At its most basic level, music marketing is all about percentages.

When we understand those percentages, we can craft a predictable and repeatable game plan for career (and financial) success.

Implementing a simple funnel-based marketing strategy allows us to move from a “spray and pray” approach to a more calculated, data-driven approach to promoting our music and building a business on top of that.

So rather than simply saying, “Tell more people about your music,” let’s dig deeper into how (and why) this truly works.

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Figuring out the funnel

As independent artists, the funnel is our best friend.

Now, I’m sure all understand how a basic marketing funnel works, but for context, it looks something like this:

We start by generating awareness and progressively move people down that funnel until we turn them into customers.

But an often overlooked aspect of this funnel is that it narrows with each successive level.

It’s not called a marketing cylinder, after all.

Losing people at every step is a fundamental aspect of marketing, regardless of product or industry.

In short, not every single person who knows you exist is going to take the next step, let alone give you their money.

I know that may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many artists ask me questions like, “Tom, I got 100 clicks on my ads on Instagram, but only 50 new listeners on Spotify—why is that?”

Short answer: the funnel leaks a little bit, and it always will.

The basic premise can be broken down like this:

If 10,000 people see your content, 1,000 of them might listen to your music on Spotify.

Of those 1,000 listeners, 100 might choose to follow you on Spotify, Instagram, or otherwise.

Of those 100 followers, 10 might choose to subscribe to email updates.

And of those 10 subscribers, 1, yep, just one, might make a purchase.

Now not to take the wind out of your sails here, but a 10% success rate at each step is actually quite good.

But for the sake of argument, it would theoretically take 10,000 impressions to earn one customer in this scenario.

And that’s how the game works.

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Implementing systems

No single artist can fully manage every aspect of the funnel while consistently making music and posting organic content.

This is why systems are so vital.

If we tried to do all of this by hand every time, we’d quickly become overwhelmed, burn out, and quit.

Because most of us are on our own or working with a very small team, automating as much of this as we can is critical for growth.

So if we take the 10% scenario above and work it into an actual automated process, it might look something like this:

We run ads on Instagram to send traffic to our artist profile on Spotify, using this single ad as both the source of our impressions as well as the foundation for our listenership.

Because of our ad, we earn new followers on Instagram and Spotify as a natural byproduct of a good song and great visual ad creative.

We then use a different ad to retarget everyone who has engaged with our Instagram content, paid or otherwise, and offer them a lead magnet (like a free download) in exchange for their email address.

And finally, we use email to passively sell merchandise to our subscribers every time we send out an update about new music.

With this system, our only job is to release music frequently and email our subscribers when we do that.

Barring slight adjustments to ad creative, targeting, etc., the rest is automated and takes care of itself.

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Filling it up

Now there are plenty of variations on the automated process above, but at its core, the most important aspect of this is pulling people into the top of the funnel.

Without that, nothing else works.

Much as a train car is filled using a giant funnel full of coal, grain, or whatever else, we too can fill up our container with customers by pouring more raw material into the top.

For us, this means generating awareness.

We can do this by posting organic content, running paid ads, or, ideally, doing both.

Once we have our systems and automations in place for the subsequent layers underneath, it really does become a game of numbers at that point.

The more we put in, the more we get out.

Easy.

So if we once again assume a 10% success rate and make other assumptions like every customer spending exactly $10 (yes, I’m keeping the math simple here), then if we wanted to make $100 from the above funnel, we would need 10 customers and, at the very top, 100,000 impressions.

Now, the reality is that the conversion rate is generally far lower than 10%, especially when it comes to getting people to break out the credit card.

But as we keep going, learning to make better music, better content, and run better ads—as every level of our funnel improves—we can hope to see that rate of return improve as well.

From there, it’s simply a matter of doing what it takes to fill up the top so we can reap the benefits at the bottom.

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