Learning how to sell your music and create music marketing plans and strategies is not nearly as daunting as it might seem to many musicians. In this article, I’ll not only give you a simple music marketing plan and strategy, I’m also going to give you some free marketing tips and ideas you can start using today!

Marketing music—as it’s done by record labels—is typically too expensive for Independent artists. While major labels will often try regional marketing, and if it works, deploy the same techniques nationally, Indie artists don’t have the budgets to go national, and often rely on the Internet for online music marketing to give them national and international reach.

The Best Music Marketing Tip of All!

Marketing Indie music really isn’t much more than using some common sense and a little elbow grease. It’s all about audience engagement and building relationships one fan at a time. So let me start off with what might be the greatest single music-marketing tip of them all; you’ve got to give to get!

There’s a marketing law; The Rule of Reciprocity – “I’ll give you something for free, if you give me something of equal value in return.” The potential buyer feels a moral obligation to give something in return if you offer something first, and you’re not asking for too much in return.

What do you have that your buyer will value enough to give you his or her email address in return? If you give them a free song download in return for their email address, you can build a relationship and market more of your music to her over time. And to a person who has already shown an interest in your music. Does it get any better than that?

How to Create a Music Marketing Plan and Strategy

Music Marketing Tip #1: Identify your target market and go to where they are. Who is your target market? Thirty-something females? Great! I identify where they frequent or congregate online and off. That’s where you need to be to meet them and market your music to them.

Do they come to your shows? Great! Have an assistant or volunteer walk around the room giving out a CD Single in exchange for email addresses from your. Have that same person selling full albums for $10 to $15. And what about T-shirts or other swag? You can do this! You just need to find someone with a personality and the desire to help you.

And don’t forget; once you have those email addresses, don’t forget to use them! Keep your fans in the loop, but don’t bombard them with spam. Send them short, informative emails that they will find interesting.

Music Marketing Tip #2: Learn some basic sales tracking and record keeping. Not to sound cynical, but make sure you create and routinely use a simple accounting system to make sure all inventory and money balances out at the end of the night. You’ll need to keep an accurate track of those things for tax purposes as well. Use Quickbooks. There are plenty of FAQs and helpful online forums to help you become good at it in no time flat. Suck it up… you’ll need to do some basic business tasks if you want to earn an income marketing your music.

Music Marketing Tip #3: Marketing your music online. People will not buy your music if they can’t find your music. Make it easy for them to find you by learning where your buyers go online and see if you can market your music in those places. Example: If your typical buyers, or at least a significant percentage of them are mid-thirties females who tend to read a lot of romance novels, see if there are any best-selling authors who have their own site. Cut a deal to put a graphic link on their site, and for every download sold, they get a reasonable cut. To summarize: Market your music to your most likely buyers at places where they already go!

Music Marketing Tip #4: Building a website for yourself on the cheap is easier than you think. Google the terms; WordPress Music Retail Themes. Many of them are free, and none are very expensive. WordPress is easy to learn, but if it’s out of your technological reach, there are plenty of small developers that will do it for you for a few hundred bucks. Money well spent.

Use Facebook and Twitter to market your music as well, but don’t over do it! Nobody wants to hear about your trips to the grocery store or what you’re having for dinner. Engaging your fans with information that’s about the making of your music is what they want to hear about.

Tell them about a new song you’re working on. Post video clips of you in the studio. Post lyric sheets. Tell them the story behind the song. Let them meet the other musicians who played on the track. Those musicians will show their friends, who in turn will show theirs!

Let your fans know about every show you’re doing. Comment before and after your shows. Mention the names of fans that you saw in the audience or greeted at the venue. Make it personal to them and they’ll show their appreciation and loyalty by telling their friends about you.

A Music Marketing Strategy is Important But…

If you don’t have a great product—in this case, your music—no matter how many people find you because of great marketing, they are not likely to buy what you’re selling. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. In this case, if the water tastes foul, the horse will never take another sip.

And while I’m using horse metaphors, let’s talk about putting the cart before the horse! There is a common belief that record companies manufacture sales with marketing. I’m sure there may be some cases of that, but it’s my observation that the reason we sometimes believe a hit was “manufactured” is that we personally don’t like what we hear and believe that the only way it could have become a hit is through marketing or some sort of play to play.

The reality is that somebody does like the music—a lot of somebodies! Just because it doesn’t appeal to you or I doesn’t mean the song is only a hit because of great marketing. Radio stations couldn’t keep an audience if they only played bad music they were cramming down the throats of their listeners.

Back to the cart before the horse; is your music ready to be marketed? Do you know what genre it’s in? Is it a niche genre or a more commercial one? Are your songs so catchy and memorable that your listeners will want to hear them over and over again, and then tell their friends? Are your songs as good as the best on the market?

I know it’s hard to take an objective look at your own music, but it seems to be wasted time, energy and expense to market your music before it’s ready enough to capture the fans that you’re after.

What’s Your Strategy to Market Your Music?

Do you have one? Do you have a marketing plan written down? When are you going to start, and what will be your first action steps?

Before you start, make sure your music is top notch, get objective opinions, figure out what genre your music is in, who your fans are, and identify the best marketing tactics to get your music heard by those fans. Whether you’re using an online music marketing plan, or selling CDs from the trunk of your car after shows, making a plan and sticking with it will result in much better sales!

Bonus material:

Music marketing and promotion articles and FAQs:

http://www.taxi.com/music-business-faq/music-promotion/

Great video interview with Youtube sensation Tiffany Alvord:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH8mZX5FX80

I just finished doing a video interview with some nice gents from Australia. One of the topics they asked me about was Music Marketing for Indie Musicians. I realized while I was answering the questions that so many of the music marketing techniques I was recommending are common sense things we often overlook unless reminded.

Your instinct – or should I say reflex  – is often to market music in a way that feels like it would appeal to you. But you aren’t the potential buyer, and may not be objective when judging the effectiveness. So the first step is to identify exactly who your most likely buyer is.

How old is he? Is he actually a she? What is his life like? What does he like to do in his spare time? Where does he do it? Who does he hang out with? What kind of radio station does he listen to? Does he go to clubs to hear live music? How does he buy music? How old or young is he or she?

Music Marketing Segmentation

That’s really just a fancy way of saying that you need to identify the types of people who will buy your music. It would be extremely rare to find any music (other than the Beatles) that has across the board appeal. Demographics and psychographics matter for all forms of marketing – even music marketing! Your audience represents a marketing segment, which you need to identify and concentrate on with a relentless passion.

Once you’ve done some serious thinking and identified your target market segment, you need to answer one central question that all consumers ask when confronted with any sort of pitch. “What’s in it for me?”

Very little else matters if you can’t answer that question, and you better answer it well!

What is in it for the potential buyer? Are you in a genre that he or she likes? How is your music a cut above? What makes your music accessible, yet unique? Are you able to describe your music in a way that quickly makes it easy for your potential customer to imagine what he or she will hear?

Yes, you need an “elevator pitch,” and a really good one at that! To simply say, “My music is awesome and you’ll love it,” isn’t enough. If you told a potential buyer, “My music is similar to Taylor Swift but with male vocals,” the buyer would instantly know what it is and decide if he or she is interested in learning more or hearing it.

Marketing Your Music is Really Just a Conversation

Once you get the right people to listen to your music, you need to keep them engaged. Invite them into your life. Help them get to know you. Post session videos on YouTube. Post videos of your shows, your road trips in the van, and whatever else you can think of that makes your listeners become fans. The more they know you, the more they will feel like they discovered you, and want to share their new discovery.

Write a blog. Keep it relevant. Talk about your songs. Tell your readers what inspired you to write each one. Ask your readers to interact with you. Which of your songs do they think are the best? The answer might surprise you and that could be valuable information that helps you sell more music

Follow up with the people who buy your music. If you capture an email address for your purchasers, send them a short thank you email. Give them a chance to opt in to your email list. Ask them politely, and let them know that you’ll respect their privacy by not sharing their info.

Don’t hammer them over the head trying to sell them more music right away. Let them get to know you a bit, then politely ask them to buy more. Asking for the sale is something many creative people have a hard time doing. People are afraid to sell because they worry that the potential buyer won’t like them any more.

Selling Your Music

If you’re selling something they’ll love, then you’re actually doing them a favor by making them aware that they can buy it! Think about it – don’t you only get disgusted by people trying to sell you what you don’t want? If somebody tries to sell you a handy 8-track recording studio for your iPhone would you hate him or her? Not likely, because it’s something that might benefit you.

Marketing Your Music with Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization or SEO has become critically important. How many times a day do you use Google? So does everybody else! It’s your job to make sure that any and all the web pages that have your music on them are visible to all the search engines. It’s also important to do everything you can to get on the first page when the search result comes back.

I don’t have enough room here to teach you everything you need to know about SEO, but it’s not as hard as you think and you really need to know who to do the basics. Taking just one weekend to read SEO Made Simple by Michael Fleischner.

But remember, all the SEO in the world won’t help you much unless you are effective in figuring out how to categorize your music in simple, common terms that consumers would naturally use in conversation and when using a search engine. “Indie Country Pop” is a pretty good example. Click the link and see where you’d be if you titled your sound, web page and your genre as Indie Country Pop.

Let’s try something more specific this time. Search Google for “Acoustic love songs for weddings.” How would you like to have your song appear on the first page for that term? Think you’d sell any music? You bet!

More Music Marketing Advice

There are plenty of people offering advice on how to market your music. Some is good, some not so good. Most songwriters and artists don’t do any music marketing other than building a MySpace page and putting their music on CDBaby and other online music retailers. If you use any of the techniques I’ve described above, you should be head and shoulders above your competition. Effective music marketing is an ongoing pursuit. If you tend your garden regularly, it will flourish.