A Digital Marketing Checklist For Creatives

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another solo episode of Selling Sheet Music.

I’m Garrett Breeze, and today, I have some thoughts to share with you that I’ve written for a guest blog post at digitalmusicnews.com.

They have a really great daily newsletter.

That is something that I use to stay up to date with news in the industry.

So if that’s not something you’re familiar with, I’d encourage you to check that out.

The subject for today’s episode is something that I think many of us are sort of loathe to deal with, and that is managing our online profiles, our online presence.

It’s something I think can sort of end up feeling like a chore, and frankly, not what we signed up to do, right?

We are here to make music, to compose, to arrange whatever it is that we do.

And so, it can feel like spending hours setting up social media profiles or editing web pages can feel like wasted time.

But hopefully, after listening to today’s episode, that is going to feel a lot more manageable.

So, what I’ve got for you today is just a quick checklist to make sure that you are doing everything you need to be doing online.

It’s just five steps.

And hopefully, after you’re done listening to this episode, you’ll feel motivated and excited to get after all of those profiles and make sure that you are putting the best foot forward online.

The first step is to Google yourself.

As egotistical or odd as it might seem, it’s important to put yourself in your fan’s shoes.

And you can learn a lot by looking at what shows up under various search terms, and you can learn even more by what doesn’t show up.

One key thing to keep in mind is that search results often vary by device, so make sure that you try it out on mobile, desktop, and incognito mode to get the fullest picture of what potential customers are seeing.

And don’t forget that images and videos have their own separate search algorithms and show their own separate results.

This is one of the best ways of figuring out what kind of content to create and what kind of first impression you’re having.

The next step is to set up your home base.

Now that you have a better idea of what people are seeing about you online, you can use that to help steer your visitors where you want them to go.

Usually that means a website, but a social media profile could work too.

Whatever you choose as your home base, the goals are the same.

You want to seem current and competent, and you want it to be really obvious what visitors should do.

Maybe it’s buying sheet music, maybe it’s listening to an album on streamers, whatever your goals are, make sure they’re super obvious.

If someone’s already gotten to the point where they’ve made the decision to click on your website, there’s no reason to be timid about selling to them.

And of course, make sure your photos, biography, and contact information are all up to date.

Now, this next step is one I think most often gets overlooked.

There are two main categories of what I call profile sites online.

The first is your standard social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

Chances are you probably already have profiles on one or two of these sites, if not all of them.

However, there’s a couple of things you can do to improve your performance.

The first is to have a consistent handle across all of your profiles to make it easy for fans to jump from one to the other.

The second is to make sure that you’re using the business or professional settings on these profiles, because that gives you more scheduling, advertising, and analytic tools than a personal profile has.

You might also consider paying for a verified badge, depending on your situation and how much you use the platform.

The second category of sites are your distribution profiles.

These are third-party sites where you’re selling or streaming music.

This includes Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Sheet Music Plus, JW Pepper, Music Notes, big sites that you’ve heard of, anywhere your music can be found.

For some of these, you create an artist profile when you register.

For others, like the streaming services, they’ll need to be claimed after the fact.

But your profiles on these sites shouldn’t be ignored.

Because they have such a large footprint, they often show highly in search results, even if you have only a small amount of music on them.

Film composers should also claim their profile on IMDb, and artists that are well established can also be eligible to claim your Google Knowledge Panel, which lets you edit or influence the suggested results that Google puts in the little box next to the search results.

After you’ve done all that, the next step is content production.

Once you’ve claimed all your pages, updated all your profiles, and importantly linked them to each other, you can start thinking about what you’re actually going to put on them.

Keep in mind that for many people, the first place they discover a composer is not a search result or a web page.

It’s a piece of content like a video or a blog post.

You don’t want to burn yourself out or waste time that would be better spent creating music.

So prioritize quality over quantity.

Focus on what makes you unique and what you can do that others can’t.

One of the reasons to prioritize quality over quantity is that you should be repurposing this content for a variety of formats.

Text, image, video, audio.

When you do that, the quantity follows naturally.

Some people batch create.

For example, they’ll spend a day creating posts for several weeks and then schedule them all out in advance.

Others take it one week at a time.

Whatever your approach is, consistency is the key.

And with that, don’t feel the need to post to all of the platforms all of the time.

Focus on two or three that have the largest audience or give you the most interactions.

One way to keep that consistency is to schedule time in your calendar, on your phone, to update these profiles regularly.

And you can sort of sort your tasks according to how frequently they need doing.

I tend to do an annual spring cleaning at the end of the school year for major web updates, things like profile pictures and biographies, making sure all of the music that I’ve written in the past year is uploaded and where it needs to be, checking all my links to make sure they still work, that kind of big picture stuff.

But then monthly, I take a look at my sites and the kind of content I’m putting out, and I think about how I need to change that or focus that depending on the kinds of projects that I have being released during that time.

So I think it’s helpful to think of it in terms of sort of annual tasks and monthly tasks.

You may have a different approach, but the hope is that by putting this time in upfront, to set things up in the right way, makes it easier to maintain, especially if you’re checking in regularly, rather than just sort of letting tasks pile up month after month after month.

So it’s boring.

It’s not what we signed up to do as musicians, but it’s important and a little bit goes a long way.

And that’s all I’ve got for you this week.

We’ll be back next week with another interview episode that I’m really excited about.

As always, if you have questions or comments about the show, you can email garritt at breeztunes.com, and we’ll see you next week.