Music Promotion Strategy

In the ever changing and competitive environment that is the music industry, it is important to stay ahead of the curve. The rise of music streaming platforms like Spotify and social media like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have made it easier than ever for aspiring and emerging artists to launch music, but harder and harder to make sure it actually reaches an audience.
Once the audience is reached, it’s also harder to keep momentum going in a world where your song can be trending one minute and old news the next.

Although most artists want to do one thing and one thing only: make music, it is a good idea to also invest some time in marketing. Because after all, why are you making music if not for as many people as possible to enjoy it?

At Hide and Seek we have our roots deep in the cultural scene and have seen first hand what the benefits of online advertising can be for artists. In successfully working with artists such as Dutch rapper Willie Wartaal and Headhunterz – the world’s number one hardstyle DJ – we’ve gained valuable expertise in this arena.

The first step for artists is to establish an online presence and gather an audience. Social media is the most obvious way to do this.

Once a following is established, however, it doesn’t end there. In Headhunterz’s case, he already had over a million dedicated fans on social media. It is then important to make sure those fans take action, for instance that they watch new music videos, vote for their artist in award competitions, stream new tracks or visit the merch or ticket shop.

For Willie Wartaal we ran a campaign on YouTube and Facebook to achieve views and engagement. A secondary goal was the strengthening of Willie Wartaal’s brand. The holistic approach generated a flywheel effect and fueled an increase in streaming on all platforms.

That is why as an artist it pays to bet on an online campaign to achieve your goals and strengthen your brand.

Our customers are different every time. Advertisers selling the exact same products can turn out to need a very different approach due to different margins, different secondary USPs, different setups of marketing teams, and different levels of online savviness. That’s why for each customer, but also for each project within the customers’ organisation, we create a custom plan, every time.

First we’ll need to understand the customers’ organisation and the objectives. By making them quantifiable, we will understand what the boundaries are of how to ‘play the online game’. Then we will dive into your data to understand the current situation and look for opportunities. In order to come up with the right (branding) strategy.

We believe that if both sides – the customer and we as the agency – bring their knowledge to the table, we can make the most successful strategies. That is why we need to get to know each other very well, have clear success metrics in place, we need to zoom out regularly, and always keep an open conversation.