In this episode of the mixtape marketing podcast, I will be talking about hip hop marketing strategies for rap artists.
I just want to bring a tool to your attention, to help you check if certain hip hop blog actually works getting featured on.
Sometimes, musicians, we get caught up in the excitement of the music creation process. This might leave us blind later on when we try to promote our mixtapes online.
From my experience as a musician and as a music marketing blogger, I've seen a lot of hip hop blogs sites offer promotional services.
So many hip hop artists are quick to jump on these rap promotions. Most of the time these rap blogs themselves can't even promote their own content, not to even mention promoting any hip-hop artists.
Do a background check on rap blogs
For this reason, I'm creating this blog post to inform hip hop artists on how to check hip hop blogs before they conduct their rap music marketing online.
I don't think some hip hop blogs have bad intentions.
I really feel that some rap blogs really wants to help promote hip hop artists, I just feel that some blogs can't offer the music marketing services that they claim.
Countless times I've seen rap blogs offer promotional services on social media or via email Marketing. But most of the time these hip hop blogs are actually conducting in spam cold email tactics.
Sending the same generic Tweet to all their of their followers. These aren't the type of rap blogs you want to promote your brand.
In the podcast, I do a quick background check on some blogs that I'm actually a fan of like that of stopthebreaks.com. Which is one of my favourite hip hop blogs. I know that this site is legit.
I use a tool called SemRush.com to help me conduct a basic analysis of the type of organic traffic that stopthebrakes.com gets each month.
SEM rush shows the type of traffic that is website gets daily basis from search engines like that of Google Bing and Yahoo.
Also it gives me some keyword analysis all the type of keywords that stop the break ranks for.
This gives me some proof that this hip hop blog receives real visitors each month. Based on this analysis I would be very confident in advertising on this hip hop blog.
SEM rush does not give you a full indication of the traffic that each hip-hop lover receives. Obviously some hip-hop blogs relied heavily on social media traffic to. SEMRush does not give you these metrics.
So I will also check some of their social media followers using a tool Tweetaudit.com
This tool will give me an insight on the Twitter followers that any rap blog has. If any hip hop website has a large fake following I will stay clear from advertising with that hip hop blog.
Not every rap blog uses each individual social media sites. So there's other factors that you need to consider. Try and look for a constant engagement with their audience. This is a good indicator if the site is genuine.
Most hip-hop blogs that have still featured placements on their website, predominantly have media kits with a detailed analysis of the Google Analytics.
You could always ask this site for are Google Analytics reports proving that they get legitimate people and traffic to the rap blog on each month.
Most hip hop blogs that are selling advertising will be happy to give you the analytics. If they choose not to they must have something to hide.
Stay clear and move on.
Hip Hop Music Marketing Strategies
It is very important to have a content marketing plan when you're promoting any mixtapes albums or singles. Most industry artists have content plans behind any music promotion.
{I don't think Drake or Lil Wayne are sitting down making a content plan.}
Industry artists have big marketing teams behind them to create content for them. So more often than not they're not controlling all of their social media. There is someone from the marketing team promoting their content, videos, images each day.
Obviously you don't have a big marketing team. So you need to start using certain automation tools to make life a bit more easy for you.
First of all you need to have content to share with your social media followers. This will include mixtape cover art, single art from the mixtape, interviews about your mixtapes, Interviews about your songs on the mixtape, interviews about the people that helps you create the mixtape, different content formats for each social network.
It's important to keep content native to each social network. Otherwise, your social network will look unprofessional and unorganised and your fans will not take you seriously as a professional hip hop artists.
Once you established and gained some content. You should start using tools like I mentioned below, to help you automate the process.
Aweber. Email Marketing software. Broadcast emails to your newsletter subscribers. Email autoresponder series tool.
Tubebuddy removes a ton of grunt work associated with optimising your YouTube channel also has additional features to help lighten the workload with YouTube.
Now that you have a list of some tools to help remove the group work from social media marketing your music, now I want to show you how to just use one song to help you promote your mixtape.
You need to be able to maximise the promotional value from a single song that on that mixtape. The biggest problem with most hip hop artists is that they use the songs themselves to promote the mixtape.
You need to be able to create multiple types of content for every single song.
For example, you take one song,
Then you create lyrical videos using a tool called Canva.com.
Now you chop this video up for each social network. Facebook YouTube and other video sites allow full songs. With Instagram and Twitter you need to have one to two minute clips..
Each song is usually 4 minutes long. This will give you 4 separate clips for Instagram and two separate clips for Twitter.
You now also have lyrical cards from your lyrical video to add to your social media networks sites. Just make sure that the lyrical cue cards are branded with your logo are images of you are artists.
You can also interview yourself and tell your fans the meaning behind each of the lyrics on the mixtape. Again you can chop and format this video for every single social network.
Create another video behind the scenes where you work with the producer that creating the instrumentals for your mixtape.
If you have a bigger budget video, you can trace different gif images to promote the song on different social media channels.
GIf marketing is pretty effective and attention-grabbing new viewers for your mixtape.
Fiver.com is a cheap place to get lyrical videos, give images, professional video edits.
Also there is a ton of hip-hop blogs offering cheap hip-hop music promotion here. Try and look at the feedback for each hip hop site.
Try and do tests that I mentioned above with tweet audit and SEM Rush.
Some of the music promotion gigs that are on fiverr.com are ok. You will find something hidden gems but a lot of the marketing on here is a waste of time.
If you follow some of the rules that I said I love you in this blogpost you might find some gems to get you started with your music promotion on fiverr.com
These hip-hop music marketing strategies are a waste of time unless you have a good brand built.
Make sure that you have a nice-looking website to bring new followers back to. Make sure you have an email newsletter this attached to that website, so that new files can try to hear more from you.
