The Ultimate Guide For Marketing New Music Part 3: Strategic Planning
Have you ever asked yourself how to plan your music career? What are the steps that go into the magic of becoming an artist?
A Musician in today’s industry must use a patient mind, goal-setting perspectives, action-planning, and a deep self-awareness to successfully navigate and manage their career. Believe it or not, this wonderful set of emotionally intelligent aptitudes culminate in a single tangible, well, digital, document.
Inside a musician’s toolkit must always be a strategic plan. It’s much like a business plan but without an investor angle. Strategic plans outline a career’s key components and by tracing connections between your environment and your objectives, allow you to evaluate, target, and follow through with both macro and micro plans.
Throughout our experiences, MPT has seen many different career types and musical successes. The strategic plan is unique to each artist but starts with a single set of questions and considerations. In this article, we will discuss how to put together a strategic plan for your musical career.
Reasons To Treat Your Music Like A Real Business
Right about now, you might be wondering, “Is strategic planning really that important, how should I plan my music career, inst everything is random?”
To start with, no, nothing is random, everything in the industry is a story inside of someone else’s story. So start first by evaluating where you fit in as a musician in your genre’s market. Take a time to think back on the past year.
- Did you get that album or single released?
- If so, did it get released on schedule?
- Did you accomplish more than half of what you wished to do?
- Have you achieved any of the significant milestones available in your market?
We frequently make decisions based on our feelings. After all, why not, songs are created out of the passion that seeps through to a creative medium. However, if you always wait for those ideal circumstances, you may anticipate away your potential as a musician. Even though we don’t often associate money with music, you do need to be able to support yourself by doing what you do best, and income generation is formulaic rather than creative.
Staying focused on those particular goals will be made easier by taking the time to plan strategically.
Strategic Planning
Focus & Direction
Structure, aim, and follow-through on the part of musicians are more crucial than ever in 2022. Having a career plan can help you through the many setbacks and uncertainties the music industry is guaranteed to throw your way while also demonstrating your commitment to others. Picking an industry direction like recording artist rather than orchestra member, for example, is a macro decision you need to make early. Once chosen, focus your energy on those operations and nothing else.
Focusing on a formula, regime, or schedule is key no matter the direction you choose to take as each of them gives you reliability in the habit. From there you can build each individual component of your business, from marketing, finance, sales, and of course studio time.
Short-Term & Long-Term Goals
Planning will always save you time and stress in the music industry, whether it’s for a specific project like an album or a broad objective involving your entire career. Without time-based goals that have a start, due, and end date, you’ll have to spend a lot of time and money putting out fires, making last-minute modifications, and managing the paperwork.
Short-term goals are achievable on a 90-day stretch. They need to be quickly actionable, not be resource exhaustive and are either a singular instance with high value or a segment of a long-term sequence. this can be anything from a production cycle, to a song release or launch campaign.
Long-term goals are essentially anything that will span over a 12-month period. Strategic outlooks for 12 months, should be divided into segments and include, you guessed it, short-term goals. Year-long goal setting can have high-tension times as well as “detente” where an artist can comfortable and creative. Think of an album creation or concert tour.
The three words to remember when building these goals are: Concise, Realistic, Achievable
Building Raw Excitement For Your Fan Base
Finding out exactly who your fans are and what drives them is made easier by target profiling in music. Although you may have a core audience of devoted listeners your fan base must grow at a steady pace. The super fans need to be energized so they can help you expand your reach to new listeners.
With excitement, enthusiasm, and energy, your fan base needs more than a monthly drop to keep them attached to the brand. Your personality, content & personal interaction have to keep people hooked, and planning this out with a creative twist is a very significant step.
To excite your audience always imagine that they are looking to you for trustworthy entertainment. Every fan may serve as the cornerstone of something substantial and significant in the long term.
Organize and Normalize Routine
You’re going to need a plan to “make it” happen whether your goal is to sign a deal with the label of your dreams or to make a livelihood from music placement. You will be confronted with your own limitations, and even though the MPT Agency attitude is all about going above and beyond, you need to organize yourself around tasks you can complete. Don’t overburden yourself or you can face deadlock in your tracks.
It is always better to progress one step at a time than to leap into a pit.
Planning makes you confront difficult questions about your work goals, both major and minor and helps you establish useful habits that become like clockwork. Things like checking emails, consistently posting, and having strict studio times are all about normalizing successful habits. The smallest things, when combined can amount to great things.
Advantage In The Industry
Strategic planning distinguishes devoted artists from amateurs. Excluding music quality, the difference in success between artists is often limited to their ability to follow a plan. If the musician is working in a jumble of chaos, they won’t be able to manifest the type of performances they need to stand out.
Your chances of identifying actual momentum in the industry will increase with the quality and specificity of your career strategy. The overall flow of markets, fans, trends, and sounds is a segment that you cannot control as an artist. Therefore, you’re objectives revolve around working with and through these elements to get to the next level.
MPT Agency, Your Strategic Partner in Music Marketing
Though many musicians have ambitious goals for their work, in theory, those who actually put in the effort to prepare well stand the best chance of succeeding professionally. At MPT Agency, there is a rich culture of nurturing this habit in our artist roster and guiding them through the pitfalls and difficulties of their promotional outlet. Strategic planning is a long process and is not something that is built overnight. Your promo campaign will require you to answer a long list of questions that will help you every step of the way.
MPT Agency will help you to prepare well and stand the best chance of succeeding professionally in today’s music biz. To find out what other services can enhance your musical career, make sure you check our blog regularly and follow us on Instagram for more music marketing-related updates.
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