Wendy Day breaks down music marketing beyond checklists: tailor tactics to your artist's style and audience, treat every release as an event to stay top of mind, and mix digital plays (Spotify playlists, TikTok challenges, Instagram micro-influencers) with street teams and club networking. Build a funnel from listeners to superfans while keeping costs low.
Chapters
Hey guys, I'm back with more marketing stuff. I've made a list today, um, and let me give you a little disclaimer before I get into it, um, because the way that you, um— I'm also getting rid of that incredible sun, uh, spot right on my face. Um, the way that you market, um, artists is different, right? So the way that I would market a young hip-hop artist who's super lyrical is way different from the way I would market, um, a street rapper. It's a different audience, it's a different market. I would use different tools for each one. For somebody that's more lyrical, I would go more digital heavy, and for somebody that's more street, I would absolutely hit the streets. So I'm, I'm very nervous to just give you this blanket marketing information and have you think that you have to do all of it because it's going to be different based on how you reach your target, right? So if your market is a little bit older, you shouldn't be on TikTok, um, or even Snap, and I'm going to talk about both of those. So if your market is a little bit older, Facebook is the perfect place to reach folks. So take that into consideration. Um, and also I want to say that consistency is the key here. So you want to be as consistent as possible as you can with your marketing. I almost knocked you over. Um, you want to be as consistent as possible with your marketing because it's the repetition that's going to really, um, help you to grow, right? You want to stay in the forefront of people's minds. So for me, I call it events. I make sure that my clients have different events happening. I don't mean physical events, but like online events. I make sure that my clients have different things going on at all times so that there's always a reason to be posting or to be talking about, you know, the, the artist or their music. So we do different, like, posting content is an event, putting them out on promo tour is an event. Dropping a new single is an event. Showing the artwork is an event. We just make sure that we do different releases of different information to keep people talking. And then, you know, the key in all of this is to reach the right potential fans so that whatever you're doing, the ads or the posts, convert for the lowest price possible. You want to make sure that you're turning people who don't know who you are into potential fans, and then turning those potential fans into real fans, and then turning those real fans into rabid fans so that they support everything that you do. And that's just a conversion process that you do all the way along. Okay, so, um, The different methods that we use to market and promote, um, we use Spotify playlists. Spotify playlists consist of two different types of playlists. There's editorial playlists, which are owned by Spotify, and then there are over 5,000 playlists outside of Spotify where, um, you have the ability to get into one of their playlists so that a fan that's following their playlist who may not have known who you are will hopefully hear your song, get excited about it, and go find more music by you, listen to that song, you know, more often than just on the playlist, follow you, you know, etc. So we do a lot of playlist promotion through Spotify. Then we also do, for younger artists we do, and more upbeat music, we do TikTok and Triller campaigns. And sometimes we pay influencers to do whatever to the music. And sometimes it's a dance, sometimes it's just working out, sometimes it's, you know, acting it out like a karaoke type thing. But sometimes we'll pay for a campaign of influencers on TikTok and Triller, or sometimes we'll do a contest and give away a prize, you know, $500, $1,000, whatever, to whoever has the best video. And then market and promote that. Um, we do influencer ads on Instagram, which is kind of the same. It reaches a little bit older of a marketplace than TikTok— is, um, like 13 to 17-year-olds— and then Instagram is more like 13 to, um, 24, which is the— or 26, which is the main market that most of our artists um, go after. But of course you can reach people that are up to 36 years old, up to 44 years old. Shit, I'm on, um, Instagram, obviously. That's where you're watching me, probably. But, um, and, and I've got followers, you know, that are 65 plus. So, um, we do influencer ads. And when we do the influencer ads, I think I have a video that I posted sometime in the fall about influencers that— on youtube.com/thisiswendyday, I go into like extreme detail about placing influencer ads, but to keep it short here, um, we don't go for influencers that have millions of followers because first of all, it's too expensive. Second of all, it's very hit or miss in terms of reaching their following. Um, so we'll go after the smaller influencers, the ones that have 50,000 or 100,000 followers, and will work out a deal where they'll either dance to the song or they'll just post it so that it reaches their audience, or they'll work out in the club to it, or they'll go shopping to it, or, you know, whatever the influencer— you know, if they're a comedian, then we want them to do some sort of a comedy skit with the music playing in the background. But there's always a way to figure this out. And by the way, when your song starts to take off and you become big enough and there's a movement behind your music, you don't really have to pay for this. Like, influencers will just naturally gravitate towards your song, and if you hashtag it properly, you will actually notice because they will put the hashtag in their post and they'll do it for free. But we're not talking about free right now, we're talking about paying for it. We do SoundCloud and YouTube promotions, and when I say that, I don't mean to have bots and people that aren't real following or, you know, views. Like, we don't believe in bullshit views. We believe in building a fan base with real people so that we can turn around, and once those people are following, we can talk about shows and have real people come out to the artist shows, and we can sell merch and stuff. That's, to me, like, if you're not doing this and making money, what's the point? You know, it's the music business. The artists that I work with are all in this to make money. Not that they sell out for money, but it's a business, and the goal is to be able to do this full-time and feed your family, right? So we still do some old-school stuff, like we still do street team work in that 5-hour driving radius that I talked about in my last video. I still put artists out on promo tour. I think promo tours are the best way to reach new fans. It's not a way that people necessarily discover music. That's really what YouTube and SoundCloud and Spotify, and to some extent the mixtape sites, are for. But in a promo tour, we put folks out on the road so that they can hit college campuses and they can go to high schools and they can go to whatever's popping in in a certain city or town where there's a large amount of people hanging out, whether that's a pool hall or a barber shop or a flea market, um, whatever the place is in your town— excuse me, in the town where the person is, where they can pick up fans. Like, that's the goal. And all of that is filmed and put on their social media so that you can actually see what the artist is doing and where they are. And, you know, all of that plays into the building of the artist so that you can kind of follow them and see the behind-the-scenes stuff. We still— can you hear my dog snoring in the background? He's really loud. Gangster. Okay, so there's club promotions where we make sure that the DJs and the tastemakers and the promoters at the clubs all know who the artist is. So when they're on promo tour, they'll go on a club run. Sometimes the artists that I work with will just go on club runs every night. They'll leave whatever city they're in and they'll drive to the next town over and, you know, interact with the DJs in the clubs that play the type of music that they have. The street DJs, um, the strip club DJs, they'll make friends with strippers and get a stripper to be the person to really anchor that song so that she wants to dance all the time to the song. And again, That depends on the tempo of your song. You can have a slow song and work it in the strip clubs, it just makes it really challenging. So there are the different ways that we market and promote, just off the top of my head. I hope I included everything. I'm sure that I didn't. I'm sure I left some stuff out. But at the end of the day, you need to figure out what the best way is for you to reach your potential fans and in the most cost-effective way. Okay guys, now go get to work. I just gave you a whole lot of shit that you could be doing to get your career to the next level, why are you still sitting here watching this video?
