Marketing can be tough. It’s not as simple as coming up with a snappy ad, or the perfect tagline, or a quirk that you want people to associate with you or your brand. Marketing, public relations, and content creation are all highly-skilled fields that people spend years perfecting — it’s not experience that one can just pick up overnight.
So, if your natural talents lie more in the area of music or art, you may find that marketing, particularly content marketing, is practically another language to you. You might know that you have to “sell” yourself, and your music or art, online in order to reach a wider audience, but outside of that, you’re lost.
But don’t stress — because you’re not alone.
In order to build an audience for your work, and draw people towards it, you’ve got to have a strategy. But, even the experts can drop the ball on that. According to Forbes, only 37 percent of B2B (business to business) marketers reported that they have a documented content marketing strategy. And that’s actually relevant to their job!
So, if you’re an artist or a musician and have no idea how to use inbound marketing, don’t beat yourself up. The fact that you’re here, researching the topic, is a great first step.
Let’s break it down.
According to Smart Brief, two key elements in content marketing are standing out and knowing “thyself.” As an artist or musician, this is something you’ve probably already worked on. There are a million other artists out there — why are you different? Do you understand what you’re trying to tell people with your music or art? Use that in your content.
Let’s focus on starting a blog, where you post about your inspirations, your goals, or your process. People may be more interested in it than you think.
When you’re ready to get started, there’s a bunch of different blog hosting options out there — from LiveJournal to Tumblr or a WordPress blog and more.
Once you know what you want to focus on when it comes to your content, and what you want to say to your audience as a musician or artist, you should come up with a strategy, as mentioned, to offer up that content to your readers — and a way to publish it.
Are you going to post to your blog once a week? Twice? Are you going to direct people to your content via social media channels? Or piggyback on the work of other creators you admire by reposting their content (with credit!) and talking about it? That’s all a part of your strategy.
How about packaging your work? After all, there are a number of blog hosts or social media possibilities out there that you can publish your work to.
One thing you should consider when it comes to deciding where to post your blog content is whether you want to make money from it. You can do this more passively — by setting up tools like Google Adwords on your website — or actively by choosing to post your content to sites like ConnectPal or by allowing sponsored content on your blog.
ConnectPal, for example, lets you sign up and post content via their platform. ConnectPal’s platform makes it easy for readers to subscribe to your posts — which can directly earn you money. That’s a very proactive way to use a platform for your brand in a way that can financially benefit you.
Once you know what you want to write about as an artist or musician, your strategy when it comes to presenting your work, and how you’re going to offer it to your audience, a lot of the work after that comes down to trial and error.
See what works, and what doesn’t. Do your fans respond well to blog posts about other artists that inspire you? This sort of marketing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But, if you’re determined to figure out a way to use it to reach your audience as an artist or musician, you’ve already taken an important first step. You’ve got to work hard, and the rest will come — a fact that every artist knows all too well.
