Automate your band!

Whether you’re a wildly successful musician or a complete unknown, you are probably ‘time poor’ — you are either very busy with a successful music career, or subsidising an unsuccessful one by working round the clock in an unloved day job.

Either way, you won’t necessarily have a huge amount of time on your hands to promote your music. This is where automation can come in really handy – and in this post, I’m going to look at ways you can automate your band’s marketing efforts and save a truckload of time.

1. Consider online advertising

Using online advertising isn’t a free way to automate your marketing – but it can, when done well, be very effective in driving traffic to your site while you are working in a call centre.

If you have some budget to put into Facebook, Twitter or Google ads, then it’s definitely worth experimenting with them to get more visitors to your band’s site or social media profiles (the aim, of course, being to convert these visitors into social media fans or subscribers to your mailing list).

Usually it’s best to target fans of bands that you think your act would appeal to and offer some free content in exchange for a like, follow or email address.

Our view is that typically, Facebook ads work best for bands, and email addresses are the best thing to try to obtain from a ad campaign, as they let you fully ‘own’ the relationship between you and your fans — you are not beholden to a social network’s algorithm when it comes to getting messages about your band out there. (You simply send everybody an email, which in many cases results in a hard-to-miss ‘push notification’ across devices.)

For more tips on how to use online ads, check out our ‘Facebook ads for musicians’ post.

2. Automate your e-newsletters

I’ve written about this regularly on this blog, so I’m not going to wax too lyrical about it again…but basically,  if you use a tool like Aweber or Getresponse to send out e-newsletters, then you have the ability to program in a sequence of automated ‘follow up’ emails to your fans.

Everybody who signs up your mailing list can therefore automatically receive encouragements to follow you on social media; buy your merch; come to a gig and so on – without you having to worry about scheduling e-newsletters in automatically. You’ll find some more in-depth information on autoresponders here.

3. Use RSS to disseminate content

If you have a website worth its salt, it will contain a blog with an RSS feed. This RSS feed can be used to power all sort of stuff automatically – if you set things up correctly, your RSS feed can:

• convert your blog post into an e-newsletter which goes out to your mailing list every time you add a new entry

• share your new posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds

• allow others to display links to your articles on their websites which are automatically updated every time you post new content

• ‘ping’ news services and blog directories with new content

• display your new posts to anyone using an RSS reader.

4. Be a slave to the algorithm: optimise your site for search

Every second of every day, algorithms are trawling the internet, sifting through sites and picking the best ones to plonk at the top of search results.

Setting up your website in a way that gives it the best chance of being automatically discovered by one of these algorithms means that you may end up on the receiving end of a lot of web traffic without much effort.

For some tips on how to go about this, you can read our article about SEO for musicians (I’d also recommend that you check out our inbound marketing tips).

5. Split test to find out what content works best

You can use split testing algorithms — also known as A/B tests — to test what content works best for your band.

Whether you want to find out which version of your website works best, what subject header for an email generates the most opens, or even which mix of a song appeals most to your fanbase, A/B tests can automatically ask the question and give you the answers.

A/B testing tools work by

1. showing two different versions of a web page or email to a sample of your visitors / subscribers

2. evaluating which generates the most engagement (be that in terms of how long people stay on a website or how many people open an email)

3. automatically rolling out the best performing version of your content to the majority of your web visitors or subscribers.

Most e-newsletter tools allow you to split test out of the box; for running A/B tests on websites, check out Unbounce or Instapage.

6. Promote your gigs with Songkick

By using Songkick,you can automate your gig publicity efforts to a degree.

First, Songkick allows you to make use of a widget that you can embed on any number of online presences (i.e., your website, Facebook, Bandcamp etc.) – meaning that once you’ve added a gig to the system it will automatically appear anywhere your widget is displayed.  

Second, Songkick have a partnership with Spotify, Youtube and Soundcloud, so your gigs will automatically appear on those sites when people are listening to your music on them.

7. Use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts automatically

If you know that you’re going to be too busy to post on social media during a certain period, you can use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance – on multiple networks – so that the posts still magically appear even whilst you’re doing something else.

Not convinced by the power of automation yet? Well, you’re probably reading this post because one of three things happened:

1. A search engine or social media algorithm automatically decided that you should.

2. Our e-newsletter system automatically sent you an email about it.

3. Our RSS feed and an automated tweet sent news of the article’s existence to the Twittersphere.

Automation rules...