 So I was thinking to myself the other day that if a music artist were to do all of the different music promo strategies across all of the music marketing spectrum, it would be a lot. You know what I'm saying? Like to be real, it's a lot to us sometimes and we get paid to do this stuff. And they also had me thinking that what would I rank certain promo strategies if I had to stack them against each other? Like, yes, there are different strategies that will undoubtedly put you in front of somebody, but some things are definitely much more worth doing than other things that you may have heard of. I have someone tell you to do. So that's exactly what I want to get into for this video. I want to rank some of the top promo strategies that I hear about the most so that hopefully it gives you a little bit of clarity on what you should be doing and what's worth your energy. Let's get into it. What's going on? My name is Kory Music Marketing Co-Finder Country Band Agency and today I want to rank some of my top music marketing promo strategies. I want to say my top strategies. These are the strategies that are pretty common. These may be things that you've heard me talk about. Maybe you've heard Sean talk about them. Maybe you've had another marketer talk about it. Somebody's probably put one of these tips of strategies across your way at some point or another. And if not, then I guess it's going to be a video of a couple of new promo strategies that you could try out and maybe put to work and see how they work for you. Now, like I said earlier in the video, I don't think that all marketing strategies are created equal. I think that some things are much more worth the effort, much more worth the time and much more worth the money than the other things that could also put you in front of people technically. So that's what I'm going to do for this video. I'm going to talk about some of these different strategies, rank them, we're going to go from worst to best in my opinion. And then I'm going to see how you guys feel about it because I'm going to see if you all agree with me if you all disagree, but I think this is going to be interesting. Now, before we get into all that, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Links will be in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage me, come give me some video ideas, all of that good stuff. Also, go and check out the brand main elite courses. We have relaunched them and reopened them back up to the public. So if it's someone that missed out on the last round, you've been wanting to get in, you know what I'm saying? Trying to learn a little bit more about his music marketing. The link will be in the description below. Go and check that out. Promise you you won't regret it. Now with that being said, let's go ahead and get into it. So out the gate, first promo strategy, very bottom of my list is comment spamming. And you guys know who you are. All of you have probably done it at some point. You are enacting, I think the worst music marketing strategy there is. One, it's extremely annoying. No one likes to have their comments spammed on or their comments spammed by some random artists in some random link. It makes you look needy. It makes you look like you're begging for attention and no one wants to feel like their attention is being begged for. That's literally the best way to push people away from you. On top of that, it's just simply not a scalable method. Like let's say you get your comments spamming down to, I don't know, you're knocking out 10 comments in 10 minutes. So that's what that's 60 comments in an hour, you know what I'm saying? And like you can't scale it up. You only have so much time in the day. You only have so much time that you can actually post these comments before you get blocked by Instagram or Twitter or YouTube or whatever platform you're doing it on. And it's just the worst possible marketing strategy that you can do. Like if you are a comment spammer and you do it, like I hate you. You know what I'm saying? Just be real with you. I hate to be that guy, but I very, very strongly dislike you. You know what I'm saying? Like you get no love over here. So out of the gate, I think that's the worst music marketing strategy that anyone can do. Please don't do it. All right. So next up from there, I will have to give it to the $1.80 method. Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with the $1.80 strategy. I first heard of it from Gary Vee. To me, it's a step up above the comment spamming strategy because you're still engaging with people's posts, but you're bringing some type of value with it. So the concept behind the $1.80 method is that you leave your two cents, right? So your thoughts, your opinions on at least 90 posts a day. So that's what the $1.80 comes up to, 90 times two cents equals to $1.80. You know what I'm saying? Y'all got it. We hear, we hear a cool bet. So like I said, to me, this is a step up to the comment spamming technique that I see a lot of ours do. Whereas with the comment spamming, one thing you're not doing is showing the person that you're commenting underneath that you actually care about their content or that you're there for a particular reason, which means that they have no reason to care about you and your link that you just posted underneath their stuff. Versus if you go underneath a potential fans post and let's say you go like, hey, you like to go skateboarding. I also like to go skateboarding. You should go out to this park one time or sometime at this place. Now the person on the other side is going to sit and go like, hmm, this person just tried to connect with me around some general interest that I already have. And now they're a lot more likely to actually check out whatever you're asking them to check out, right? So the idea behind the $1.80 method is that you leave this two cents on a bunch of different posts from people that make sense for you. Maybe they're fans that you scout it out because they follow other artists. Maybe they engage with content that also falls within your niche. However you scout it out, these other people in the term of the day are worth you giving them your two cents, you do it, and then you leave something of value underneath their posts or in their DMs, et cetera, et cetera. Now the reason that this is at the bottom of the list for me is because it's time consuming. You know, it goes back up to it's not something that can easily be scaled up. If you're doing 10 comments in 10 minutes, so basically a comment a minute, that's an hour and a half just to knock out this 90, you know what I'm saying, these 90 comments, which I think is something that's worth doing in the beginning, especially when you don't have money to spend on yourself to do some of these things that we'll talk about. And it's definitely still a viable strategy, even if you still have a lot of advertising or other stuff going on around you. I just don't think it's something that can easily be scaled up because once again, it's not easy for you to do a thousand comments in a day. You would definitely get your account blocked on any social media platform. You would be flagged as spam. And then that would just stop the whole method, right? So that's why it's at the bottom of the list for me, not because it necessarily doesn't work, but because it's not easily scalable. And it takes a lot of your time, especially compared to some of the other things that we're going to get into on the list. So up next, we have getting press, getting PR, some of you guys may call it. And you might be wondering, like, why is it at the bottom of your list? Like press is dope, press is legit, not as a marketing tool. Now, I don't know how many publicists or journalists will stand behind this, but blogs and press don't really do much for music discovery these days. A couple of weeks ago, as I'm me making this video, Pigeons and Plains, which is one of the most reputable music blogs out there, made a post on their Instagram account talking about just how irrelevant blogs have become in the music discovery era because majority of music artists fans are finding that music through social media platforms, word of mouth and things like that. I don't know too many people that have found a new music artist that they love because of a blog or because of press. When's the last time you found an artist that you like because of a blog or some type of press or journalism or something like that? It's probably been a minute, right? So I don't think that press doesn't have its place within a music artist, you know what I'm saying, like overall strategy. But when it comes to marketing alone, it is at the bottom tier of a fan discovery, you know what I'm saying, like you will, you will, you're probably not going to get a lot of fan discovery out at $3,000 or that $5,000 PR campaign that you're thinking about and definitely not as much as you would get if you put that money into some other things. Now, yes, there will come a time in your artist career where it will make sense for you to start to get press around yourself. Press is really good for building brand credibility. It's really great for building up SEO. It's really good for like creating certain looks that you can celebrate within your community and within your fan base, but for pure marketing and finding new fans, zero, nothing. It doesn't, it doesn't do nothing for you. So if you're someone that's been thinking about going heavy on PR and press as a marketing strategy, you might want to think about it again, just to be real with you. So what are we going through so far? Number nine, comment spamming. Number eight, the dollar 80 method. Number seven, PR and press. Number six, I think I got to give it a Spotify playlist or just play listing in general. Now I don't think it's the strongest marketing plan. Like if your marketing plan only includes getting yourself into Spotify playlist or YouTube playlist or SoundCloud playlist, that's not really a marketing strategy. And that's because listeners from playlists, from real playlists are very passive. It's equivalent to listening to the radio. You've probably been in the car as a kid and the song came on the radio and you gave it a listen, not because you liked it or cared, but because it was just there. It was on something that you were already listening to. That's the equivalent to playlist traffic. There may be people in this playlist who hear you and give you a stream because you're in this place they listen to, but it doesn't mean that they care to necessarily go and check you out and become a fan. Yes, it's a gamble like anything else, but the chances are a lot more slim when it comes to play listing in general. So coupled that with the fact that Spotify playlisting, botting is like a very rampant problem in the placing community. And you know, it's something that I'm sure will pick up in other communities that are very playlist centric. That makes it a much riskier marketing initiative to take for the average artist. Now, I do believe that there is a place in time to add playlists into your marketing mix. One of those times to me is when you already have a pretty solid fan base built up. The thing that I have noticed from people who use play listing at a really high level is that they really use it just to pad out numbers. Like they're not really looking for any crazy fan growth. They're not really looking for like, you know what I'm saying, the most amount of followers that come out of it, they're just looking to add an extra 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, half a million streams into what they have going on. And this isn't just me talking about small indie playlists. I mean like playlists across the board. I know people who only get into Antipop or any of the big editorial playlists because they just know it's going to be a good look and it's going to pad their streams, not because they necessarily think it's going to bring them new fans and new serious listeners, you know what I'm saying. So play listing is good when you have a good network of playlist curators that are growing up their traffic in a legitimate way. When the place is relevant to your music, please don't place yourself in the place just because it does numbers. Make sure you place yourself in the place that actually makes sense for your genre and is placing other artists that are like you. And when you fall into those categories, then yes, play listing can be a very powerful thing. It can help speed up the algorithm for you on Spotify. It can trigger a couple of things that may have been a little bit harder for you to trigger with traffic coming from other sources, but it can also be a very dark and seedy and scary place that if approached wrong, can really mess up your analytics and mess you up. It's not super long time, but for long enough, you know what I'm saying. At number five, right? Number five on my list, smack in the middle is posting in social groups and threads. Now when I talk about this, I'm mainly thinking Facebook groups. I'm mainly thinking Reddit threads. I'm mainly thinking discord groups. And I'm mainly thinking like whatever other community you come across. You may be on some forums or something like that. And the reason that I kind of have this so high up is because I think that this is a very viable marketing strategy that most people can implement that they don't implement. Like how hard is it for you to go on Reddit and find five or six threads that make sense for your music and then post your video in there and get some traffic on it that way? You know what I'm saying? Like how hard is it for you to go and engage within a certain community, build brand, build value, build face within that community, and then push those people over to your music. There's a pretty well known story about the group Brock Hampton. I don't know if you guys are all familiar or fans of Brock Hampton, but they're like this, this rap pop group that's been around for like at least the last like three, four years. And a very wildly known part of their origin story is that they found each other on Kanye Tither, which is a blog or a blog group built around Kanye, right? It's a bunch of people who like came there initially to talk about Kanye and then they grew into his own like, not group, you know what I'm saying? Grew into his own community. And these guys found each other by engaging in that community. They have built up some sort of reputation within that community. They have built up a face card and there were people in the group that would go check their music out whenever they posted it because they were such frequent members of that group. I've heard similar stories about artists like Todd, the creator of our future. And I've seen it with my own eyes from clients and artist friends of mine who are just very active in certain groups on discord and Reddit and Facebook. And they've really built a community of people around them who like it and who would now check their stuff out whenever they drop because they brought value to that community. Now posting in these groups does zero for you if you bring no value to the community. For example, if you join a discord group and the first thing that you do is you dart for the music section, you spam your link and then you leave. No one is going to listen to you. Why would they listen to you? You think you're the first person to drop your link in this group? No, of course not. But if you go into that group, bring some type of value. Once again, build that face card, build that brand within the group, then people will become more likely to check you out and want to actually hear what you have to say. So I think that when used correctly and when done the right way, these groups are a very powerful way to build community within a very specific sub niche because once again, they exist across all niches on a bunch of different places. There are lots of creators with discord groups. There are lots of Reddit threads to accept music submissions. There are lots of Facebook groups and there may be others once again that you guys know about that I don't know about. So next we have influencer marketing, but specifically getting your music or your content shouted out on repost pages. Now I'm sure you guys have come across them or seen them or maybe even followed some, but there are dozens of pages across Instagram, Twitter, even TikTok and YouTube. They offer reposted content for artists in exchange for a small fee. And this is personally one of my favorite music marketing techniques, one because there are just so many pages like on Instagram alone. There's like hundreds of pages within damn near any niche. You know, some niches are of course bigger than others. Like it's a lot easier to find like rap pages than it is to find like Afro beats pages and stuff like that. But most genres of music and most niches have at least a handful of pages dedicated to posting music for those type of artists. And if you find those pages and you're able to pay the rate that they ask for, then those pages can be very powerful in your marketing arsenal. One, if you use them correctly, it's very easy to get the public to believe that these pages are just covering you. Now initially, you know, some people are gonna know that you're paying for promo. Like fans aren't stupid. They're gonna realize that like, yo, I've never heard of you. You got a thousand followers and somehow you got posted on this page with half a million followers. Like come on, people aren't stupid. But if you do it enough and you do it effectively and by effectively, I mean that you create content that is interesting to this audience and looks like it makes sense on this page. Then over time, you can start to convince the fans of that page that you're just another artist that this page is covering. We've done it for clients before. I've seen it get done for bigger artists. And it's a very popular strategy that's not going anywhere. So if you have been skeptical of paying a repost page, you know what I'm saying? Don't be definitely make sure that you audit the page and make sure the traffic is legit. Look at their numbers on social blade and see how they've been growing for the last couple of months or the last couple of weeks. Ask around and see if you can find any of the promo that they've done on the page and maybe talk to their artists and see how it benefit them. Ask the page for screenshots of results or back in analytics to of course make sure you're not paying for bot traffic or fake traffic. But assuming that everything is legit and real, then 100% go for it. You know, and the more of these pages that you can build up and kind of having your arsenal the better because to be real with you, one or two pages doesn't really do much to you, even at like the biggest level. Like you can get posted on at DJ academics or at rap, which both of those pages have millions of followers and like one post on it isn't going to do much for you. You know what I'm saying? Like it's going to take multiple posts on that same account to really get an impact or activating a bunch of accounts like it at the same time to get almost that same impact. So when you're doing it, definitely go for quantity of followers, but make sure you're also going for volume of quality pages as well. That would give you a much more benefit and when it comes to influencer marketing through these repost pages. Number three is influencer marketing using actual people. Now I put this over influencer marketing with the repost pages for really only one reason. Like I personally like working with the repost pages a lot more. They tend to be a lot quicker to respond. They tend to be a lot cheaper. We all know that people influencer may we don't all know, but if you ever worked with any type of like people influencer person influencer, the prices can fluctuate. You could be paying $100 for one person to have someone quote you $40,000 for a post. So in that sense, I do think the repost pages are a little bit better. However, when it comes to people influencers, they tend to shift the culture a little bit more. Now these influencers in modern times are basically the new celebrities, right? Like you probably care more about an Instagram influencer or a YouTube or a TikToker than you do certain actors and actresses. That's just how this is how culture has evolved. So if you're able to tap into certain influencers, it can be a very powerful way to extend yourself into a niche, like almost any niche, because there are influencers that speak to whatever audience of people that you're looking to speak to. If you feel like your fans are artsy hippie people, then there's probably some artsy hippie influencers that have the exact type of audience. You feel like your audience is more grunge and into skate. It's probably some influencers that speak more to their demo. So the powerful thing about people influencers is that, you know, one that can be negotiated with sometimes it willing to do the work if they like you, you know, not saying they'll do it for free, but they might do it for discount or just even be willing to do it if they like you and like the music. And you can always take their content and repurpose it to do other stuff with maybe run ads, maybe get a shout out on these repost pages we just talked about. But it gives you a wide variety of options of things that you can do if you get these people influencers on board with your campaign. So for that, their number three, even though like I said, I personally don't like the negotiation process. They can be a lot slower to respond and they definitely will command higher prices on average compared to the repost pages. But if you activate the right influencer and activated in the right culture hacking moment, then you will have a very powerful marketing moment behind you. Number two is paid advertising. Now y'all knew I was going to put this on here, you know what I mean? I knew this was coming. But paid advertising to me is just like the pinnacle of marketing that you can do. One, it gives you direct access to potential fans. You don't have to go through anybody. You can't be gatekeeper. The thing will allow the methods that we talked about like the influencer marketing or the playlist thing of press and stuff like that is like you can be gatekeeper out that stuff. Like there's a playlist that you feel like will just pop you off and that curator doesn't like you like your ass out, you're not getting onto it. Versus if you learn how to run ads properly and really hit the right targeted audience, like no one can stop you from doing that. As long as you pay your bill on time every month, you know what I'm saying? You don't run content that gets the account block like you'll be fine and you'll be able to consistently grow out. On top of that, almost every major platform has an advertising platform. Instagram and Facebook has one, Twitter has one, Snapchat has one, Reddit has one, Pinterest has one, TikTok has one, Spotify has one, even Twitch has an ad platform. Meaning that allow the general concepts that you're going to learn while running something like let's say an Instagram ad or YouTube ad will apply across the board when you different to the other ad platforms. Like yes, they all have their different functionalities and their different like user designs. But for the most part, the same KPIs matter on each platform. They're all tracking for the same stuff and they just each give a little bit of a different result based on what you're doing. But pay advertising allows you to go directly to the potential consumer. Direct B2C right in front of someone that may like you. It allows you to control the data and always have access to that data and that data becomes super valuable because now we're talking about learning from the data and realizing what type of people like you or what specific demo you're speaking to. We're talking about being able to retarget back to the data and push new things back to old people that are familiar with you and maybe have seen you. And then we're talking about just generally being able to like build on top of that data and create campaigns that further speak to more people like those people you just brought in. So pay advertising for me is right up there. You know what I'm saying? Like right near the top, right underneath what I'm going to consider to be number one. And another thing I did forget to mention with pay advertising is that with most of these ad platforms, pay advertising is the most budget friendly. Like some platforms like TikTok ads and like Twitch ads are super expensive. You know what I'm saying? Like they cost a lot more than other ad platforms. But for the most part, a lot of them will let you run ads for as little as a dollar a day. So if your budget, you know what I'm saying? Like you're tight on the budget and you don't really have a lot of funds to work with, then influencer marketing may not be the best thing for you. You know what I'm saying? Like you may need to dive into something like pay advertising first just to get some traffic going while you work on getting your funds up. You know what I'm saying? Like ain't nothing wrong with that. But pay advertising definitely top of the list for me because it's everywhere. It's on every platform. The data is malleable. The data is controllable. And like once again, no one can gatekeep you out of it. And that's been the biggest problem in music marketing and the music industry for a long time is artists being gatekeep out of things that would be very beneficial to their career. Number one music marketing technique trick hack promo tip, whatever you want to call it to me to me is content marketing. And I'm sure some of you saw this comment. If you follow me, you know, I'm all about influencer marketing, pay advertising and content marketing. But the reason I put content marketing at the top is one, your content dictates a lot of the things that you can do with these other marketing strategies. It dictates the way your ads work. It dictates what type of repost pages you're going to use for your shout outs. It dictates the type of influencers you may reach out to a lot of things start at content to if you activate your content right on the right platforms, you will be getting free growth and free traffic. So if you post a video on TikTok and that video goes up, free traffic. If you post a video on YouTube and it gets 2000, 3000 views organically, free traffic. If you post a video on Instagram and it ranks on a hashtag, that's free traffic. So just by getting into your content bag alone can start to open you up to a much wider audience and actually start to be the beginning of a lot of you guys' marketing plan. Like you may not look at it that way, but making videos on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and tweeting and all that stuff is a marketing strategy. It's a very powerful marketing strategy when you do it right and you start to understand not only what types of content resonate with your audience or the potential audience that you're looking to tap into, but also resonates with a particular platform and moves on that platform. For example, there's content that works better on TikTok than it does on YouTube or Instagram and that's okay. But the quicker you understand that and the quicker you get into your content bag, the better off you'll be. So if you're an artist that's been trying to avoid making content, like you don't want to be like that artist, like you're severely limiting yourself with the scope of how far your music marketing campaign can go because at some point, everything boils down to content. Like I tell clients that all the time, like we're content marketers, like there are literally things that we can't do if you don't make content for us that fits that scenario. So if I had to pick a number one, and I guess I do have to pick a number one, because this is my video right, I made the video. I'm going with creating content as the number one music promo strategy. Get into your content bag, lyric videos, POVs, freestyle videos, visualizers, music videos, I don't know, Instagram lives, skits, whatever content falls in the bag or something that you're interested in doing, it can only help, you know what I'm saying, just to be real true. So that's my number one tip. So let's run through it again, right? Number nine, comment spamming sucks. If you do it, I hate you. Please stop. Number eight, the $1.80 method by Gary V, a little bit better than the comment spamming because Alicia being genuine about it, but still not super scalable, still takes up a lot of your time. Number seven, PR press does make sense at some point in your career, but most of you guys, it doesn't make sense in the beginning. Do it once you're at a point in your career where you have a fan base and you're looking to be a brand credibility and get your SEO up. Number six, we got play listing. Playlisting can be a little shady. You know what I'm saying? Only playlisting isn't a marketing plan, but if you're in legit playlists with legit traffic then they can't help to boost your numbers and they can't help get you in front of people that do genuinely care. Number five is posting in social media groups, like Facebook groups, discourse, Reddit threads, and that's because these are free. These house a community of people that will like you, but you have to engage in the community and actually bring some type of value for it to be a viable promotion strategy. You can't just spam the group and dip. It doesn't work. Number four is influencing marketing through repost pages. Really great, potentially cheap option. There's lots of repost pages out there that speak to a bunch of different niches. They're easy to work with. They're usually negotiable. And you know what I'm saying? If you activate enough of them at the right time or at the same time, then you can get a very powerful impact on your campaign. Number three is influencing marketing using people. These people are the modern day celebrities. They control the culture of the internet and activating the right influencer can have a massive impact on your music marketing campaign, but it can be a little bit expensive just to be real with you. So it may not make sense for everybody to do, but it's definitely something to explore once you have a lot more budget at your disposal. Number two is pay advertising. The data is valuable. You can go direct to the consumer. So straight B to C and no one can get, keep you out of an ad account. Top, top thing up there for me. And then number one, once again, is creating content. It can generate free traffic for you. It can dictate the flow of the rest of your marketing campaign. And you know what I'm saying? It should be the fun part of making music. You know, like I tell artists all the time, like there's a lot of other things that you're going to stress about being a music artist in the music industry and creating content should be the fun thing. You know what I'm saying? Like don't let that be the other thing that stress you out. But as far as marketing goes, it's top tier. You know what I'm saying? Like content goes a long way in a society where you guys are basically competing for attention. So I'm curious to know what you guys think. Have you tried any of these problem strategies? Which one do you like? Which one do you not like? Let me know in the comment section below. I'm always interested to know what you guys think and how these things are actually working out for you. Other than that, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.