Digital Marketing, Content & Promotion (Cert HE)

The history and evolution of music marketing and promotion is perhaps not as recent as you think, in fact, as long as music has been made, music creators have found ways to get it to their audiences.

Making music is one thing, but ensuring you find an audience that wishes to engage with you, follow you and spend money on your work is a business and an art form.  Today we’re used to owning our own narrative through social media and forget, that many years ago live performance was the only way to reach your audience. With the advent of radio, advertising and the press, things changed rapidly and then, in the 1980s, music video changed the game again.

This module will look at the history of music marketing through the press, TV, content, fanzines, celebrity magazines and later, the web but also promotion: radio, TV, live touring, festivals, video and social media. By understanding the history of marketing and promotional methods, alongside the development of key marketing theory: the 4Ps, through to the 4Es to content, SEO, and AI, we’ll take a whistlestop tour through all the things you need to know, to understand where we are now.

The module will focus on the history and development of marketing and promotional methods, alongside their tools, techniques and theory.

An indicative lecture programme relating to this module will comprise:
1. A brief history of music marketing: press, radio and TV to 1970s
2. A brief history of music marketing: video killed the radio star – MTV and the magazine
3. A brief history of digital marketing: 1990 and Compuserve to TikTok and AI
4. Introduction to marketing theory 1: The marketing mix
5. Introduction to marketing theory 2: Maslow, Kotler, Drucker, Porter et al
6. Consumer decision making
7. Marketing models: SWOT, PESTLE, BOSTON, RABOSTIC, PESO
8. From bands to brands
9. B2B and B2C becomes D2C
10. Search vs found. Paid vs Earned
11. Going social
12. Influence and influencers

It’s not just about a post, or a short TikTok video. Great content takes planning. You need to know your audience and use your content to inspire them to act and it all hinges on two key questions: what do we want them to think and what do we want them to do? If you can answer those, you can plan content that is going to work. Your creative vision is just part of the picture, your content has to have aims and objectives and more than this, work for the audience.

In this module, you’ll begin to plan and map content, not only learning how to create content of various types but also thinking about what your client (the artist or label) needs and which audiences you’re targeting. You’ll start by analysing the work of others, let’s deconstruct what the experts have done, before developing the skills to scope a project, plan what’s needed, research your audience and design something that will influence them.

Lastly, you need to know that you’ve met the aims and objectives you and your client set at the beginning, so we’ll look at how you gain traction and measure success.

An indicative lecture programme for this module will include:
1. What is content?
2. Analyse the experts: words and pictures – posts
3. Analyse the experts: video and audio – teasers/trailers
4. Brand: design in keeping (colour, font, look, tone of voice)
5. Speak to the audience: segmentation and personas
6. Call to Action – using content to generate action
7. Getting to the top: intro to SEO
8. Platform: web, social, push and pull
9. Using content to build fans and gather data
10. Sign-up and GDPR
11. Go live! Publishing content how-to
12. Promoting the content
13. Measuring impact: metrics, analytics and data

Marketing in the digital realm means there is a wealth of data to collect and interpret about the ways in which customers engage with, interact and perhaps don’t interact with your content and campaigns. Technology is available that can show you how many seconds and on which parts of your website customers hover, what their average visit is, whether they click through to purchase or abandon their purchase having second thoughts. Technology can tell us a lot about how consumers behave and we can use this to make evidenced based decisions on content and campaigns.

The acronyms are endless, from CTR (click through rate) to ROAS (return on ad spend), there are a few of these you’ll need to know to assess the impact of your campaign. So during this module, we’ll ensure you know how to implement Google Analytics, understand the point of a CRM, obsess about UX and always have a CTA.

An indicative lecture programme might include:
1. Established and emerging digital marketing channels
2. What do we need to know about customers and why?
3. The value proposition
4. Collecting and storing customer data (CRMs)
5. GDPR and Data Protection: the rules, and law and safe storage and use
6. Customer persona and market segment, know your people
7. Communities and influence
8. The call to action (CTA) and user experience (UX)
9. Analytics tools (web and social)
10. Using data to set goals and KPIs
11. Interpreting and using analytics
12. Reporting the data and demonstrating impact
13. Emerging tech: AI and bots

It has been said that a brand isn’t a ‘thing’ or a series of qualities; a brand is about how it makes you feel. We’re all aware of the challenge of choice: are you Apple or Samsung, Coke or Pepsi? Brands have history, reputation, and associations. How does that happen and what impact does it have on whether we buy into that brand or not?

This module will explore how brands are built and how you can implement those principles to explore and update a brand based on evidence you have gathered and applying your skills in this and other modules. Working directly on real life projects, you’ll be exploring existing brands and finding out how and why you might refresh these to have more impact and drive more sales. An indicative lecture series might contain:

1. What is a brand?
2. Case studies of successful brands 1
3. Case studies of successful brands 2
4. Image, Identity, culture and personality: the four components of brand
5. Audience analysis
6. Brand audit
7. Competitor analysis
8. Brand positioning
9. Brand messaging
10. Recognition, Reputation, Recall
11. The brand plan
12. Creating and measuring impact

We’ve all experienced the sudden realisation that an artist, song, video or meme is everywhere. Often, that is the result of a promotional marketing campaign, carefully planned and curated to ensure that particular aims and objectives are met: tickets to a gig sell out, a song flies up the charts, a clip goes viral, everyone is talking about your artist (that appearance at an awards ceremony, that outfit, that entrance).

Months of planning goes into all these things to ensure that a whole range of content is released over a period of time to keep that artist at the front of our thoughts: article, appearance, photograph, video, interview, release. This module will help you understand that process first, through analysing fantastic and effective campaigns from other artists and then, to try and piece together and plan a campaign of your own. You don’t have to launch this campaign (you’ll do that in the next module!), for this, you just have to pitch and in doing so; show us you understand the process.

1. Anatomy of a campaign – analysing the experts.
2. Ideation and research: know your subject, and set your aims.
3. Mapping success: key metrics and data.
4. Know your target audience, mapping trends.
5. Look at the competition… where do you fit? How are you different?
6. Conduct a content audit, what have you got, what’s worked, what do you need?
7. Planning a campaign 1: resources (time, money, people, tech)
8. Planning a campaign 2: the right content in the right place at the right time
9. Timelines and content calendars.
10. Align to the brand, joining it all up and staying authentic.
11. A or B? The merits of testing.
12. Pitching to the professionals, positioning the campaign.
13. Reflecting on feedback, adjusting the plan.

This is where you put everything together. We’d like you to take everything you’ve learned so far and apply this to a real music industry context by collaborating with others to lead the design of your own content-driven marketing campaign for a chosen artist. During this module, you’ll have chance to understand how professionals create marketing campaigns and then bring this to life with your own project.

You will gain an understanding of how to launch a campaign to promote an artist and will integrate, analyse and assimilate marketing theory, data and consumer trends, market segmentation and devise a content driven campaign from idea to impact.

An indicative programme will comprise:
1. Thinking like a marketer: approaching a new project through planning.
2. Do your research1: understanding the artist
3. Do your research 2: mapping trends and understanding audiences
4. Do your research 3: find your tools, map your content, set a timeline
5. Collaboration: building a team to deliver the campaign
6. Set campaign goals, KPIs, targets and metrics.
7. Budgets and resource: how much, how long, and who?
8. The marketing mix: what are you going to do?
9. Mapping the campaign, presenting to the artist and your team.
10. Making the content, refining the plan.
11. Go-to-market campaign and reflection.

This course comprises 6 Assessments totalling 120 credits.

You will complete around 320 hours of indicative scheduled learning and teaching activities and 880 hours of independent learning on projects, productions, placements or self-directed study.

Assessment will be through: Coursework, presentations, assessed tutorials and portfolios.