Go-to-Market Strategy For Musicians 2024

A Go-to-market strategy is a step-by-step and gradual plan on launching the product and reaching the right audience to escape chances of failing. As a musician, when you try to monetize your music, you are directly trying to use social commerce to generate revenue.

And in this 21st century, being a musician is to be an entrepreneur, as you have to find your right product fit, the right audience, escape saturation, and generate revenue by selling your merchandise(and music). Your thought process should be like an entrepreneur. Also, you must follow all the plans and strategies that a business does.

Why do you need a Go-to-Market strategy?

The best of the ideas and products fail if there is no proper strategy to address the market and the consumers.

People in your niche are trying hard to reach their targeted audience who might be common to your targeted list. In this digital world, nothing happens by chance. Instead, every lucky outcome results from a strategic move.

There is no excuse to not address your customer persona, customer journey, or product fit. When you have a detailed Go-to-Market strategy, you understand your Total Addressable Market(TAM) and manage the expectations and the workload before you invest in any social advertising.

Here are the five things you need to do before launching your music or merchandise store:

Identify the customer persona and create a value matrix to differentiate yourself from competitors:

A buyer persona is a composite picture of the critical segments of your targeted audience. You need a customer persona to deliver messages that would be relevant and resonate with your audience. You could cover subtopics like the demography, key purchase drivers, preferred content format, preferred platform, key responsibilities, etc.

After you have created a buyer persona, it is time to deploy a value matrix. As a musician, you should understand whether you are popular among millennials or Gen Zs. Additionally, you could look at the trends like which generation prefers your music genre, analyze your fanbase, website visitors, and who are your ‘user-generated content’ creators. You could highlight the market position relative to other music labels and add a relevant marketing message.

Optimize your ad strategy by testing them with small budgets before pushing it to a wide scale.

Data and analytics are the vital shields that help you limit the wrong expectations and assist you in raising the bar at every step. Marketing is all about the right information, the right platform, and the right people. There is no room to assume whether a particular landing page would perform better or not. When you include finances in your action, you should be fully loaded with reserved data to maximize the return on investment. After all, the sole purpose of any advertisement on digital media is to get maximum returns.

You can start with small budgets on different digital channels to examine which channel suits your campaigns. You could use A/B testing against different copies of your landing page, ad copy, or ad message to see which one yields a better result. Possibly, your first-time visitor wouldn’t purchase from you. Thus, it would be best to experiment with your A/B testing randomly. It would help deliver more empirical data and a realistic approach.

Use a hybrid of inbound and outbound marketing approaches for your Go-to-market strategy.

Inbound marketing is the process of creating tailored content to reach your audience and connect with them organically. For example, you could increase brand awareness if you rank on top of organic search results. Also, if you create friendly and entertaining content for your audience, you are indirectly enhancing trust, credibility, and preference for your merchandise.

For example, as a musician, you could make behind-the-stage moments, create a social-reform post, etc., to increase your branding and selection. Website, Content Marketing, Social Media, and Social Ads are the different ways to connect with your audience through inbound marketing.

Outreach Marketing could still be an effective strategy for you before launching the music. In the case of a musician, you would like to manually outreach other influencers and bloggers using cold-email tactics to help spread word of mouth.

Keep hold of your existing customers while you try to acquire new ones.

Acquiring new customers would always cost you way more than selling to the existing loyal customer base. It even becomes more critical in the case of a musician as you have a fanbase that already loves you and wants to be a part of your campaigns. Make sure to shoot personalized emails to your existing customers and your subscriber list to build anticipation and excitement about your new music or merchandise store.

Renewals, cross-selling, and upselling are the best opportunities for you to earn more and gain revenue. Selling a product as a company is very much similar to trading music or merchandise as a musician. You would have to optimize the pipeline continuously, innovate the strategies, and improve yourself in the whole process.

You could also create special offers or discounts for your existing customers. An affiliate program could be yet another way to encourage people to refer your music or merchandise(product). There should be no stone left unturned when you strategize on your Go-to-market strategy. Your efforts would bring colors to you in the form of more revenue. You can also earn a loyal customer base and enhanced brand awareness.

Provide direct call-to-action and shorten the sales cycle.

When a potential customer lands on your landing page, the worst you could do is distract or confuse them at this stage. Thus, create clear landing pages with transparent messages. The exact words that you used in the emails should be reflected on the landing page. This would prevent the potential customers from losing confidence. Also, if you aspire to sell music or merchandise, keep the call to action directly focused for this sole purpose. Don’t add additional links to your previous videos or anything else.

Also, try to shorten the sales cycle. The amount of time a customer takes between entering the sales cycle and closing the deal should be minimal.

Conclusion

A marketing strategy is crucial and many times be the differentiating factor. Once you have your music(or merchandise store) ready, you have to take many inbound and outbound marketing steps to create hype for your product and generate more sales. As it is said, there is nothing that happens by chance in the digital marketing sphere.

You must have a vivid customer persona, complete information about your customer journey. Create a value matrix so that you differentiate your voice in the crowded area of the internet.