Best Practices and Valuable Tips on Create and Market a Personal Brand as a Musician on Instagram

Instagram is one of the most popular social networking sites for professionals wanting to build an online brand presence in the current times. With over a billion active users, Instagram is filled with a ready market for professionals of every industry. As a musician, you are sure to find your target audience on Instagram as well. However, the large number of users means you probably have many competitors. This makes finding organic followers and engagement slightly hard here, especially if you are new to the platform and yet familiar with its frequently updated features and algorithm. Brand building on Instagram requires careful strategy and planning. To build a social media presence on Instagram professionally as a musician, you must gather followers from the right target audience. This is mainly because a significant determiner of your visibility is the engagement rate of your content. You can also invest in cheap Instagram likes to boost your account growth and push your content into other users’ home feeds. However, purchasing Instagram activity should make a minor part of your social media marketing strategy to ensure sustainable results.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay 

What you should aim for to make a personal brand as a musician on Instagram

Every profession has its own set of unique goals. As a musician, of course, your top focus is to produce and sell top-quality music. In addition to that, creating a brand presence requires you to build up your Instagram page in a specific manner. You must be able to:

• Attract a new audience and build your follower count in a sustained and ongoing way.
• Create professional and social relationships with other Instagram users by interacting with their content.
• Have a high engagement rate on your profile.
• Drive traffic to clickable links, shopping tags, and call-to-action buttons.
• Create instant visual brand recognition for yourself as a musician.
• Stand out over your peer in your niche while being an important contributor to the community of musicians in your niche.
• Adapt yourself to changing trends and features of Instagram to be able to sustain audience growth and brand building.
• Monetize your account and create possible avenues for direct sales and collaborative ventures.

Here are some things you can do to build a personal brand as a musician on Instagram:

1. Have a business account

To promote your music with the best advantages, ensure your Instagram account is a business one. This account type offers several additional features like the ability to monetize your content and sell your music in addition to access to content analytics. Some features you can use to strengthen your strategy at creating a personal brand as a musician include:

• Public settings that improve your visibility and audience reach.
• Analytic advantages like Instagram Insights, which lets you:
  • Study audience behavior and demographic information;
  • Track your impression and reach;
  • Track content performance;
  • Plan future posts in an informed setting.
• Ability to promote particular posts depending on your goals and budget.
• Ability to create Shoppable posts depending on your country’s rules and regulations.
• Ability to monetize certain Instagram content like IGTV videos depending on which country you are in.
• Ability to schedule and monitor auto-posts.
• Add Swipe up links in your Instagram Stories for more lead and traffic generation.
• Add quick call-to-action buttons for contacting, booking, or buying on your Instagram profile.

If the account you currently have is a personal one, you can switch to a business account at no cost by making the necessary changes in your account setting.

2. Complete your Instagram profile

Ensure that your Instagram information is complete and up to date. Here is how you create an excellent professional profile:

• Photo: Give your profile visual branding by using a profile photo you want your audience to associate with your music. This could be your image, the image of your band or company logo, a musical instrument, or a still from a performance. If you are active on several social media sites, it is good to use the same profile photo on all of them.

Image Credit: Noiseporn on Unsplash

• Bio: This is the SEO-optimized portion of your Instagram Please keep it simple, authentic, yet keyword enriched. Do not just mention your music and genre here. Provide your audience a reason to become a part of your musical family. Think of why a visitor should stop by to check your content and become an active organic follower. You can update it as frequently as you wish.
• URL: Provide a link to a landing page that suits your business needs as a musician. This could be your official website, a recent interview, a review of your music, a link to purchase tickets for your next concert, and so on. This space, too, can be updated as frequently as you need for maximum traffic generation, including call to action on your posts directing audience attention to this URL.
• CTA buttons: If this feature is available in your country, provide a CTA button for direct sales and interaction with potential clients. Instagram has currently partnered with several booking sites that let your audience book tickets or sessions with your band. You must have an account on one of these sites to avail yourself of this feature.
• Contact information: Potential clients and collaborators look up your profile information to get in touch with your business. Add a location to your information to attract local business. Set up your preferred mode of communication. If you provide external communication means, ensure that your contact details like phone number and email address are valid and working.

3. Plan your posts

The most crucial part of being active on Instagram is to post the right kind of content at the right time. Whether you use photo posts or video posts, you must identify what you should be posting as a professional. For this:

• Set micro-goals: Have definite and time-bound mini goals in place before focusing on content creation. Create posts that aim to fulfill these goals. Micro-goals also help you manage your budget more efficiently besides organizing your time and market research.
• Set realistic budgets: Although creating a business account is free, you may need to spend some money to build yourself up as a personal brand. You may have to invest in editing software, buy engagement, place advertisements, or even employ professionals to enhance your social media presence. Be clear of what you are willing to spend on your Instagram marketing strategy in terms of both money and time.
• Experiment with post formats: Instagram is constantly updating its posting features. It has come a long way from being just a photo-sharing platform. Now you can publish videos, Instagram Stories, Reels, long IGTV videos, and even broadcast yourself live. Not only this, you can enhance your posts and videos with in-built filters, memes, gifs, Shoppable tags, CTA buttons links, and polls, to name a few editing features. Familiarize yourself with the different posting formats and specs. Try out all of them to find out what kind of format suits what type of content best for you. Regardless of how experimental your content is, keep in mind that Instagram is a visual platform mainly used on the cell phone by members who tend to swipe up their feeds rapidly. Your content has to capture the attention of this user pool. Hence ensure that your content is:
  • Attractively packaged;
  • Well-lit and visually arresting;
  • Has a clear and easy-to-spot story.

Additionally, you need to create content that sustains audience engagement over time. Hence:

• Use a mix of infographics, photos, and videos to target your potential clients and collaborators.
• Make use of hashtags, geotags, and strong captions with call-to-action as frequently as possible.
• Post frequently and consistently.
• Self- promote by creating teasers, campaigns, and events and leading a series of posts up to the main event.
• Repost, simultaneously post across various media and sites and recycle old content to bring back attention to dead conversations.
• Create content that makes the audience save and come back to your posts rather than bypass them with a one-time like.
• Tag and mention mentors, fans, reviewers, and collaborators.
• Acknowledge other users who share your content or drive engagement to your profile in any form.
• Use insights: This is a handy tool to use in your marketing strategy if you have a set audience demographic in age, language, or region. Even when you are creating content aimed at a broad target audience, Instagram insights let you analyze and keep track of:
  • How your posts and ads are faring?
  • Who is interacting with your content, how and when?
  • Which kind of posts fare better in terms of attracting audience traffic and engagement?
  • What is the best time for you to post to gain maximum visibility and reach?
• Make use of promotional posts: To create sales and lead conversion, consider using Facebook and Instagram advertising options. You can:
  • Create ads or promote select posts;
  • Specify your target audience;
  • Specify a duration for running the ad;
  • Specify the destination for traffic generation;
  • Set your expenditure limit.
• Create promotional content: Create content with a call-to-action end goal that results in direct profits and brand growth for your business as a musician:
  • Offer limited-time discounts on the purchase of your music or concert tickets;
  • Provide early bird freebies for customers;
  • Create teasers of upcoming music.
• Network and collaboration: Joint endeavors are a great way to increase your audience reach and build brand presence. Collaborate with other Instagram users to make your content visible to their followers and target audience:
  • Use influencers: This is a great mess of building social proof. Work with influencers to increase brand value and credibility. When you get positive reviews as a musician or when your music is used as a background score by an influencer with a broad audience outreach, you are sure to find some organic audience growth on your profile.
  • Team up with fellow musicians or professionals from allied industries: Working in partnership with others from your music industry will help you build professional networks in the industry and bring your music to their existing audiences. Organize concerts, go live in collaboration, or produce long videos together to build yourself up as a musician.
  • Make use of automated features: An essential part of good networking is responsive and available for communication. You can:
    • Create generic responses acknowledging mentions and tags,
    • Create polite and appreciative responses that let followers know you will be responding shortly.

In addition, to maintain consistency in your posting strategy:

1. Auto-schedule posts: This helps you maintain a posting routine that builds audience anticipation for fresh content.

2. Humanize your brand: Even as you use auto schedulers and automated replies, remember to be social and authentic. Humanize yourself as a music brand by:
   • Creating behind the scenes stories and posts;
   • Engaging with your followers;
   • Being responsive on DMs;
   • Going live frequently;
   • Generate curiosity about and traffic to your music by creating information-based content like:
     • Behind the scenes stories;
     • Your music, genre, and inspiration;
     • Your mentors and allied industry professionals;
     • Your ethos.

3. Use hashtags and captions: Optimise your post content and music videos by adding the correct hashtags and a keyword enriched caption where applicable. Both hashtags and keywords can push your content up on Instagram’s search ranks and thus bring you more visibility, reach, and conversions.
4. Cross-promote your Instagram content: Encourage likes, shares, saves, and comments on your posts by:
   • Cross-posting your content across all your social media handles;
   • Posting the same content in different Instagram formats;
   • Including your Instagram handle on your profile information on other social media websites or networking opportunities;
   • Creating email updates for your followers.

To sum up

Although the quality of your music determines your audience growth the most, when it comes to branding oneself digitally, musicians need to worry about much more than their music alone — creating a brand presence required comprehensive planning of your content strategy. You may find the growth slow initially, but you will soon find yourself growing as a musician if you follow the best practices outlined here while cresting your Instagram marketing plans.

Header Image Credit: ActionVance on Unsplash