Brand Awareness Marketing for Your Music Site

Okay, so you’re not Bruce Springsteen, or the CEO of Warner Brothers. But if you create, distribute or sell music, you can still get legions of fans and potential fans to visit your website. All it takes is some creative online marketing – the kind of marketing that’s built right into Conduit Community Toolbars.

With Conduit, you can increase awareness of your site, and raise your musical profile – without hiring a fancy publicist. Toolbars are an effective and completely cost-free engine for branding – the merchandizing strategy that raises awareness through cumulative exposure to advertising images. By associating your music site with a toolbar-based branding campaign, your target audience will get to know you, begin to like you, and eventually, get hooked on your music – something that translates into increased site traffic and online sales.

Striking a (Customized) Chord With Fans
Here’s how it works. Conduit allows you to create a customized toolbar and offer it as a free download to site visitors. The toolbar sits at the top of the browser window, “branded” with a logo, title or graphic image that reminds them about your site’s existence, and serves as a one-click connection to your site at all times. Similar to an advertising billboard that gets its message across while drivers are zooming down the highway, toolbars are an excellent way to pound in your most important marketing message whenever your subscribers are online.

Unlike general ad campaigns conducted in the print or broadcast media, Conduit toolbars allow you to raise awareness of your music site by delivering your branding message directly to a targeted, self-selected audience. And like a song that rises or falls on the charts, you’ll be able to track your campaigns effectiveness by monitoring click-throughs, toolbar installs and shares.

Fun and Function
Conduit toolbars can be customized with a nearly unlimited range of features – from radio stations and video blogs to applications and games. Not only do these “extras” make surfing more enjoyable, they improve your brand image, because every fun feature you choose to share with your fans become associated with you and your music. This means you get the credit – as well as click-throughs.

Widgets, Music and the Viral Path to Branding Success
Viral marketing is the digital music industry’s bread and butter (or Lennon and McCartney, if you prefer). Conduit helps your music site ride the wave of this phenomenon, because every individual toolbar feature is designed for easy sharing via social network facilities like Facebook and MySpace. This means that when your subscribers share the super-cool things you’ve put on their toolbar, you’ll reach new fans. These new fans will gain always-on, browser-based access to your branding campaign, and a built-in click-through to your site.

And by creating branded “widgets” and adding them to your toolbar, you’ll become part of Conduit vast library of toolbar features – features that can be picked up by anyone in Conduit’s vast network of over 38 million subscribers.

If you’re marketing music, you need to find the right tone – one that resonates with your target audience and gets them humming – and buying – what you have to offer. Like a catchy tune, Conduit community toolbars communicate the “essence” of what you are, and in so doing, help you pick up fans that last a lifetime.