One method of working with influencers involves dm’ing ones you find on your FYP on TikTok or Instagram feed. In this case you try to get in contact with influencers by reaching out to them on their social media to see if they’re interested in promoting your music.
One of the strongest pros of cold reach-outs is the flexibility of who to work with for your campaigns. Any influencer is game as long as you can get in contact with them. This means you can spend the time finding the right influencers that align with your brand as an artist and with your song which hopefully translates into a more effective and engaging piece of content. Now this can work well, but only if you have an understanding of who you want to work with and have the hours to spare, and I mean 10s and 10s of hours investing in building your influencer marketing campaign, which for many artists is already a drain on the creative time spent on making the music.
A standard cold reach-out campaign can look a lot like this. Time is first spent finding their contact details, getting in contact, waiting to hear back from influencers, negotiating a price, sending them what you want, receiving a draft, approving it and having it finally posted. Now that may work for a couple influencers, but aiming for a comprehensive campaign, imagine doing that with 5 influencers, let alone 20 influencers at once. It’s a lot of work. Not to mention if they’re a popular influencer, their dm’s are usually going to go unanswered. If this sounds like hell, you should probably look into the more convenient methods for promoting music like an influencer marketplace which offers a wide array of influencers, a dashboard to manage your campaigns and direct contact so you will always hear a response.
Part of this process as well is the high level of trust involved. You’ve never met this influencer before and they may want you to either pay the complete fee upfront, or at least ask for a partial payment upfront. How are you to know if they are actually going to go through with posting this? As a smaller artist your budget means a lot to you however it probably means it’s not really worth it to get a contract in place with the influencer, however having peace of mind that you are protected is key to running a successful campaign which can leave you in no mans land about how to promote your music safely.
There is also the lack of understanding of the market to consider. You will only know the price and rate of the creators you find and who actually take the time to respond. If you have never created a campaign before, how are you to know who is the right creator to work with and what prices are fair? By lacking a comparison to the market you may be missing out on a more cost effective campaign to run.
There are benefits to running a reach-out campaign, but the time cost in immense, couple with the lack of trust and understanding of the ecosystem may leave you in the dark in how to go about creating the best possible campaign for your music.
Our recommendation?
Choose your marketing technique wisely, and make sure its a good fit for you and your music. By working with an influencer marketplace you have the flexibility of working with as many influencers as you'd like but also the security of our platform's escrow and influencer vetting to protect you. Whether your choice lies with SoundSmith, as long as you are happy, we are happy.
By working with SoundSmith we provide you a centralised location to also manage your campaign. For example, if you are working with 10 influencers at once, you are able to view the status of all the influencers in real time, whether they accepted or declined your campaign invitation, as well as whether they’ve posted, and how many days left they have to deliver their post.
You may want to stick with a specialised platform such as SoundSmith which devotes all its time and resources to music marketing. A company built around growing artists and providing them with tools. We care about your results just as much as you do. We want to see people make a living from their art. There are so many talented artists out there who simply lack the right tools to be heard. SoundSmith has been built purely for you, the artist.
If you're interested in SoundSmith, sign up here immediately with no strings attached!