3 Top Communication Tools for Marketing Music

After deciding on the best music marketing strategy to carry your brand....let's discuss some marketing communication methods to keep your audience engaged as you release more music and media over time. The following list begins to discuss effective marketing channels that are popular for communication and can be tailored to our use:

Email / Contact List

Many marketers explain that email marketing is what allowed them to amass a large audience, while keeping track of their consumers through email or text message service. It also helps boost engagement and automate more sales. People prefer receiving promotions through email and love to participate globally within a group. Whereas your website is central to teach people more about your brand, your email or contact list is meant to collect your supporters, so you can always reach them. Be sure to ask your consumers to opt-in to business communication, including automated emails and text messages.

This relates to DMs. Let's note that some professionals still prefer email for establishing long-standing professional relationships. Try asking for their email through DMs especially to send any material.

Email is a great way to introduce new products. It feels personal because if your consumers try to reply to the email, they expect it to be seen by only one person, being a one-on-one communication method, similar to letters. We used to use letters to update our support system on all the happenings around us. Nowadays, it's text messages and emails, if not phone calls. Email is also a great way to update your following on any press or publication by providing links. You can also incentivize your audience to boost engagement on the publication by commenting something special.

Some claim collecting emails as part of their contact list or CRM system, which is managed along with their sales funnel. It's similar in that a CRM collects more information than what's required for email or text marketing. But email can also be part of your sales funnel, so you can use it to build your CRM, and learn your consumers slowly over time. That can look like asking for contact details and preferences, and scheduling your communication to lead up to a promotion or discounted offer. The third or most familiar encounter, can be used to drive a sale (such as merch or different versions of published music).

Although that is what typical sales funnelling and email marketing looks like, you can develop a tactic that follows your consumer's appeal, especially when you think about how your audience wishes to engage with your music. How do they want to be directed by your brand to engage with artists and their music?

Newsletters

Newsletters elaborate on our communication history of letters. Newsletters became the first newspapers, and essentially updated people on a particular subject. But the format of them were like our paper newspapers, which we're accustomed to updating us on regional or national news. It's different because newspapers became their own brands that focused on certain public topics, whereas a newsletter was openly updating you on a business or brand. For our purpose, we want to focus on this tone of communication, along with its format.

The main difference between an email and newsletter, is how they are written. Newsletters are written for large audiences typically found at conferences or lectures. The tone informs this general public (similar to a blog) whereas an email is seen as a two-way ongoing communication between two people or a small group (e.g. threads). The tone of an email tends to be more personal whereas a newsletter is read as news. In a way, you can imagine why some brands call their email marketing campaign a newsletter, because that's their tone of writing.

In a newsletter, you can update your audience or consumers on everything relevant to the brand and to them. In our case, if some supporters have been asking for merchandise, a newsletter is the perfect time to speak on that progress or other product developments. It's also a way to incentivize engagement, ask for feedback or collect responses from consumers about what they want. The format you choose to do this can be fun and interactive but should suit your audience's preferred interaction.

Newsletters' formats are similar to modern magazines in that they have more writing, including extensive articles on sub topics relevant to the brand. They also tends to be a lot of high quality imagery and graphics. This makes the reading experience highly pleasing for any audience. Whether or not they want to read essays or descriptive point of views, versus to look at graphical compositions that tell stories of your brand, a newsletter is a product many audience members would pay for. If it's designed well it can be seen as an archival piece that speaks to the periodic journey of the brand over time.

Website

Your website functions as the home base of your brand. Everyone knows they can find as much information as they need on your website. And if there isn't, they expect to find some intake form or way of contacting your brand directly (email or intake form).

Think about when you walk into your favourite retail store to see what's new: you expect to be informed of upcoming releases, new releases, discounts, who to contact, and some product knowledge, or recent event information.

While your products can be synchronous with your brand colours and imagery, much of your audience may not see the cohesion of the visual work because of how it's disseminated online. The platforms themselves have a set style. They also feel like marketplaces made of different brands offering different ideas, products, and services. Within that inherent competition it may be difficult to accurately represent your brand's essence and feeling.

On every platform you exist, bring people back to the true face of the brand - your website. On your website, you want sections to be easy to digest and follow, but to speak to the graphical representation of your brand. At first you may not know what people want to see from your brand. Try to keep it concise but with tons of media representations like videos, images, graphics, animations. Try to use the media itself and titles to craft a story or represent a journey your brand is going through.

Typical pages you need for a website:

1. An About page/ Contact page: an introductory page that gives a run-down of your brand's mission, a bit of insight into how your brand works, or contact space for collaborations, including any key company contacts or methods of communication),

2. Blog or News section - this is where everyone will go to determine your brand's vision. People expect to read your tone of voice from the blog or at least infer what's important to the company by what's highlighted in this section.

3. Try a Shop section with a great e-commerce experience for your website. Use this for an idealistic and on-brand merchandise presentation. Couple this with content marketing tactics, different aesthetics with the products, especially through social media videos, always bringing consumers back to your website.

Overall, your brand's visual story should be evident through the website. Try using certain colours, symbols, style and texts to represent elements of your brand, and characteristics of the artistry and music that's shared with the audience. Think about different ways to show moods through colours and symbolism, and to represent different ideas. Lots of videos help to showcase the music. But also think about translating music works into a visual style. Experiment with different ways people experience and feel the type of music you make, while remaining authentic to you. You can make graphics around that premise, or hire talent to brand a collection of images and videos you want to display on your brand.

So when there is anything new people expect the website to be updated, but they won't necessarily know that unless you alert them. Try to use your email marketing website updates alerts.