The aim when growing a fanbase is to nurture a community of people that resonate with your sound and story, and are invested in your journey. Email is a great medium for growing a relationship with your audience. Don’t make the mistake of using email marketing as a noticeboard, just announcing releases, and shows, without much else. Use it to engage with your audience—share some behind the scenes info, your brand story, some of your musical process, etc.

Tell People About Your Email List

If you have taken the time to set up an email list, send regular emails, and schedule campaigns. Make sure you tell people about it. This may seem simple but people forget, with a host of other tasks on their To-Do list as an artist. Let people know at shows, on socials, and your website.

Don’t Chase Vanity Metrics

When growing your fanbase, you want to focus on growing a community, connecting and engaging with people, musically and through your brand story. Vanity metrics—stats that look good but don’t always translate to new fans, such as follower counts, or provide useful data when planning strategy. Someone that doesn’t like your posts, but reads every one because they are interested in you as an artist, can be more likely to become a fan, and part of your community than one that follows your page because they recognise your name, or you use dogs in your visuals, and they like dogs.

Repurpose Content for Multiple Channels

Making content can be time-consuming, making it in batches, and repurposing it where you can, can help to save you more time that could be spent on making music instead. For example: a behind the scenes video can be turned into multiple social media posts, emails, and a blog post. You can use the same video, editing the length for different platforms if needed, reuse and edit the copy for each platform, and the same goes for images.

Dig in to Stats

It’s important to approach your marketing strategically if you want it to be efficient. Without planning, and evaluating, you can waste time (which could be spent making music) and not get the results you want. Use social media, email marketing, and website analytics to figure out what is and isn’t working for you as an artist, and adjust, and adapt as you go.

Hire Help

Trying to do everything as an artist can be time-consuming, frustrating, and overwhelming. Don’t forget if you have the budget you can hire people to help you such as writers, graphic designers or website designers. Even if you just pick the tasks that you find the hardest or really hate doing. Maybe you hire someone to write the copy for your website, or create images for social posts. If you have a bigger budget you can have someone creating and scheduling your social media posts.

Work with Someone Else

Releasing a track with an artist that you vibe with can be a great way for both of you to get more exposure for your music, grow your fanbase, and expand your musical skillset.

If you are looking to collaborate with songwriters, musicians, singers, lyricists, producers and composers, Verse-Chorus offers a lively community of 1000’s of musicians in one place to connect and create with. Post songwriting ads, browse members, and more.

Written by Nick Stephens, a music production tutor, music marketing writer, and down to his DNA—music obsessive. When he isn’t making music you can find him at live music events, DJing up and down the UK, including Glastonbury, and the gym—sometimes.