Need advice on best marketing with limited budget

[Gary Storm]

Hi all,

My wife is a musician in Perth Australia, and signed to an indie label. She just completed an album in London with producer Mick Glossop (Van Morrison/Frank Zappa etc). It's influenced by late 60'/early 70's music (Janis, Doobie Bros, The Band etc). It's being released in February, and there will be 3 free mp3's (drm free) to download from the album.

They've given her a budget for marketing of 5000 Euro's. $7000 USD?

We can either go with the professionals who will charge up to $5000 or so for a 3 month campaign to market the music to say 500 music websites and get some reviews etc, or get me (her husband) to try and do alot of the work (getting in touch with music sites etc, though I'd also do tech sites as well like TechCrunch), and also pay for some banner/block advertising as well.

So, any advice on how best to use the money (which isn't alot for marketing I know)? Obviously promoting the free mp3 side is a part of it. I'm hoping to kick things off and then WOM will take over. I also want to get a music video done (hopefully something viral)... also needs to be in the budget.



Cheers,

G

[sem4u]

Well you won't get much for your money, especially with a music video needed as well?!?

Do you have a myspace account set up? This is where I would start first of all.

[Marcia]

If you burn $5K out of $7K in a few months, there will be nothing left to work with. What you'll need to do is be creative, get into some "social marketing" and start networking with other musicians and people in the industry.

Can you get the company to give you some materials like videos to put online?

[Gary Storm]

We need to do our own video. I`m going to see if any Uni Students would be interested (as they have to do projects anyway).
Just don't know how to network the best and get the message out. I want to do some advertising, so am trying to find out what banners/boxes on sites cost, and which are the best advertising strategies.... so any advice is appreciated.
If anyone can recommend a publicity/promotions place on the net (especially for music), please tell me.

[Marcia]

Gary, banners ads can be costly, and really take having the skills needed to pick them judiciously. And they aren't the best in terms of ROI in some cases.

Word of mouth and viral marketing are about the lowest cost (mostly free), if something happens to catch on - and probably the most effective nowadays.

I'd seriously suggest researching "social marketing" opportunities; and check out Yahoo videos and YouTube, places like that. Even kids are putting videos out there, and you could also check out local opportunities for your area.

Have there been any press releases done and distributed?

[beu]

Submit your video to YouTube, Google Video and/or all the others. Create an iTunes account and "podcast" your videos and mp3s via iTunes store. Setup a MySpace profile and create links to your videos on Google Video / YouTube.

Best of luck!

[Hemal Shah]

There is so many way for marketing your website with low cost.

1. Dir Submission
2. SE Submission
3. Link Building
4. SMO
5. Forums Submission
6. Video Submission
7. Email Marketing

[onlineseo]

In your particular case, you need to concentrate on variety of different marketing channels like :-

social network sites
related music forums
and any other website devoted to a particular set of music lovers.

Banner advertising is done mostly be professional companies which are concentrating to increase their SALES/LEAD rate.

Your music site just needs some good promotion from related websites. :)