Music Marketing - How to Target and Conquer your Niche

The music industry today looks to be full of artists that seem to come from nowhere. All of a sudden they have a viral hit, whether it's from a video, or a trending tweet. 

The DIY musician needs to realise that this kind of thing doesn't happen purely because they have have written an amazing tune. There are thousand of undiscovered brilliant tracks out there. More often than not, it has become succesful because of their canny use of Social Media. And probably even more so because they understand what their niche is.

So what is a Niche?

Cyber PR's Jon Ostrow puts it like this,

a niche is simply a specific or ‘specialized’ market. In other words, it is not ‘the whole world’ or ‘rock fans’. A niche is a very detailed, smaller sub-section of a bigger market, but most importantly those who are characterized within the niche are far more likely to be loyalists than fans of a more generalized market. Not to get too ‘marketing-jargen’ on you all, but typically speaking, the more specific a niche, the more dedicated those within it will be, and visa versa, the more broad a market becomes, the less dedicated the fans will be.

So clearly, all music genres fall into niches, the trick is, How do you conquer that niche to get your message/brand across? Well, you need to define and locate the fans of your niche, Jon suggests collating the following information to help you determine that.

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  • Demographic (age, gender location)

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  • Similar / influential artists (remember to start locally, then branch out to the regional, national and global scale)

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  • What are the influential promotional outlets?

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  • Where do the fans exist online?

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  • What blogs do they read?

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  • How do they find out about new music?

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  • Are they into fashion? If so, what brands?

Check out the Jons Full article for cool tips on how to understand and conquer your niche, you can read his full post here.

 

Link

http://arielpublicity.com/2012/07/18/conquering-your-niche/

13 Tips on Getting the Best Out of Twitter

I don't how often i have heard people say "No i don't use Twitter, it's just a bunch of people saying where they are, what they are doing and what they had for breakfast" and "What can I do with 140 characters?" Well, it has proven it can do a hell of a lot more than that, from distributing news, social and political commentary, to marketing, distributing not only short bursts of text but also pictures and videos. It has now been around for 6 years, and has pretty much become the leader in spreading information across the world, becoming the social barometer of our times.

It is now an essential tool in any musicians marketing strategy, and there is a wealth of techniques you can use to get the best out of twitter in keeping your fan base informed and engaged.

Not only can you use it as a news service, it also has great potential for you to find new fans, and get them to discover you.

Since its inception, there has become a wealth of third party utilities to help you exploit the potential of twitter to the full. Two i have been using the most over the years are Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. They give you the ability to monitor the 'twitterverse' and search for keywords and hashtags (twitters own keyword system that allows users to find tweets on certain subjects such as #art #photography #ladygaga etc) that could be relevent to you, your music and your goals. They allow you to join in the conversations and connect with people discussing things that could be relevent to you, and in turn, you might be interesting to them.

Chris Singleton over at Prescription PR has put together a list of 13 top tips for musicians and bands using twitter which i think you should take a look at. Here is my favourite peice of advice from his article...

By all means post links to your band's new videos and MP3s from time to time, but do not get too fond of doing so; otherwise you’ll just look like a jerk. Believe me, when it comes to overcommunicating about my own music projects, I’ve been there, done that and bought the t-shirt…and despite waxing endlessly about the importance of musicians keeping schtum for five minutes, I still see artists (who should know better) bore their friends, family and remaining fan to tears with hourly Facebook updates about their latest creative endeavours. Nobody cares after a while (if they ever did in the first place –geddit?). Instead, post links to great content from other sources – whack links up on Twitter to scintillating articles which don’t happen to be about your music (and rest assured, there are a lot of them). Or make witty observations about cheese and/or the credit crunch. In short, get a reputation for being an interesting dude, not a self-obsessed bore.

Check out the rest of his article here.

We also have an article on our Make It In Music site on twitter for musicians here.

 

Links

http://www.prescriptionmusicpruk.com/the-prescription/2012/5/1/using-twitter-top-tips-for-musicians-and-bands.html

http://www.makeitinmusic.com/twitter-for-musicians/

 

The PC is Dead

Technology has come along way in the last few years, and the trends of consumption change along with it. We are now heading towards a time where people will no longer be carrying around their laptops as smartphones will soon out number PCs on the planet. 

 

We have moved to a world of access, where we have everything we want at our fingertips, and just as the music industry adjusts to a new business model, along comes the next.  Still the problem remains with the 'old guard' record labels struggling to keep it together, and maintain some kind of resemblance of what the industry was. But, will they, and you the music makers, be ready for what comes next?

 

Even Facebook is starting to realise it's the mobile market is where the future is with its purchase of Instagram. No one wants to get left behind. The model is changing.

 

Bob Lefsetz sows a few seeds here for you to think about where all this is all heading, also with a view on how current social trends may soon dissapear and become outmoded.

 

You can read his article here. 

 

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2012/04/24/seeing-the-future/

 

Why Facebook bought Instagram  read more on that here.

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/15/pinterest-will-take-facebook-into-the-mobile-age.html