How to Build a Social Media Campaign

Every business owner understands that their company's brand needs to reach out and engage its audience. But musicians especially need it reach out in a way that feels genuine, honest, and compelling. Social media is a great way to do that. It keeps fans updated about your music ventures, provides an outlet to attract new fans all over the world, and can dramatically increase your footprint as an artist. But do you know everything that is involved in creating a comprehensive social media campaign plan? Helping fans learn how to do this is exactly one of our primary goals at Band Pioneer.

A social media campaign can take a lot of hard work to build. It involves learning as much as you can about your target audience, finding out what social networks they spend most of their time on, and learning how you can reach them.

Putting a social media campaign together takes time, skill, and resources. With a certain amount of guidance, you can begin developing expertise at building a campaign that gets the attention of your niche fan and drives them to engage with your music. 

In this article we're going to shared the six critical steps that you need to take to create that successful social media campaign. Make sure to also read our articles on TikTok and Facebook music marketing.

Musicians often make the mistake of believing that all they need to do on social media is show off. But for many of us, just adding another music video clip online is a little too generic, and could get lost in the shuffle. Before you begin promoting your music, you need to understand who you're promoting it to and what they are interested in.

Customer personas are a great tool often used by business to help identify and describe their target audience. They outline information about the demographics that customers belong to, the challenges customers have that the company's product helps solve, and the features that customers look for when they purchase a product. In other words, they draw a detailed picture of what your ideal customer (or in our case fan) looks like.

Interviewing a large number of your typical fans can help you gather the information that you need to create these customer personas. Market research can help, as well. Typically, your customer personas will list age, gender, work description, hobbies, relationship status, location, personality traits, their favorite music and brands. This data will allow you to zone in on the type of person best suited to support your artistic style.

Once you get to know something about what your typical fan looks like, you're in a position to learn what social media channels they tend to spend the most time on, so that you can make optimal use of your resources focusing on just those channels.

• Find out which platforms have the most people among your target audience demographic.
• Determine which social media apps have the features that best suit your style.
• Gather information about which social media channels have the most active engagement by the types of users that are interested in your music.

Before you begin running a campaign, you need to have a clear idea of what it is that you wish to achieve with it, and how those goals align with your music, band, and marketing objectives. Many brands think of their goals in terms of greater traffic to their website, the generation of new leads, conversion rates, greater brand awareness, and brand authority.

It's important to do more than to simply state that you aim for greater traffic or more leads, however. Your goals need to be specific and measurable. You need to define exactly how much you wish to increase your current traffic or lead generation rate.

When you have specific goals to reach for, you can engage in social media marketing that aligns with them. For instance, if you wish to increase traffic to your website, you may choose to create the kind of content that members of your fanbase look for when they're searching for music. If your goal is to increase your conversion rate, on the other hand, you may want to focus on the kind of content that people read or watch immediately before purchasing band merchandise, or downloading digital assets.

Different best practices apply to different social media channels. You need to fine-tune your content promotion methods to each channel that you get on. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for instance, have live video streaming features that let you establish more direct contact with your audience than recorded video. It would be a good idea to take advantage of them if you're on these channels.

It's also important to remember that platforms like Facebook require businesses to pay to advertise if they want to reach most of their audience. Organic reach alone does not work effectively. It's important to take advantage of such platform-specific features to promote your brand. If Facebook is one of your target social media platforms you should also read our article on Facebook reach and advertising marketing tips. We also have a recent article on marketing tips for TikTok, and an entire category dedicated to online music marketing.

It's important to keep a few things in mind when you ask your content writing team to create content for you:

• The content should be consistent with the message of your music and fanbase.
• Where it's appropriate, your content should have calls-to-action to help your fans take positive steps toward converting once they finish consuming your content.
• It's a good idea to post a mix of original content and shared external content to retain audience interest.
• You should repurpose and republish content to make the most of your investment in it.

It's important to remember that social media viewers today have short attention spans. If you give them a reason to tire of your content, they will quickly look elsewhere. You need to make sure that your content is concise, wastes no time getting to the point, is free of grammatical errors, and is easy to digest.

In general, video content delivers a return on investment that is about 50% greater than text-based content. You need to seriously consider investing in video.

Social media is about more than simply throwing some content at your audience and letting them consume it. People come to social media to experience engaging social relationships, and music-related content can be one of the most effective ways to do this. It's important to monitor your social media accounts multiple times each day, and to reply to as many followers as possible when they comment. When you start a conversation with your audience, you attract greater interest. Likewise, the less they hear from you, the more out of touch you appear.

Your social media campaign cannot be something that you set in motion once, and walk away from, expecting it to run on auto-pilot indefinitely. You need to constantly check to see what content works and what doesn't, and make adjustments as appropriate. If a particular post resonates with your audience, you need to take note and consider promoting it for even greater reach. If something seems to not work very well, you need to make changes to your content calendar to make sure that such content isn't put out again. It takes regular monitoring of your results to achieve an effective social media campaign.

The better you learn how to reach your target audience through social media, the more successful you will be using these media to build your brand.

Make sure to bookmark our music marketing page, as we are constantly researching and publishing new marketing content to help our viewers succeed. 

And make sure to check out the following links detailed information on any specific platforms you're interested in:

• Facebook Marketing
• TikTok Marketing
• Creating a Music Website
• Music Merchandising