The Reluctant Marketer’s Handbook
What is the Reluctant Marketer?
A reluctant marketer is my term for someone who wants to make more money from their skills but is hesitant to take the steps necessary to promote themselves and their work. For you, marketing could entail promoting some combination of your music writing, recording, playing, and teaching.
Why the reluctance?
- You don't know how to promote yourself effectively with grace and in a style that feels appropriate for you?
- You feel self-conscious that self-promotion is somehow an admission of need or desperation?
- You believe that effective marketing will be too expensive and take more time that you have to give it?
- You accept the myth that money demeans your true artistic worth (the noble starving artist syndrome)?
So, how can you better promote yourself and make more money by marketing your work to the very people who will most benefit from it?
I think it starts by realizing that by not going out there and promoting yourself, your products, and your talents, you are depriving the musicians who most need you. Their need for you can include getting you for gigs, playing your arrangements, using your instructional materials, experiencing your live teaching and clinics, reading your books, listening to your CDs, and everything else you have to offer the musical world.
You are solving a very real need these people have. Sometimes, by the way, we don’t even know we have a need to be filled until the solution is put in front of us.
What effective marketing could mean for you.
Before knowing how and what to promote of yourself, you must be clear on: What stage are you in your life and career? What do you want to promote and make money from? What is unique about your personality, your music, and the things you can offer people that they cannot find anywhere else?
These are important questions to which you must have honest answers before knowing how and what to promote of yourself.
Some of the things you might want to start promoting better include your:
- gigs and appearances
- availability to be hired for more gigs
- private teaching availability
- school clinic availability
- recordings (CDs or streams)
- writing (original compositions or arrangements)
- books
- videos
- thoughts on music and other topics of interest and expertise
Once you know what you want to promote, the fun begins: marketing yourself to people wanting to buy from you.
Marketing is a very broad topic, so let’s look at just three important aspects of it:
