The Future of Musician Marketing

The digital age has revolutionized marketing, making it more complex but also creating the opportunity to dramatically improve fan experiences, especially away from the concert experience. The rapid advancements in technology that enable the possibility of always-on connectivity between Artist and Fan have made it so that marketing as a discipline is now inextricably tied to tech—and mobile tech. For artists this transformation both challenges and empowers like never before.

Artists are brands and like brands, are starting to realize the insights and power that technology can bring to their fan marketing initiatives. Artists can, for the first time, use digital insights to power optimized fan interactions.

Outside the music industry, brands get it. The marketing technology landscape is exploding. In one survey, 68 percent of organizations had a separate digital marketing budget that averaged a quarter of the total marketing budget.

One key enabler of marketing technology is the capability to identify, understand, and interact with fans on an individual level. The early analytics from digital interaction with fans focused on aggregate metrics. How many visitors to your web site? Now, new tools allow you to drill down to individual fans and their interest in you. You can now separate the right data from the big data. This all starts with the creation of a comprehensive user profile.

Customer Profiles

Your fans are constantly creating more data. Clicking, searching, swiping, tweeting, and many other actions provide information in real-time about their interests. Marketing technology can capture and analyze these fan interactions in a profile so that you can make better decisions on when, how, and with what message to engage your fans.

Your fan profiles can be either known (you have their name, e-mail address, phone number, location, age, gender), or anonymous (the profile lacks identity details). And even data in the aggregate – preferences over watching videos compared to streaming music, for example, show that you can improve your marketing to your audience. Activity on your web app / web site can help tailor the Artist to Fan engagement experience accordingly.

Programmed Interactions

The last step is delivering the engagement to the fan, which takes two forms. The first is how you engage with your “new” fan, and this needs to be programmed based on a logical sequence and delivered in real time to the fan.  The good news here is that we are rapidly approaching where technology can automate this activity, so you don’t need to interrupt your day every time a fan opts in to your mobile fan base or email list.

The second engagement form is scheduled outreach to your community. Whether it’s location targeted to announce an upcoming show or a broad email/text/social post about a new video or music release, these communications need to be regular and relevant to the interests of your fans. While not purely automated, scheduling eliminates much of the marketing burden required to sustain a fan engagement campaign.

This is the future of marketing technology for musicians. Using the right data to understand your fans well enough to predict, prepare for, and deliver what they want from you. Using data to stay one step ahead of fans will enable you to develop extremely strong fan relationships that foster loyalty that will keep fans coming back again and again.