The ultimate guide to promoting your rock band
If you’re a musician, you know how challenging it is to promote your music. It might take a rock band years before they get famous and their music becomes mainstream. However, you can accelerate your band’s growth with various cost-effective promotional strategies.
From composing music and releasing albums to hosting concerts and generating revenue through ticket sales, running a rock band is no walk in the park. You must be mindful of so many things all at once, starting with whether you’re producing the right music. How can you know if you are? You’ll get a positive response from your fans and the general public. However, promoting a rock band requires much more than just good music. Here are our top cost-effective promotional strategies to build an identity for your rock band and maximize your outreach.
Discover your niche and be visually creative
Not every rock band is created equal. There are innumerable sub-genres in rock, like progressive rock, alternative rock, punk rock, and much more. Ask yourself, where does your band fit into the spectrum? There need not be one answer, and you may experiment with different genres. But whatever the case is, the bottom line is that your audience should resonate with your music.
As discussed before, producing good music is instrumental, but it’s not everything. You need to accompany it with the right graphics and visuals. And we’re not talking about the music videos here but rather your album covers and rock band posters. Take your sweet time coming up with these.
You could hire a professional to do it, but you know best what your band is all about and what vibe it exudes. So, we recommend using an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall, which contains hundreds of album cover templates and rock band posters to help you craft the best posters and album covers in a few simple clicks.
Social media is where everyone’s at these days, so you should focus most of your promotional efforts on social media marketing. But before that, you need to determine which platforms are right for you. As a rock band, you need a YouTube channel, an Instagram page, and a Facebook page.
YouTube is where you post all your songs and monitor if they’re getting good traction. If you’re producing great music but still aren’t getting enough views and subscriptions on YouTube, you’re probably not playing your SEO cards right — more on that later.
Similarly, Instagram is the perfect place to create 15-second reels to give the audience a little teaser of your last concert. You can also post updates about your tour. However, you must remember that Instagram is a visually-driven social media platform. Everything you do here must be catchy and eye-grabbing, so make sure all your posts have eye-candy visuals.
As far as Facebook is concerned, you can host live streams like mini-concerts and Q&As on your band’s Facebook page. You can post your YouTube video URLs to your Facebook and Instagram pages with a short, catchy caption and appropriate banners. We suggest using these Instagram post templates to make your posts stand out.
Collaborate with other artists and influencers
This is another surefire way to increase your outreach and traction on your channels. Find another band to play along with or host a joint mini-concert of sorts. With such collaborations, you can reach out to a greater pool of people, particularly the audience of the other band. Similarly, the other band can increase its outreach too!
Alternatively, you can pair up with social media influencers and make guest appearances to increase your engagement. Make sure the influencer or YouTuber you pair up with is excited about your music. The best time for making guest appearances is a few weeks before releasing a new rock album. You can stir up excitement among your fans and give them a tiny glimpse of what’s to come.
Get your merch game on
Every band sells merchandise, including t-shirts, mugs, and much more, to increase and diversify their revenue stream. You can ask a local artist to design your merch and promote it on social media. As far as promoting your merchandise is concerned, make a video, particularly about this. Plus, every video you post should have a link to your merch website.
Your rock band should have many ways to sell merchandise. Having a website is one of them. Don’t forget to insert your website’s link on your social media channels’ information page too! Alternatively, if you’re hosting a live stream on Facebook, you can also advertise your merch there. Remember, your merch needs to provide some sentimental value to your audience.
SEO can take you places
SEO (search engine optimization) can catapult your band to newer horizons. It’s a set of best practices that make your website and social media channels appear on top of Google’s search results. SEO is typically used by enterprises who want to drive more traffic to their website and increase sales, but it can also be used to promote your rock band even though you’re primarily a business that wants to sell products and services.
To get the most out of SEO, make your video titles on YouTube no more than 60 to 70 characters. Also, try to include keywords if you’re doing a podcast. You can search for the most widely searched keywords using tools like Google Keywords Planner and incorporate them into your video titles. But this won’t work if you’re uploading a song on your YouTube channel.
A few parting thoughts
Promoting a rock band is all about increasing your engagement with your audience. The more you connect with your fans, the more your outreach will expand. Connecting with an audience needs much more than good music, albeit good music is the foundation for that to happen. But once you have ticked that box, it’s all about social media engagement, giveaways, concert ticket discounts, and making guest appearances on TV shows and YouTube channels.