Today's advice is regarding marketing and the fact that there are levels to marketing, as well as what type of marketing strategies you should be using at a certain level of your career. 

Let's explain it on a business model where it makes it easier to grasp this concept. 

Let's say you want to open up a local restaurant that is gonna sell the best cheesesteaks and burgers. For now you have one location.

You're not going to use the same types of marketing strategies that McDonald's, or TGI Friday uses. You would go out of business trying to use some of the marketing campaigns that they use. You're not gonna get your name on billboards, commercials on major TV channels, and so on at this level. You're better off handing out flyers locally to acquire your new customers, and spreading the word about your new restaurant that way. Using a modest budget to run local ad-words or Instagram ads to attract your new customers makes sense for your level of business. 

Your ability to deliver your product or service matters more at this level. That's a concept that a lot of businesses don't quite understand. We've seen local services and companies go out of business because they sold so many group-ons and received so much business that they couldn't handle. This in turn, gave them so many bad reviews on yelp and tarnished their brand to a point that they simply couldn't recover and had to shut their doors. This happens to so many businesses but no one talks about it.  

But you may ask how does this relate to me as an artist? 

Well we've seen number of examples where artists in their early career paid thousands for billboards with not much ROI, spent thousands to get their music videos on MTV jams or BET jams, without creating much of a spike in their brand growth. 

We've seen artists pay thousands to get on satellite radio station interviews and shows without much of success. We've seen artists do radio campaigns in class B markets without much of success. We've seen artists spend thousands on major features with other artists and got virtually nothing out of it. 

We can keep going and going, but the point I'm making is that there is a time a place for certain marketing initiatives. 

A lot of the items I just mentioned are a volume game. This means if you can't do 20 radio stations at once, don't do just 3. 

If you can't get 5 to 10 billboards in strategic locations then don't do it at all, 

If you can't do a mid-level radio station interview every 2 weeks don't just pay money to do one.

We would have to teach you a lot more about the music business for you to understand why, but we can tell you that all labels we've worked with know this fact. We can show you that for the same money it would cost you to do some of these campaigns you can achieve 3 to 5 times the reach of quality targeted fans through online marketing for half the price. 

Anyways, the take away is that there are many different levels and types of marketing strategies. You're not Travis Scott or Taylor Swift, so don't try to do Travis Scott or Taylor Swift level marketing on a hundred thousand dollar budget because you will waste your money.  

If you are looking for help with different types of marketing strategies to take your music business to the next level, contact us today to get started and hop on a strategy call with the team at Digital Science Media.

If you don't have the budget just yet for a full blown marketing campaign but want to learn about the business basics, make sure to check out our Indie Artist Accelerator where we have modules that go in depth about the very topics we discussed in this blog post, live Q&A's, a private Facebook group, & more.