It's painfully common for a music tech company to invest, build, and launch new products without hiring an expert to advise on their marketing strategy and ad spend.
New founders often go all-in with influencer campaigns after launch. Results from such campaigns tend to be hard to measure, in addition to the risk that many Instagram and TikTok creators are subcontracting black hat engagement farms to boost their numbers. While there’s a time and place for influencer campaigns, relying on only that approach risks bringing in tens of thousands of views, thousands of likes, hundreds of comments and shares, but drives almost no traffic or sales.
Struggling to find an affordable marketing agency with relevant experience in the field, they turn to ad agencies who specialize in other fields, outside the music niche. But those agencies lack the first-hand experience with music and audio technology to truly understand the pain points.
Those generic ad campaigns continue for months without ever achieving a serious return on ad spend. Maybe the problem is your ad, but maybe it's the landing page or some conversion chokepoint down funnel.
Marketing your music tech startup
As a music tech startup, you need a marketing partner who understands the industry and has experience promoting similar tools. There are complex rules dictating which locales and demographics to target, ideal daily ad spend and campaign duration, retargeting and so forth.
Music tech encompasses a wide range of product formats, from browser and mobile apps to DAW plugins and hardware. The audience in each niche is picky and wants to hear the problem articulated in a way that feels genuine to them. This requires a special, non-generic approach to storytelling, in order to convey the unique selling proposition.
But where can you find qualified agencies to help market your music tech startup at a reasonable price? Try searching Google and you'll notice that most of the marketing agencies in this niche specialize in promoting artists and musicians. Their expertise in fan psychology does not necessarily transfer to music tech.
Finding music tech experts for each channel
Seasoned music tech advisors know how important it is to choose the right partner for each of your marketing channels. A killer SEO strategist might not be able to write the actual content. An excellent copywriter may have no idea what to focus on. An affiliate marketer might have nothing to offer but their list.
As a marketing agency, we know our strengths as well as our limitations. So in this article we'll explain precisely how we can help and recommend alternatives for readers who need more than advertising.
Dotted Music: The top agency for music tech advertising and more
Our own company, Dotted Music, has been serving the music industry for two decades. We got our start as an artist promotion agency and have gradually moved over to serving music tech companies over the past twelve years.
Dotted specializes in paid ad campaigns for music tech. We've worked with brands like Dreamtonics, Ultimate Guitar, Yum Audio, Tomplay, and DataMind Audio. Each time we run an ad and notice changes in direct response, we carry those learnings over to our other music tech clients so that everyone can benefit.
We create custom, targeted ad campaigns for each of our clients, primarily through Meta and Google, as well as TikTok and Reddit. The ads are optimized for brand awareness and conversion. Our team has the experience and insight to know when to offer free registrations and lead magnets, versus when to drive purchases and paid subscriptions.
There are targeting groups that work from the get-go. We’ve seen promising results, sometimes reaching a 200%+ return on ad spend with up to 50% for SaaS during the first month. After a few more months of testing ads and optimizing the funnel pages, clients have shown achieving 800% ROAS within a quarter.
Alongside ad campaigns, we’ve helped music tech and music AI companies with product launch strategies, email marketing, social media management, community management, and influencer campaigns.
To deepen our industry knowledge, we've hosted over 150 episodes on our Music Growth Talks podcast.
What's a realistic ad budget for music tech startups?
Music tech ad spend varies according to the company’s goals and budget. It's common to start with as little as $2,000 per month as an early stage startup and grow to $3-15k over time as the business grows. The better your ROAS, the more budget you have to reinvest and grow brand awareness.
Complimentary marketing efforts for music tech
Paid advertising is one of the fastest ways to gain market visibility, test your marketing copy, and identify leaks in your sales funnel. However, there's more to running a business than paid ads. We track conversions down the funnel, on pages created and maintained by people outside our organization.
Conversion rate optimization: If your landing pages and shopping cart are not optimized, you might run an exceptional ad campaign and fail downstream, when leads arrive on your website. Hiring a conversion copywriter and performance marketer with expertise in your industry is advised.
Organic search: Hiring an SEO consultant to review your sitemap and recommend improvements is usually a great place to start. Revisions to metadata, alt tags, headers, and keyword density can move the needle. However, organic search is a long term strategy and can take 6-12 months to gain real momentum.
We've formerly collaborated with AudioCipher Technologies, a music tech company in the MIDI plugin niche. Their founder Ezra Sandzer-Bell drove over 850,000 unique site visitors during 2023 and 2024, through the company's blog alone. He explained to us in an interview that organic traffic drives the majority of brand awareness and revenue for his company.
The AudioCipher Technologies blog is a software review hub, covering products in depth and ranking at the top of Google as a result. You can contact Ezra directly via their website to request a feature.
Spotlight articles and reviews: Product reviews on popular music tech sites can drive steady long term traffic over time. It's important to find partners who take SEO into consideration. Keyword optimized content will perform better long term, while other software review sites might send a brief flash of referral traffic before disappearing into obscurity.
Try to find sites that specialize in your niche. For example, if you're in the AI audio and music niche, consider popular journals like the AI Musicpreneur to amplify your go to market announcements.
PR and publicists: If you have the budget to hire a dedicated publicist, they can do a lot of the groundwork for you. One of the most popular options in the music and tech sector is Rock Paper Scissors. Their founder Dmitri is the organizer for Music Tectonics, an industry conference that takes place each year in Los Angeles. They have many years of experience promoting music companies and building a supportive, inclusive network for entrepreneurs to engage with.
Influencer marketing: There are several reasons to hire influencers and video content creators, but referral traffic is not one of them. Most of these influencers inflate their numbers artificially and trick companies into hiring them at $1-5k per video. You're better off starting with a cluster of micro influencers at $100-200 a pop and choosing a carefully vetted "whale" influencer to put your company on the map. We’ve run influencer marketing campaigns on behalf of our music tech companies to help promote their products with relevant influencers. Our clients have been covered by the likes of Andrew Huang, Bishu, or Jeff Nang.
Backlink building: Building reputable do-follow backlinks to your site is essential if you want to rank in Google search. This is a particularly difficult task, because cold outreach campaigns tend to go nowhere and black hat backlink building from scam organizations like Rhino Rank can cost you thousands of dollars, while simultaneously earning you penalties from Google.
Email marketing: Create lead magnets and grow your own mailing list over time. We’ve helped music tech companies grow their email lists and optimize them for sales, product launches and updates so that they get the most out of their email subscribers.
Take the next step with a consultant
Need help coming up with a comprehensive music tech marketing strategy? Our team at Dotted Music offers a free 30 minute consultation, so you can take a moment to pitch your product and explain your business goals. We will give you an honest assessment of how we can help, and if our in-house team is not equipped to support you, we can refer you to other marketing partners who will.
Visit our home page to learn more or go straight to our contact page to request your free consultation. We look forward to hearing from you!
