In this video Wendy Day explains why timing is crucial for music promotion and how independent artists should coordinate all marketing activities so they hit the audience simultaneously. She uses a dinner‑meal analogy to illustrate that staggered exposure (radio, blogs, digital ads, TikTok, video, SoundCloud, etc.) leads to audience fatigue and wasted spend. She outlines the typical lead times for each channel (radio 12‑16 weeks, blogs ~2 weeks, digital ads a few days) and advises artists to work backwards from the release date to schedule each activity. Day highlights common pitfalls: piecemeal promotion, limited budgets, and hiring ineffective vendors, which result in short‑lived spikes rather than sustained penetration. She stresses the need for a coordinated, multi‑channel push that provides both reach and depth, and recommends building a detailed timeline based on the marketing plan, using her existing videos and articles as resources. The overall message is that proper timing maximizes impact and avoids wasting money.
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Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to 2020 Vision. Um, so let's talk about how we put everything together. So you've seen the videos on putting together a marketing plan, you've seen the individual videos that talk about the different aspects from touring to digital ads to TikTok campaigns, etc. So how do we put that all together? And what is timing? Timing is, um, for example, if you're going to promote your music, you want to reach as many people as possible from as many different directions as possible. And your timing is in putting that all together, making sure it all hits at the same time. It's sort of like if I invited you to my house for dinner and you walked in the door and I gave you a dinner roll, and then 3 hours later I gave you, um, a piece of pie and a steak, and then 20 minutes after that I gave you a vegetable— aside from the fact that you would never come to my house for dinner again, it was not a successful meal. Because a successful meal is when everything hits the table at once in the order that it's supposed to hit. So you get the salad first, then you get the meal, the Okay, you might be vegetarian, but just bear with me for my example. You get the steak, the vegetable, the potato, and then you get the dessert after you're finished eating the meal. That's sort of a successful meal. I know a lot of you that are healthier out there going, "No, it's not." Bear with me for the sake of this example. So, when everything is hitting the table at the same time, that's a successful meal. If it's hitting in pieces, You're not going to be patient enough to, to wait out eating dinner for, you know, 4 hours or 5 hours. It's just not— it's not a successful meal. So marketing and promotion is the same way. You need things to hit pretty much at the same time. And where that becomes a little challenging is, let's say you have a radio record. It takes 12 to 16 weeks to really get poppin' at radio. But if you've got a publicist and you're going to hit the blogs, that really only takes about 2 weeks to structure and organize. If you're doing digital ads, that only takes a couple days to place, you know. The longest part of that process is getting the ads approved by, you know, YouTube or Facebook or Google or whoever. So you've got to think about when you want everything to hit. So if you're dropping a song on, um, January 1st, you're going to want to count back— if you're going for radio, you want to count back 4 months from that. If you're going for digital ads, you may want to count back a week from that. If you're going for blogs, you might want to count back 2 weeks from that. And that's when you start to place things so that everything hits at the same time. I hope that makes sense. Um, one of the areas where I see most of you fucking up, and this comes back to budget because a lot of you don't have budget, you can't just do one thing and expect it to catapult your career to success. There are times where that does happen, but it's so rare. You're more likely to win the lottery and get struck by lightning the same day than you are to just be able to do one thing and have it work. Many artists will create music— tell me if this sounds like you— you'll create music and then you'll start asking around, you know, how to promote it. Somebody will tell you, oh, you need to get on the blogs. So then you go and you hire a publicist, and, um, that publicist gets you on some blogs. You get a little bit of bubbling going on for your song or your music or your brand, and then it just dies off. And you're frustrated because you wanted to be in Fader, Complex, and pretty much all over the internet, and it didn't work. And it didn't work because you don't have a movement yet. But you did— let's say you hired somebody who's legitimate and they really went hard and they used their connections, so you got your song placed on some smaller blogs, but it didn't really move the needle because 3 days later nobody was talking about you, and you just saw a little bit of movement. So then you go into the industry and you start asking around. People tell you, oh, you need a video and you've got to promote it. So you shoot a video and you hire a video promotion person, and they put your video out on some of the, um, on some of the, the, uh platforms— sorry, that accept video. It's really early in the morning. Um, platforms that accept videos. So you see a little bit of movement but not really much. And then after about a week, it goes back down. Then you figure out in looking at your SoundCloud that you need SoundCloud promotion. So you find somebody that can promote your SoundCloud and you pay them the money to promote your SoundCloud, and you see a little bit of movement on your SoundCloud, but then it goes away. It's not that— it's not that what you're doing is wrong, it's that your timing is off. You need to be able to do all of that at once. You need to be able to do everything that we spoke about in terms of marketing and promotion pretty much at the same time, because not only do you want reach, but you want penetration. So you want your potential fan to see your music on SoundCloud, see your music on YouTube, hear your music when they go to the club, turn on the radio and hear your music all at the same time, see your video that same day. Now, I'm not so naive to think it can all happen on the exact same day, but the reason that people hire me is because they want it to hit within the same time frame. So that's what you need to recreate. You need to make sure that everything is hitting at once. And the reason most of you don't do that is for budgetary reasons. Either you don't have the money to spend on this and it takes a lot of money to be successful in the music industry, or you don't know what you're doing, so you're piecemealing it. You're, you're kind of doing one thing at a time. You're placing a TikTok campaign and seeing how that works and hoping for the best. And then when that doesn't produce, um, either a record deal or fame instantly, you get frustrated, and then you move on and do a SoundCloud campaign. And then when that doesn't work, you go and you place digital ads. But you're, you're leaving too much time in between all of those things, most likely because either you don't know you need to do it and you're just finding out, or you don't have the money to pull the trigger and do it all at once. Either way is not benefiting you. So what you're doing is you're wasting money and you're not giving really skilled, talented vendors the opportunity to deliver results for you. So you're out there saying, yeah, my publicist didn't do shit for me. The reality is that there are a shit ton of publicists out here that won't do anything for you because they are inept or they don't know what they're doing, or they're just out here to take your money and keep it moving. But there's a lot of really great publicists out here and great digital ad providers and great video promoters, great radio promoters, and they're not— they don't have the chance to show you what they can do because you don't know what you're doing. You're hiring them to do a job that they can do, but you're piecemealing it. You're not doing everything at the same time or in the proper order. So I would suggest going back to the marketing plan that you put together and building out a timeline of when everything needs to hit, and count it backwards. Figure out the day of your release and then count everything backwards that you want to accomplish from that point forward. And there's a ton of information online about how to do that. I've made videos about how to do this. I've written articles about how to do this. So you can find the information out here. You just really have to look for it. I hope this was helpful, and I hope you'll give some thought to timing, because if you're spending money to do this piecemeal, all you're doing is spending money. You're wasting money, and you're putting a black eye on people and an industry that could have gotten you to the next level if you knew what you were doing and had the proper budget. Okay guys, take care. Save this, save this video. I think it's really going to help you, and you can go to youtube.com/thisiswendyday to find it if you don't save it. Okay guys, take care.
