TPS #056: Why Your Marketing Doesn’t Work

Step #1: “Define the market”

As mentioned above, music marketing is how you appeal to fans.

Music marketing has traditionally been reduced to:

1. Pretty words and pictures

2. Highly competive situations in search of fan approval

3. An activity an artist MUST DO in order to be successful

Defining the market doesn’t mean you must know your “target demographic” or “target audience”.

What it does mean and require you to do is create authentic music and moments with your music. Your focus isn’t on trying to reach but on what makes you different.

As I discussed in my previous newsletter, this enables you to pick your audience – the people who are engaging the most with your music – and define your market – who are those people.

Step #2: “Appeal to the market”

When you have defined your market, you can appeal to them through interaction and engagement.

Appealing to the market requires transparency.

In short, the transparency to your market – your fans – is what fuels their interaction, engagement, and ultimately, their relationship with your artist brand.

Whether that transparency is sharing intimate details about why you wrote a song or the fears you have in sharing your creativity with the world, your vulnerability plays a role in appealing to your market.

Most artists miss this step because they confuse “appeal” with being fake.

If you’re presenting your most authentic self in your brand and your music, then the market you’re speaking to will know if you’re being fake or not.

Your marketing – how you’re relating and appealing to your fans – is what guides your whole artist brand. It’s not just want you communicate to them.

Step #3: “Define the strategy”

Strategy is such a buzz word, particularly within the music industry.

Music strategy has traditionally been reduced to:

1. Being technical, dry, and unimaginative

2. Doesn’t consider the needs, emotions, and psychology of fans

3. Lacks passion, creativity, and imagination

Strategy should capture the imagination of your fans. It should be creative and emotional.

Defining your music strategy is not about why you stand out as an artist, but rather how you stand out.

Defining your strategy is not focusing on what makes you different from other artists. It’s about how you’re different.

Whether it is your use of a certain color palette in your artist brand or lyrical presentation of your music, defining your strategy is another way to bring depth to your artist brand.

Step #4: “Leverage the strategy”

All created strategies are rooted in how you leverage your brand.

In fact, leveraging your music strategy is designed to impact your artist brand in a way marketing cannot.

Using the previous example, an artist who uses a certain color palette as part of your artist brand, your market will undoubtedly comprise of people who are drawn to those group of colors.

Leveraging your strategy positions you to interact and engage with your market, helping you to achieve what I call “soft-sell status” – the ability to persuade anyone because you have a relationship.

As you can see, it’s leveraging your strategy directly affects how your market interacts and engages with your artist brand.

In other words, you have to know how you will talk to your friends to get your desired response.

I have spent decades in the music marketing and strategy and see how both are flawed and incomplete.

However, strategy is less flawed than marketing. Yet the entire music industry is built on the back of marketing. Strategy is recognized as a whole business providing the foundation for every business – including an artist’s music business.

I believe it is easier to bring marketing’s “heart” (i.e. appeal) to the understanding of strategy, than is is to bring strategy’s “head” (i.e. leverage) to the understanding of marketing. This will allow building your music business to be more impactful.

Hope this helps.

Related: Technology – particularly AI – is giving artists an ability to figure out and define who their market is. On an episode of the podcast Sound Shift, Arianna O’Dell sits with AI marketing platform SymphonyOS founder Megh Vakharia about how artists are really finding their audience.