What are the most important steps in implementing a social media strategy?
Influencer marketing refers to tactics and strategies that are intended to influence the influencers. Influencers are people in media who can review and promote whichever bands, artists, events, etc. that they find appealing. Centers of influence are media outlets and prominent media figures that have clout with the audience. Identifying online centers of influence and utilizing influencer marketing tactics will help to build relationships with influencers. Building connections with media outlets is especially beneficial.
Mainstream artists often use marketing and public relations firms to build promotional packages. These promotional packages are reviewed on an ongoing basis for their performance. It’s the ability of the promotional entity to consistently re-evaluate the performance of their promotional packages based on analytic information that enables to continuously improve the efficiency and performance of their promotional activities. If your goal is to be a mainstream artist, then don’t be afraid to mimic the social media strategies of mainstream artists. They’ve usually refined their social presence to be highly efficient, so copying their strategies is not a bad idea.
There are a lot of online social networks for bands and artists. Joining these communities can be helpful, but take up a considerable amount of time to engage your audience. It might be a good idea to offload this work onto somebody who is willing to work at a low cost. In joining these media outlets, it is also a good idea to weigh the perceived value against the time and effort of joining the community.
One tool which is useful for making evaluations about social media websites is www.alexa.com. Using www.alexa.com you can find out the ranking of the site in terms of usage. Generally, social media web sites with greater usage are going to offer a greater reach. This is not the only factor to take into consideration when considering which social media outlets to join. Some social media outlets may provide additional opportunities such as interviews, media events, etc. Don’t believe for a second that you cannot launch a major label quality PR campaign with a bit of help.
How did social media change the marketing landscape?
No longer do people need to build inroads with large media conglomerates to get press for their music. The traditional print medium has been significantly impacted by the Internet. Radio has also been significantly impacted. These traditional channels had gatekeepers such as program directors and editors who pushed homogenized, mainstream pop culture, and generally avoided more avant-garde works. The democratization and decentralization of media has changed the rules of the industry. Now independent media outlets carry the same weight as traditional media outlets.
The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 rule is a marketing term that is a metaphor for the relationship between effort and results. The general theme is that 20 percent of marketing messages result in 80 percent of successful marketing campaign results or influence. Part of your marketing effort will need to be to figure out which part of your marketing message is making the most impact. The way to measure results is through the use of analytics.
Why Use Analytics?
Part of implementing a social media strategy is implementing a process for evaluating the effectiveness of different social media outlets and their synergy with your product. One of the values of social networking is its ability to make predictions about the demand of products or services. Analytics helps promoters and venues to make determinations about which bands should be brought in to perform based on social media in the target region. Analytics can be used to identify social patterns such as regional preferences and influential entities in specific locals.
Google is one of the best tools for performing analytics. Try using Google to gather information on the how media flows through the Internet. You can do this by searching for the new release of an artist using Google, and then filtering it so that the results are only from the previous week. This will show you which media outlets are releasing content quickly and keeping up to date with new releases. This approach to analytics is best performed on the day of the release with your Google search filtered to only return results for that day.
Give Shout Outs
Be sure to use your website like a hub to your social media presence. Try to connect with anybody who writes articles about your music. At the very least send them a thanks and offer up some form of direct communication, preferably an email that members of the media can use to contact you directly. Try to weed out the social media sites that don’t provide a good return on your investment of time, or offload the work for these low performers to somebody else such as an intern, Fiverr, etc. If you do offload the work for these sites, be sure to still give them contact information and shout outs. Don’t overemphasize social media over your music making. Make sure to match your music to the social media outlets that fit your target demographic.
By Jack Johnston
Jack Johnston has a Master’s of Arts in Applied Linguistics from the New School University, MBA and MSML degrees from WGU.