Independent musicians have a problem when it comes to marketing themselves

 Independent musicians have a problem when it comes to marketing themselves: They violate the natural order of building a human relationship.

What happens if you don’t follow this sequence of steps? What if we skip steps?

It’s like walking up to someone on the street and asking them to marry you without being properly introduced to you first. The equivalent for an artist is like walking up to some with your CD, T-shirt, gig tickets and asking them to buy it...

I see this all the time on social media and the internet in general by spamming links to artists releases/merch etc... Reaching out to cold unengaged listeners directly through FB messenger, email, whatsapp, text... Brute force promotion tactics.

What you're doing is assuming a level of relationship that has not been properly achieved yet which can be seen as an assault.

Humans build up relationships within a specific order which should be mimicked when building fans.

Let's talk about the first and most commonly misunderstood step but also the most crucial step when building relationships: Discovery.

The goal of the Discovery is to turn someone that never has never heard you into knowing you and liking you - Simple right?

But to start building a relationship we have to overcome three areas:

Mistrust

Reluctance

Resistance

All three of these areas are getting harder and harder to overcome because we as humans are bombarded with pushy introductions every single day.

We come into contact with around 4000 ads/sales on the internet and the real world combined.

This means we have grown naturally to resist new people and new ideas which in turn makes us reluctant to perform follow-up action after the introduction. E.g. click on something, buy something, opt-in to something etc....

So let's talk about how humans go about their day to day lives.

As human beings, we crave betterment. What actions can I take now to improve my life tomorrow?

In other terms how can I move from this less than ideal state, which I’m in now, to an ideal state?

To get to this ideal state we form plans, even if they are tiny little actions that we make subconsciously, to better our lives with short or long-term goals.

With this in mind, what happens when you are asking someone to “Buy now”, “click here”, “Stream this” “& Attend This”?

It becomes a deviation of their natural plan to achieve their ideal state. Psychologically you are asking them to step away from the plan and to perform an action that benefits you or is the better path.

This “Ask” is incredibly difficult. It’s why Marketing is the most important area of any business.

Convincing someone off a different track is very ambitious.

When you are presenting a cold audience with a “call to action” (CTA) e.g. “sign up here”, “buy now” for the first time, it’s at its lowest possible rate of achieving the action/results you want. Especially if you are asking them to leave the environment that they are already in.

So what have we learned?

Directly linking a cold audience with the link's and CTA's on social media is a violation of the natural steps to building a human relationship.

You don’t follow strangers' instructions just because they asked us to.

So what can we do to introduce ourselves?

The better question to ask is “How do fans discover their favorite artists?

What is discovery? How does it affect our ideal state?

Discovery is very powerful. It’s what makes us human and feel like we are part of communities and part of a culture.

People wear their discovery like it's a badge of honor. It becomes a part of their ideal state.

You may have heard someone say: “I knew them before they were cool?” or “I knew when they released their first album”

Or even if someone starts bad-mouthing your favorite artist they step up and defend them.

So how do we find fans that talk about you like this?

The answer: Getting them to think that it was their idea they discovered you.

The first contact with your music and brand was voluntary.

Planting you within their natural path from less idea to ideal. Making your brand and music part of themselves via the discovery badge becoming a natural part of their self-betterment.

So the question is: how do you expose people to your music to make them think it was their idea?

This is called an indirect introduction.

Different forms of an indirect introduction are:

Radio

Playlists

Blogs

Magazines

TV

Touring

Physical Advertising

These forms of indirect introductions used to be only accessible to majors labels with big budgets but now with social media and all the different platforms, independent artists now have a chance to shine.

Let’s look at Facebook & Instagram. Platforms dedicated to the sharing of media within your network:

Video

Music

Movie Clips

Gifs

Memes

Copy

Art

Books

Articles

Quotes

Facebook & Instagram keeps a record of every user's share, post, comment, like etc... It has a very specific database of demographic & psychographic information about all its users.

Both the platforms offer native ads so that you can share media within the natural flow of socially sharing content creating that indirect introduction that we are seeking.

With these ad platforms you can target specific audiences based on music taste, can tailor the ads to not ask too much of the user early on in the relationship, and mimics the look a feel of socially shared content.

If you can do all this: You get rewarded, by Facebook ads, for making the user's experience better by charging you less and achieving ad space more often.

So, by not skipping steps in the relationship and by creating the right ads you have a chance to compete with even the biggest artists today/outperform artists with a major label backing.

We have created a campaign, which I call the “Introduction campaign”, we can use Facebook and Instagram ads manager to target huge cold audiences with tailored content and have watchers/listeners judge it based on its merits with no call to action.

If you're bored and exhausted from chasing playlist and blog placements to scale your fanbase - This is your next move.