SoundCloud for Content Marketers: Maximizing Engagement
Express your creative genius
SoundCloud is a great outlet to keep your fans engaged in between big releases. This tactic is especially useful for hip-hop and EDM communities. These genres rely heavily on collaborations, mixtapes and compilations to add spice to artist’s catalogs. This kind of stuff is bread and butter of SoundCloud.
It also means that you can show fans other sides of your musical talent that might not mesh completely with your mainstreaming image. SoundCloud can be the perfect place for music like this. Posting this kind of content creates a more personal relationship with the fans on the platform.
Choose your best material
Be sure to maximize SoundCloud’s spotlight feature to bring your favorite works on top of your channel. This feature lets you pin up to five tracks and call visitor’s attention to listen to them first.
Remember, first impressions last. The first five tracks that you highlight on your profile should be the best ones to keep your listeners interested and in the zone with your music. And you can even use the spotlight feature when you just release a new song!
Use Tags
Using tags can help searchers and listeners in finding the content that they want to see and hear. These can make your tracks easy to search and give your music more chances of being found by potential fans.
Another reason why it’s important is that SoundCloud has a recommendation system that suggests certain tracks to avid listeners. With the right tags on your music, it’ll be easier for potential fans to find your music and for you to grow your fan base.
Check out who your fans follow
If you already have an ideal fan in mind, knowing who they follow on SoundCloud will help with figuring out how you can be what they look for. Once you pooled a test group of similar potential fans or profiles together, go ahead and check for any common artists that they might be following.
Finding the common denominator among those in your ideal fanbase will show how you can represent yourself on SoundCloud so that you can promote better and attract like-minded followers as well.
Share content across social media platforms
To get the most out of SoundCloud, you need to utilize cross-platform marketing. This means taking the content you’ve already posted on the platform and posting across your other social media accounts.
If you have quite a following on Instagram, it might be a great plan to post a track from SoundCloud and label it as a “secret track for your fans.” This can help funnel your existing fan base to SoundCloud and further grow your following.
Leverage existing audiences to get more plays
There are people who are always going to better at marketing music than you. So you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, use these people to your advantage. Find channels on SoundCloud that can share your music to larger numbers of people than you could ever could.
The key here is to find channels that are a good fit for your music. Don’t go messaging someone just because they have a lot of followers. Now if you want a shortcut hack to amp up your plays, you can buy SoundCloud plays to instantaneously get more plays!
Track your data by going pro
Accessing data analytics on SoundCloud requires going pro. As soon as you get SoundCloud pro subscription, you’ll be able to access traffic data, and listener data to understand what tweaks you’ll need to make with your promotional efforts.
Upgrading your account to SoundCloud Pro is also a great way to ensure what upcoming trends on the platform are drawing attention and are about to become the next best opportunity for further growth.
Have a marketing plan
One of the most effective techniques that you can use when you promote your SoundCloud is to build a marketing plan that can help set every promotional effort in the right direction.
While it might not be necessarily be exciting as playing a concert for thousands of people, creating a marketing plan and following it is the best approach to make your way there much faster.
Final Thoughts
Renowned for its unique content and extensive features, and more within one of the biggest communities of creators out there, SoundCloud has a lot to offer independent artists like you. However, success doesn’t come overnight. It requires consistent marketing, creative problem-solving and the motivation to persevere.
In fact, your success on SoundCloud should run parallel to your marketing pushes on other platforms. But with SoundCloud, you can do more than just post your music. You can engage with fans in a more informal way and build a loyal fan base that gets a rare glimpse of your creative personality.