One of the most important factors of being a musician is brand management. You may not realize this now, especially if you’re a beginner, but your brand mirrors your career.

Right from the start, you should think about personal brand management. You don’t need fancy tools to begin – just the essential concepts and a bit of sweat equity.

In this article, you’ll know how to manage your growing brand while still allotting decent time for music creation.

Understand Your Goals

Knowing your goals as a music creator is a wise move. Your goal will set the direction of your music career and personal brand.

Here are some questions to help you guide your music career:

• What genre of music do you specialize in?
• What is your 5-year music vision?
• What types of listeners do you want to target?
• What instruments have you already mastered?

It’s also a good idea to discuss your music goals with somebody you know. This person can be your friend, spouse, or even a sibling. Just work on your goals as soon as possible to conquer your doubts and inaction.

Build or Improve Your Website

A website can be a repository of your work, achievements, and successful career projects. You could set up a personal blog, highlighting all the best things that happened in your career. Your website will also serve as a bridge between your brand and thousands of listeners out there.

Building a simple website is easy nowadays. You can start with free hosted sites but these options don’t always allow custom domain names. If your website has a custom domain name, it will generate a stronger professional appeal. When a person visits your site, a custom domain name will help communicate your brand and what you stand for.

Once you manage to build a website, you should work on it every day. Try to add blog posts, edit the site appearance, and ensure that your brand logo is visible. You should also strive hard to improve the website’s speed by removing unnecessary plugins or features. A slow website will drive visitors, and the search engines, away!

Don’t Forget Your Socials

Social media can be an important factor in personal brand development. If you access the right channels, lots of people will see your brand every week. It could begin with a simple Facebook page. Simply build the page, add relevant content, and invite people to see what you’ve created.

Brand management in social media takes time. It's difficult to see immediate results unless you start using paid ads. However there is no guarantee improved exposure through ads will  translate to immediate sales or subscriptions.

Also, Facebook is just one platform. Try to expand to other platforms like Instagram or Pinterest. With Instagram, you can upload snippets of your music, daily stories and challenges. Conversely, in Pinterest, you can share infographics loaded with music-related tips.

Choosing The Right Tools

Despite the number of brand management tools currently advertised online, you only need a few of them. Having too many tools will lead to clutter and large monthly overheads!

Youtube, for example, has a built-in monitoring tool that can track viewership and other metrics. This tool is enough to measure your career’s progress. Soundcloud and Spotify have decent monitoring dashboards as well.

Before paying for an online brand tracking tool, always check your budget and priorities. Will a new tool help you improve the quality of your tracks? Can you craft new brand growth ideas from the data presented by the new tool? These are just some of the questions that you must work towards finding an answer.

Foster A Community Around Your Brand

Building a community around a brand is not new. Just observe the world’s most popular brands like Coke and Apple. These brands have thousands of followers around the world. Their popularity is obvious and their brand is instantly recognizable around the world.

To start building your brand community, you must have a consistent content schedule. It’s not enough to compose a phenomenal song. Rather, you need to bring this song to the right channels. Let your listeners see the value of your song through your content. Some good types  of content are blog posts, Facebook announcements, Instagram teasers, and exclusive emails for subscribers.

Soundcloud and Spotify are also excellent platforms to distribute your music. As you become more popular, listeners will see your brand’s value through these platforms.

Collaborate With The Right People

Even if you’re a solo music creator, you can still work with a team. These people could help you with important things like graphics creation, sound editing, research, and even marketing. By outsourcing tasks, you’ll have more time honing your craft and improving your brand.

Does this mean you could work with anyone? Absolutely not. You have to set boundaries and know the qualities of the best people to work with. Some important qualities to seek in collaborators are reliability, accountability, integrity, know-how, and strength of character.

You must also have a thorough hiring or screening process. Find people who truly understand the ins and outs of the music industry and understand your brand. This will help you manage expectations better and will give you the freedom to direct and manage your brand.

The right people can also help your brand grow by sharing your website content, juggling ideas, and even sharing tips on how to improve your music.

Conclusion

Now that you’re aware of some great personal brand management techniques, you can draft a better music career plan. This should help you improve your daily schedule to fit your music creation and brand management tasks smoothly.

Do not give up. As the going gets tough, you’ll discover new strategies to implement. Sooner or later, many people will discover your brand, leading to more profits and better recognition!