I blog a lot about the importance of planning your music marketing and promotions campaign before spending one dime, exerting any energy, or thinking about any one strategy. The planning stage is the most important part of marketing independent music. It is when you determine the how, what, when, where, and how much it is going to cost to get your music in the hands of potential fans. Planning is what separates the “wanna be’s” from the successful artists, musicians, producers, and record labels. Really! I have seen many, many people that have plenty of money fail and waste their money trying idea after idea with no plan in place. I have also seen people with very little money, that follow a plan, become very successful!

The best tool I have found to plan your campaign is called mind mapping software. The tool I want to share with you today is called MindMeister and it is free to use, available as an online application, and really, really helps you look at the big picture as well as drill down to specifics. Let’s take a look at how to use MindMeister to effectively build your successful music marketing and promotions campaign…

(I am not going to go into detail about how to use MindMeister as they have great tutorial videos available on their website and I would only be duplicating their efforts. Check out the videos to get started on your mind map!)

I am currently working with a Christian Artist, Jeremy Ledgewood, and I will use the mind map I created when determining how I would market him to the world:

The first step to planning a total music marketing and promotions campaign is to look at the entire picture and forget about the details. Often times this is called the 30,000 foot view because it’s like being in an airplane and looking down at a city from the window. You can see that there is indeed a city below, that there are roads, and that the city is laid out in a grid. But you can not see individual road signs, cars, business names, etc. As you start to create your campaign you need to stay at the 30,000 view level and simply think about the big picture items of a music marketing and promotions campaign. Examples would be online marketing, offline marketing, publicity, radio, video, and live show/tour marketing. As you start to use the mindmeister software you need to put the artist or campaign name in the center and then add your big picture concepts to the main heading. Here is an example:

As you can see, I have Jeremey Ledgewood as the campaign title in the center and each of the big picture categories coming off as individual marketing and promotion campaigns.

The second step is to “brainstorm” ideas and specific strategies within each campaign category. This is still not the time to get too specific. Let’s take online as an example. This is a huge category in marketing independent music. What you need to do at this point is decide all the available strategies online marketing offers you – opt in email lists, social networking, awareness, etc. Here is what I did with Jeremey during this stage:

Again, I am still looking at the “big picture” or 30,000 foot view of the entire campaign. Let’s look at online marketing again. In this category I have awareness, opt-in email, and social networking. But I have not drilled down intoany type of specifics like what social networking sites I will use, what I will do in specific sites, how often I will work on social networking, etc. This is because I am simply trying to get a full, big picture, idea of what it is I will do to market Jeremy Ledgewood’s music. As you continue with this process you will get down to the finite detail of your entire campaign. Let’s go another step further….

Now you can see that under the online category > Social Networking, I have expanded out specific social networking sites used by potential fans to find new independent music. Again, I still have not gotten into specifics of each of these site. I have only listed them as a tool I will use in my online marketing campaign.

Your next step is to start drilling down each of the sub categories in each category. Here is an example:

Using our “Online” example and expanding upon it, you can see that now myspace, twitter, and ourstage have sub categories. Myspace is going to be used for the 13-21 year old demographic marketing and promotion efforts, uploading music vidoes, fan club communications, and outstage contest promotions. Again, each of these categories are the “big picture.” The actual steps and action items needed for a successful outcome have not been determined yet. Looking at the big picture as a whole allows you to see the entire campaign. It allows you to see where you can promote the ourstage contests across the entire campaign. When you look at only one peice of the puzzle or “strategy” you get lost in the details. Details slow your music marketing and promotion engine down to a crawl. Plus, if you look only at online > myspace for example, and don’t think about the other areas, you might miss that using myspace to promote the ourstage contests would be a great tie-in marketing strategy.

It is always best when creating your campaign to start at the 30,000 foot view and continue drilling that view down for the entire campaign as a whole until you are to the finite details. Meaning, even after you figure out each of the categories off the main headline, don’t get caught up and “run with the ball” to complete one of the categories – in our case an example would be online. If you only drill down online in our example you would totally miss that you need to place links to radio stations on your myspace page so potential fans can listen to your music or better, request your music at the radio stations you have rotation! Or you might miss that you need to place a link to sign-up for your opt-in email list on your myspace page as well. You see, you have to start very broad, then look at each category and only drill down to the next level as you consider all the other categories as well because they each work together to form your entire music marketing and promotions campaign.

I think you are starting to get the point. This blog post really was not intended to be a blue print for creating a music marketing and promotions campaign…. It was to hip you on a cool, free, tool to help you do the work. I will go deeper into detail over the next few weeks here on the blog and in articles at I am Music Network‘s main site. Go check out the software, start working on your campaign’s 30,000 foot view, and if you have a question or get stuck reach out and comment or ask your questions here on this blog posts comment section and I will try my best to keep you moving forward!

Click on this link for detailed instructions and action plans for creating successful music marketing campaigns and promotions!

Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”