Is Anyone Paying Attention to Your Music Brand’s Content?

With the glut of content, there is a need for a thoughtful online content strategy.

There is an obsession with online content as the easy fix for musical instrument and equipment manufacturers’ marketing woes. But there are so many channels of communication available and so many opportunities to connect that a marketing plan needs to be extremely focused and purposeful in order to be successful. Simply posting volumes of content on the internet is not a sound marketing strategy.

Ed Sheeran recently announced, “I’m taking a break from my phone, emails and all social media for a while. I’ve had such an amazing ride over the last five years, but I find myself seeing the world through a screen and not my eyes, so I’m taking this opportunity of me not having to be anywhere or do anything to travel the world and see everything I missed.”

It might not seem significant that one popular musician is taking a break from social media, but just having good social media numbers is not enough to sell music industry products. A Twitter Audit review indicates that 30% of Sheeran’s 16 million Twitter followers are not real and are probably spambots.

The popular social media blog Buffer Social reports losing half of its social referral traffic. They report Twitter down 43%, Facebook down 53% and LinkedIn down 45%. All told, they lost nearly 100,000 viewers. They suggest that the severe drop in readership may be due to the glut in online content. WordPress posts an average of 1.5 million posts in a single day. And this doesn’t include other social networks that flood our computers and phones. Fortune reports that Instagram users miss 70% of the content in their feeds.

Whether you’re talking about cable television, satellite radio or the internet, we are assaulted—day and night—with a constant stream of words, music and videos. So how do you break through all that noise?

Set specific goals.

The first step in connecting with your audience in this mass of unfocused music industry content is to have clear goals. Do you want to sell a line of new products? Are you trying to build customer awareness for your music brand? Are you simply trying to drive more traffic to your website? These are not necessarily exclusive goals, but you need to prioritize one or two things if you hope to accomplish anything.

Set guidelines for content that will resonate.

Your content needs to connect to your consumer. Roger Bryan of The Huffington Post suggests that there are three characteristics of successful content: informative, interesting and relevant. In order to be informative, the copy needs to answer questions or educate the audience. This could be text and might also include photography, infographics and video content. Interesting content will engage and hold the reader’s attention. It could be humorous, thoughtful or emotive. It is not a long series of keywords used to boost search engine optimization. And finally, if the content is not relevant, it will be invisible. It will take thoughtful research to create content that adds value to the conversation. If your customers find your content authentic and useful, you can start to build trust in your music brand.

Use metrics to measure success.

If you don’t track and analyze your goals for a specific time frame, you will never have a clear understanding of your progress. If you pay attention to the feedback, you will be able to modify your messages and products and ultimately build trusted lines of communication with your customers.