There are numerous paths to stand out as a composer, which is a wonderful thing. However, there are several best practices and principles that appear in the life of successful composers on a regular basis. We are now moving into a day and age where everyday life is digital, whether that be online classes and video conferences, working from home or just for leisure like social media and video games. This means there are huge opportunities for growth in ways you never thought was possible.
In this article, we have put together a list of 5 things you can do to stand out and succeed as a composer.
1. Social media is your friend!
Social media is quite possibly the most important thing you are going to have to understand if you want to be successful in a modern landscape. Social media is king when it comes to digital marketing, if you understand how algorithms work and how to push out your work to as many people as possible then you are already halfway there.
You might be thinking, “I post on my Facebook and Twitter,” but you need to be looking at what type of content you are posting, does it fit your target audience? Is it engaging, informative or educational? All those things are just a few questions you need to ask yourself if you want to fully optimise your abilities in social media. All of your strategies to market yourself and your business on social media need to have your target audience in mind. Be aware of who you want to appeal to, and how to you want to appeal to them – will it be with informative blog posts? Or will it be with short videos on maybe Instagram or Tik-Tok?
Now that you understand just a few of the basic principles when it comes to marketing on social media, we would like to highlight the importance of community! If you have a hardcore set of loyal supporters who will follow you, and hinge on every word that you say, then surely that can only be a good thing. Just simple things like interacting with your community, replying to their comments, and replying to their queries. The more you interact with them, the more emotionally invested they will be. Who doesn’t like feeling important? When someone they admire replies to their comment, it could genuinely make their day. This fan is now emotionally invested in you, they will share your work around and get involved within your community.
2. Building your website and SEO
Next up on your journey in digital marketing is your website, your website is your central hub. Everything goes through here, whether that be your blog, booking information, social media links or your about me/us pag The point here obviously being that having a high-quality website is usually the difference between looking like an amateur or looking like a professional.
If you are not good at making a website, hire someone. Invest in yourself! You need to realise this is a business, look at yourself as a business. Put in the time, money and effort and you will realise your potential sooner rather than later.
Once you have your website set up, the next thing you need to start thinking about is SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and it is the practice of improving both the quality and the quantity of website traffic alongside exposure to your brand.
You want your website finding its way to the top of any search results, to achieve this you can do a few things without professional help. Some of these things include, creating titles and descriptions for each page, giving your site structure, including keywords in your URL, removing anything on your site that may slow it down and, producing regular content. Just incorporating a few of these things will massively improve where your website ranks in searches online.
Services such as Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix allow users to create their own websites with no prior coding knowledge required.
3. Building a brand and brand recognition
Now that you are aware of how to build a social media presence and how to create an optimised website, you need to build your brand. Building your brand begins with consistency, including a consistent, well designed logo and a good colour palette. Two very simple, but also very easy to implement tricks to help you stand out in a digital world. If your logo catches the eye and is memorable, it is easy to associate that with you/your brand whenever someone sees it. The good colour palette goes hand in hand with the logo, picking good colours that contrast each other well is so important. These colours are going to be on all your social medias and website, so you need to make sure that you like them.
Another big step towards building a bigger and better brand is to collaborate with other people, whether that be with other composers or with certain orchestras. As you see in other industries around the world, like movies, TV shows or even other genres of music. When people collaborate with other people it creates a buzz and excitement around whatever is being created. Not only that, with that extra buzz and attention around your work, that could lead to a lot more eyes seeing what you have created and in turn you could gain a lot of followers and more fans of your product, increasing the size of your brand.
Coca Cola, Ferrari and Apple. Three of the worlds most recognisable brands.
4. Segmenting the market and finding your niche
In digital marketing it is so important to segment the market. When segmenting the market, you will be looking at a variety of factors. Some of these factors include demographic segmentation, geographic segmentation and psychographic segmentation. There certainly are other methods of segmentation, but these options are the most prominent.
Demographic is literally figuring out who your target audience are. What age are they? Gender? Education? You can certainly hone in on who your target audience is when you know this information. So, what is geographic segmentation? This is the process of identifying where people live. It works on the principle that a lot of people who live in a similar area are going to want similar things. All of this goes hand in hand with data collection, but we are not going to give too much away about that just yet… Finally, we have psychographic segmentation, this is the process of analysing people’s consumption habits, and how they “think.” This segmentation strategy is particularly effective in conjunction with other segmentation strategies.
All of these segmentation strategies are great in tandem with each other. If you analyse all this information, but apply it to being a composer, you will have a greater understanding of where to focus your digital marketing campaign!
One of the most important things when it comes to marketing, is marketing something/someone who is unique. Therefore, it is important to find your niche and really focus on it, where is the gap in the market? Where will you fit into the industry? But overall, still stay versatile. Even if you are fantastic in a certain style, still stand out by continuing to be able to perform other styles to a decent level. You would be more marketable if you are unique and versatile.
Data collection allows you take your digital marketing to a whole new level of precision.
5. The value of data collection
The fifth and final point is about data collection, we briefly mentioned it in the last section, but it is genuinely so important! Sending out surveys, getting people to leave reviews, analysing census data. If you do all these things, everything in your marketing strategy will become a lot more efficient and clearer.
For your market segmentation to be as effective as possible, you will need to analyse all sorts of data to make sure you are segmenting everything in the best way possible. Like we mentioned with the geographic segmentation, you are going to need to analyse data before even knowing that information.
Conclusion
It is difficult transitioning yourself into a digital space, especially if you are not used to any sort of digital technology. Invest in the things you are not as good in or delegate tasks to other people you work with. Your overall business will flourish because of it, or maybe you don’t want to shell out any extra costs. It is more than possible to teach yourself any of the techniques that we have gone through in this blog post yourself.
We hope you enjoyed this article!
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