Music Video Marketing (Guest Post)

Below is a guest post from UK music marketer Marcus Taylor. I asked Marcus to share something with the GYRS crowd and I think this is a great post with getting started in the video area. We all know that video is huge, but do you have a real strategy beyond just firing up the webcam or shooting a music video? Here are some ideas from Marcus on how to get your video seen by more folks. You can connect with Marcus on Twitter or check out his links at the end of the post.

‘Viral Marketing’ is a pretty hot term when it comes to marketing and I guess it needs no explanation as to what it is or why it’s a good thing, but what I think one thing the majority of us fail to understand as musicians is how to create viral content – in other words, what are the properties of a viral video and how can we include them in our videos?

The general misconception of the term ‘viral’ is that it’s pretty much anything that’s weird, humorous or revolutionary in someway. Despite many viral videos having these features it’s really not even half of the story. This misconception is often confirmed when we see a disappointing three or four digit view count on what was an attempt at viral marketing – not so viral after all.

So where did it all go wrong?

When trying to create a viral music marketing campaign it’s important to pay attention to two areas; the idea and the execution of the idea.

The Idea

A great viral idea is one that stimulates a need to share the content with friends or other social network users, doing this requires some kind of emotional or psychological trigger, while this may sound a tad clinical, but really I am just saying that you need to push them to an emotional extreme – be it sad, happy, scared, surprised, confused or in a fit of laughter. Without a powerful emotional reaction your viral marketing campaign is dead before it’s even started.

The Execution (or the marketing)

As soon as you’ve turned your idea into a product it’s time to market this video, unfortunately solely plonking it onto Youtube is pretty much a useless tactic nowadays as there is so much quality content to compete with that it just gets left behind in the noise of superior videos, this calls for a cutting edge marketing strategy.

Here are my five top tips for marketing your music video

#1 – Don’t limit yourself to Youtube

Although Youtube is the clear market leader of the video hosting website industry, there is no harm in uploading your video to other video hosting sites such as Vimeo, Myspace Video and Viddler. I recommend setting up an account on Tubemogul which allows you to distribute a video to all video hosting sites in just one upload.

#2 – SEO the titles and descriptions

Remember to include important and descriptive words in the title, description and tags to ensure that people can find your video in the searches – It often helps to add terms like ‘New Indie Rock Music 2010’ at the end of video titles as people often search for such terms on Youtube.

#3 – Embed the content in as many relevant places as possible

Why wait for people to find your video on Youtube? Embed your video in forum posts, in articles, on your Myspace page and in your blog to maximize the number of places where it can be watched.

#4 – Call To Action / Subscriptions

Why let people decide what to do after watching your video? They might go and watch another bands new video and forget all about you – prevent this from happening by providing call to actions that invite them to do something such as rate your video, enter a competition on your Myspace page or join your mailing list.

#5 – Create Youtube Playlists and use related video linking

I really have saved one of my best tricks till last – create a playlist with maybe ten to twenty popular artists in your genre’s songs and slip your song somewhere in the middle, this will capture people searching for popular artists and show your video as a related or playlist result next to the video. You can also link to your video from other videos as a ‘video response’, which then shows a link to your video beneath the video you are responding too.

When combined, these techniques can make for an incredibly successful marketing campaign, but no amount of marketing will ever make up for a great idea – nor will a great idea ever achieve its maximum potential without a strategic marketing plan, it’s all about understanding and integrating the whole process of viral marketing campaign.

Marcus Taylor is a former record label manager, blogger on the Musician’s Guide Blog and author of The Musician’s Guide to World Domination.

Tags: Music Marketing, video marketing, youtube