6 Most Brilliant, Underrated Marketing Tips for Your Composer Business
In this issue, I am sharing the 6 most underrated marketing tips for your composer business
Marketing is one of the main drivers of your business success. People need to know about you, your brand, and what you do in the context of how you can help them achieve their goals.
Sometimes as an artist, you just want to make art. And that’s cool. If you want to make money on the other hand, you need to think about marketing yourself and your creations.
To help you solve this problem, I have collected 6 brilliant ideas for you to use in your composer business marketing.
Let’s dive in!
Find What’s Good and Make It Great
To find what’s already working and put your own spin on it is a tactic to get to your desired musical outcomes fast. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel every time you sit down to compose.
In production music specifically, you will do much better if you take a track that has proven to be valuable, break it down to learn why it is successful, and use the structure, emotions, and genre to create your own.
To find what’s good and make it great, you need to practice the steps above, collect data about your tracks, evaluate the data and implement it into the next batch.
If you wanna go a bit deeper, you can read the following articles.
I broke blank page syndrome down further in this article:
5 Creator Strategies for Rapid Business Success
Here I go deeper into how to fill a gap in your publishers’ catalog:
3 Lessons From $100K in Production Music Royalties
Enough Data Is Enough
To have data is great but you need to evaluate the right data and not just more. You can track all kinds of data with your tracks. But not all data is equally important.
You can easily get hung up on tracking your time or what instruments you used.
And I think these data points might have their place, but when it comes to building a valuable catalog of your music, you should focus on these important metrics:
What are publishers asking for
Publishing frequency
Minutes of music on TV
Time to compose
ROI (Return on Investment)
For example, I use tunesat.com to track how often, where and how many seconds my music is used.
To back this up, I use my PRO statement to see how much money I made from each track and then double down on the ones that did really well.
Landing a Hit Is Not a Strategy
Building a valuable catalog is by far not as exciting as having your music featured in the next Dune trailer - or is it?
But there is simply no way to predict the virality of your music. And putting all your eggs in the trailer basket is not a strategy but wishful thinking.
Through a lot of effort and lots of meetings beforehand, I was given the opportunity to custom-score a trailer for a huge franchise.
And it went quite smoothly, apart from the number of revisions, nights working, and the overall stress. But the trailer house liked it and put it forward. The studio even sent forth an RFP or Request for proposal.
The whole process took about 4 months, and in the end - NOTHING.
No upfront fee, no feedback about why, and no paycheck. Only months and months of work.
All that to say, even if you are that close, it can all fall apart right before your eyes.
Virality is simply not a strategy.
The Client Is the Hero
It is not about you, your music, your success, or your reel.
When it comes to marketing and making your composer business successful it’s about your customer. The customer is the center of attention. If they are not, make them.
To do that you can:
Listen first
What do they need from you?
What problems do they have?
Where can you save them time?
These are timeless and broad categories of questions, I know.
But they work.
When you talk, talk about them first.
This comes in especially handy, if you are pitching a new publisher or prospect.
A nice word about their prior work, something you admire about them, how it connects you with them are all great starting points.
Show a real interest in them and they will show one in you. The law of reciprocity.
Speak their language
This might be the hardest part to do for some of you. The translation of words, stories, or problems into music is an art in itself.
But this step builds on the other two. By doing your due diligence and researching your potential partners, you will (almost) automatically get better at speaking their language.
If you speak the same language, then you will understand each other much better. Obviously.
Think about distribution first
Nothing you create, compose, or produce is worth much if you don’t have a strategy to distribute it.
Your creations might have intrinsic, artistic, and personal value, but to make money they need to have monetary value as well. This means that your prospect has to find value in your tracks.
You want customers to hear and use your tracks. But they can’t if they are not distributed well.
When you think about distribution first you make it much easier for publishers to discover you, build rapport with you that deepens the relationship and ultimately leads to $$$.
Client Avatar
To know who you’re talking to and what the problems are that you’re solving for them, is an essential step.
If you market to everyone, your marketing to no one. You don’t have to get all fancy and make mood boards or anything like that. Just think for a bit:
Who am I talking to, Who do I want to have as a customer?
You’re basically building a person that you will talk to in your marketing.That is very useful when it comes to sending pitches for example.
You can create one in your head, or, and I would highly recommend that, write it down somewhere.
I did that in Notion for my Youtube channel
Went a little overboard with this maybe, but you get the idea.
Having a customer avatar will ensure you’re not wasting any time with generalities and platitudes.
See you again next week!
Whenever you're ready I can help you grow your creative business.
Book a time with me here!⬇️⬇️⬇️
