Music technology companies are very often founded by domain specialists – tour managers, mix engineers, A&Rs, studio managers–where their strength is that they know the customer and her problem better than any marketer could. However, this can also create a
blindspot: these founders can start to assume that everyone else sees their product the same way they do.
This potential blindspot affects how marketing is approached in general. At first founders are the de facto CMO, and so throw themselves into pulling together the v1 marketing communication for launch. Symptoms include overly-heavy feature lists, too much product
detail at the top of the funnel, or messaging pitched at peers rather than customers (especially when customers are newer, or less technical, or aren’t trying so hard to understand the proposition).
The first mistake founders make here is forgetting that 99% of potential customers will not know you exist, and they don’t owe you their attention. The second mistake is managing torealise this, but then opting for marketing tactics rather than marketing strategy to close this
gap. Without a grounding in marketing strategy, founders will tend to default to tactics. The problem compounds when they don’t comprehend the role of each tactic within a broader strategy. For example, to close an awareness gap the temptation is to dive headfirst into a channel tactic such as SEO or PPC. But search isn’t an awareness channel: people only look for you once they already know they need you. It’s putting the cart before the horse.
Founders’ time is extremely short so it’s not surprising that outsourcing marketing tends to take this same tactical shape: making a social hire, approaching a marketing agency to own a couple of channels, or hiring a PR specialist to try to engineer a one-off push to go viral.
Each of these hires then reports success in the numbers its own channel provides, and that’s where the next mistake creeps in.
Measuring what you can, rather than what you should
In trying to measure marketing, another mistake often rears its head, which is interpreting ‘vanity metrics’ as reflectors of business performance. The appeal of vanity metrics comes from the very fact that they are measurable. It’s easy to conflate the metrics that are particular to the specific channels – followers on Instagram, visitors to the website, views on YouTube – as being one and the same as
success metrics for your business. Or, just as bad, presuming these metrics are actually useless because they are not easily linked to purchases, or other numbers further down the funnel.
If we take social – Instagram or TikTok – for example, the algorithms now favour the initial popularity of one-off content far ahead of the follower count of the account, so an account with five followers can go viral while big channels can often flop. If a platform has become
content-first, i.e. videos are pushed ahead of creators (regardless of following), and this is how messaging really lands with audiences, you can waste a lot of time and energy hiring a social media manager or agency to boost your following on TikTok while actually barely
moving the needle on recognition or understanding of your brand by your desired audience.
After all, who are these new followers you’ve gained anyway?
The lesson is the same for any channel: you must understand both the rules of the channel platform and its role in helping you achieve your business goals, and ignore the vanity metrics – in this scenario the follower count. Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it has value to your business. AI has made the collecting part of data almost effortless. Scraping, rapid research and
comparing CSVs no longer need SQL or any understanding of databases. What AI hasn’t changed is the hard part: knowing which numbers matter, what they’re telling you and what
decision to take as a result.
This is not to say that gaining a large following on social media is a waste of time. It is instead to say that in isolation without knowing the goals and makeup of a specific business, we simply don’t know. It depends entirely on the core goals of the marketing strategy you are
employing, which leads us to the wider underlying error.
The real mistake
That error is putting tactics ahead of strategy. A music technology business has three distinct, but interrelated strands: In order, they are the business plan, then the product roadmap, then the marketing plan, each flowing from the one before. In a successful
business they are closely aligned, and constantly realigned, as a weakness in one will show up in the others.
Perhaps counterintuitively, strategy starts with brand. Before any plan, workshop who your customers are, why your product matters to them and how you speak to them. Capture the answers in a narrative framework with two parts: a strategic spine that defines what you stand for and who it’s for, and a practical playbook that turns this into rules. The playbook is what lets you triage opportunities. Should we partner with that brand? Should we sponsor that event? What looks like a major undertaking for a time-poor founder saves time and money that would otherwise go on the wrong things.
A marketing plan made up of journeys, not channels
The second phase after you have your narrative framework is taking this framework and using it to build a marketing plan combined with the milestones of the business plan and product roadmap. A marketing plan starts with a core goal, and no more than two supporting
goals. From there, plan how you’ll reach them over 30, 180 and 365 days. Before tactics comes the funnel. Awareness, curiosity, trial, purchase, retention. Each phase has its own attributes and rules. For example, you shouldn’t pile detail into messaging at the top of the funnel. If we think of the funnel through the lens of content, at the top you need strong hooks to pique interest and gain curiosity. Deep messaging will not land here. As we move through the funnel, emotional messaging can have a role to play. As we approach the bottom of the funnel and your customers are making a buying decision, you can add detail and finally introduce offers and elicit urgency.
Still employing the lens of content to navigate the funnel, if we compare different types like slick branded content vs. UGC, it’s clear that they will elicit different reactions from your audience and point to different CTAs. Show workflows, not feature lists. Likewise, one-off purchases should be treated differently from subscriptions, where the battle for attention and awareness is never over. When you have clear routes to your desired outcomes, you are ready to hire and brief.
So who should you hire?
Start with the gap, not the channel. If there’s no strategy yet, you need senior marketing leadership first, whether that’s a fractional lead or a full-time hire, every hire after that will naturally follow from that. If the strategy is clear but nobody has the capacity to deliver it, you should bring in specialists or an agency to execute against it. If one channel is already proving itself, you should hire someone to scale that channel. Get the order wrong and you risk getting invoices from people trying to look busy.
To summarise, hire for the outcome, and the channels (and tactics) will follow. If you’re working through this now, I’m running a small roundtable with Music Technology UK on 14 October at H.O.M.E in London. Bring a customer acquisition challenge and we can
work through it in the room.
There are 10 places: luma.com/znqazsq2