How to build your fanbase super fast

How to build your fanbase super fast

If you’re promoting your music online you’re probably spending a lot of time and effort driving engagement on youtube, IG, spotify, radio, music blogs, playlists etc. But does it feel like an uphill battle? A constant struggle to get attention?

All that promo stuff is important, BUT let me say this... one problem with most of those channels is you mostly don’t have a way of following up with the people that read your article or stream your song or hear you on radio or a playlist... You have to basically just hope that they start following you and like you enough to continue to check out your music in future. You’ve created interest in one moment, but you have no real relationship with that listener or any real system to turn them into a fan.

So the next time you release new music, you have to repeat this same difficult process of creating interest all over again...! Surely there must be a better way?

Luckily there is... How about, the next time you launch a project, alongside all of the attention and engagement building you do online..... how about you also include in your marketing campaign a concerted effort to drive people who engage with your music to a landing page where you can collect their email address. You can entice people with a valuable offer such as free bonus material, a discount on gig tickets, exclusive or early access to something etc.

Now the big benefit of collecting their email is that you can of course follow up with them. You can create content to send directly to your list of people who you know for certain have engaged with you in the past. Now you can actually establish a relationship with your music fans over email and over time turn them into lifelong fans. But more importantly, you can use this list to find other people online who are likely to become fans too. Let me explain how...

Facebook Ads Manager has this awesome feature known as Custom Audiences. A Custom Audience is where you upload the list of emails you collected to Facebook, Facebook will search their entire database and find those people’s FB accounts and then let you create a custom audience from those people so you can send ads directly to them.

What’s even more awesome is, you can take this even further by using your Custom Audience to create what is known as a Lookalike Audience. A Lookalike Audience is where FB analyses your list of emails, and finds individuals on FB who have similar demographics, behaviours and interests... they basically search the entire FB database and pick out people who match the same profile as your existing fanbase that you uploaded as an email list.. cool right?

So now, not only can you use your email list to nurture people who have engaged with you online and turn them into lifelong fans. But you can use them to actively search for and find people who are very likely to be into your music, and market your music directly to them too... expanding your fanbase even further.

You can keep this process going on a constant feedback loop that will just get better over time. The more emails you collect, the more accurate the potential audience FB will find for you... This means over time you will gain more fans for less and less $ spent on marketing and ads. With this method you can establish a true fanbase very quickly and end the endless battle to build hype and generate interest online.