Online Music Marketing: Campaign Strategies, Social Media, and Digital Distribution

View a promo video of author and instructor Mike King discussing Online Music Marketing: Campaign Strategies, Social Media, and Digital Distribution.

The Internet has created a seismic shift in the music industry. Traditional physical marketing outlets, while still important, have been augmented with a variety of online-based marketing, sales, and distribution outlets, all of which require their own specific marketing approaches and strategies.

This course takes an in-depth look at the tools and emerging technologies artists can use to generate interest in their music, acquire new fans, and sell their music. The course begins with an introduction to online marketing—the opportunities available, case studies on how artists are generating interest online, ways to optimize the fan experience, and the major differences between online and physical marketing campaigns. From there, the course covers the basics of developing your own Web site; securing a domain and hosting company, developing an optimization strategy so potential fans can find your site using the search engines, and best practices for creating a fantastic user experience.

Once you have your own site in order, we look at ways to optimize your visibility and acquire new fans using social media and third-party sites like Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, MySpace, Wikipedia, and more. We'll talk about the best methods for generating demand, look at successful artists and what they are doing to build their community online, and explore other organic (as opposed to paid) marketing opportunities online. Once we've discussed the ways to build up your community on third party sites, we'll consider effective pricing and product techniques designed to reward your most enthusiastic fans, while helping to generate a higher net margin for you as an artist.

To help expand your marketing and sales outreach, we'll discuss pricing details and options for third-party distribution and sales partners (such as iTunes, Amazon, Tunecore, CD Baby, and others), as well as artist-service-based partners (Reverbnation, Topspin, Nimbit, Bandcamp, and others). The final lesson in the course presents options for integrating all of these online concepts into your offline activities (such as touring, selling merch, traditional retail options, and press) to enable a fully integrated marketing campaign, one that is timed to generate as much interest (and sales) as possible!

By the end of this course, you'll have mastered the art of online music marketing, and have a fully timed, integrated, and optimized marketing plan that you can use to build up your digital touch points, generate interest in your music, and sell your music online.

By the end of this course, you will:

• develop a well-rounded approach to marketing and selling your music online
• utilize the power of social media outlets to build your fan base
• gain a broad overview of all the marketing segments available to musicians, with a particular focus on online-related initiatives
• learn traditional and nontraditional pricing and marketing strategies
• gain an in-depth understanding on the use of widgets, the importance of Web optimization, best practices for e-mail, and more
• develop a solid foundation in effective messaging, branding, and communication
• understand how to properly use analytics to identify your niche and target your audience
• create a timeline and a finalized marketing plan for your music release

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