Hanna Siwiec
This strategic marketing plan follows the campaign for the release of an EP by an emerging independent artist. The campaign is designed to build audience awareness, engagement and interest and targets music consumers and social media platforms.
Brand Equity Theory
The brand equity theory is particularly useful for this campaign, as it refers to the value brands hold in the minds of consumers. Kevin Keller’s model is a four-step structure that outlines how to build a strong brand through creating loyalty with customers. The model is composed of four parts; brand identity, brand meaning, brand response, and brand relationships. Brand identity forms the foundation of Keller’s model, establishing initial awareness and recognition among customers focusing on building a strong foundation and letting consumers know who you are, before they engage with your music. Brand meaning focuses on how your product makes people feel, how it performs, and its emotional appeal. The third stage, brand response, focuses on consumer judgements and emotional reactions to the artist and their music. Brand resonance is at the peak of Keller’s pyramid- shaped model, and centres around maintaining the relationship built with the consumer, so they continue to follow your brand. (Frampton, 2020)
By creating a strong brand identity for the artist, listeners are more inclined to engage with a brand that they are familiar with. This can be done by maintaining cohesive visual aesthetics throughout the project, for example having a clear colour palette that matches the concept of the music. In this case the colour palette is a combination of dark green and blue hues. This will be implemented through consistent use of these colours across social media, cover art, and promotional materials, ensuring the work is easily recognisable and reinforces brand identity across all platforms. Examples of similar colour pallets in music marketing include Lemonade by Beyoncé and CTRL by SZA.
By maintaining a cohesive colour palette throughout the promotional campaign, audience recognition and engagement are strengthened through consistent visual identity. Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) is a strong example of the use of brand equity in the music industry. This project successfully built a deep brand resonance by combining music with intense visual storytelling and personal narrative. The album strengthened Beyoncé’s brand identity, increased emotional engagement and built fan loyalty. Lemonade demonstrates how visual storytelling, consistent imagery and authenticity can make an artist more memorable. This example informs the release of the EP for this marketing plan as it emphasises the importance of creating a strong sense of brand equity rather and emotional branding rather than focusing on sale-driven tactics like viral moments on social media and streams. This approach informs the EP campaign by prioritising emotional storytelling and consistent visual branding.
AIDA Model
Named after an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, the AIDA model is used in marketing and advertising to describe the stages customers follow when making purchasing decisions. The first component of the model is attention, which focuses on attracting the customer’s interest, for example, short-form video teasers on social media. Interest focuses on making sure the content you show your listeners is memorable as most will quickly scroll past. Content should be visually optimised to capture attention quickly within fast-scrolling digital environments. Although the AIDA model provides a useful framework, digital consumption behaviour is often unpredictable, meaning audiences may move between stages unpredictably (Stoll, 2025). Maintaining audience engagement requires visually appealing content with minimal excess information is the most effective way of gaining attention. Once the attention and interest of the consumer has been gained, next is to make your content desirable, for example through relatability, this could include sharing the meaning behind songs to get listener’s to feel more connected to the artist and the work, or building a consistent emotional aesthetic through social media posts and cover art. The action stage requires getting the audience to engage with the music, for example stream the EP, follow the artist, or buy a ticket to the next live show. The audience should have a clear idea of how to engage with the artist, using captions like “Pre-save the EP on Spotify” or “Link in bio” directs the audience and gives them an action. This should be easily accessible through links and clear directions on where to find them. Creating a sense of urgency through language like “Out now” “Pre-save now” pushes the audience to act. Overall, the AIDA model supports the campaign by structuring how awareness is built, engagement is maintained, and audience behaviour is converted into tangible outcomes such as streams.
Strategic Goals
The artist currently has 9,500 followers on TikTok and 945 followers on Instagram. With posts gaining an average of 1,000 views on each platform. One of the goals is to grow on social media, and improve engagement with the content posted. This would mean gaining 10,000 followers on TikTok, and 1,000 followers on Instagram.
Gaining 1,000 streams on Spotify and an average engagement time of 10% across platforms within 3 months of the release is a realistic goal. In order to achieve these goals, the artist will need to constantly post about the release on social media, with a focus on TikTok, as the artist has a better established profile on that platform. Posting behind-the-scenes content, like how the song was made, and vocal harmony breakdowns will help peak viewers interest in the tracks, and build a stronger sense of authenticity. Posting regularly will help boost engagement, and replying to comments on videos will be a good starting point for interacting with their audience. Alongside promotion for the EP, the artist should post covers of songs with a similar sound to their work, to attract attention from fans of artists who make similar music. TikTok should be used as the main tool for audiences to discover the artist, and Instagram as a way of maintaining the interest, with more professional content shared, in comparison to the quick, short form videos shared on TikTok.
As most of the artist’s engagement currently comes from followers, it is important for the artist to build an online connection with the followers prior to the release of the EP. This could be done by asking followers what covers they would like the artist to post.
When looking at the analytics from the artists Instagram and TikTok profiles, most of the engagement comes from female users aged 18-24. In order to appeal to the current followers, a combination of emotional branding, community- building, platform- specific content, and audience participation is needed. This demographic is highly active on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify, and tends to engage most strongly with artists who appear authentic, relatable, and visually distinctive. (Sparrow, 2024)
Market Analysis
With social media playing such an important part in today’s music industry, independent artists now have greater access to a wider audience without needing to on record labels for successful promotion. Although this is beneficial to smaller artists, it has also increased competition, meaning artists have to develop a strong brand identity in order to be memorable in such a huge market. Alternative-pop has become increasingly popular amongst Gen-Z audiences due to the success of artists like SZA. Yana, for example, is an independent artist who has utilised social media to gain a following. Following the release of her EP Exit Strategy in 2025, she has gained over half a million monthly listeners on Spotify. The marketing leading up to the release was mostly on TikTok, with lost of short form videos emphasising the lyrics of her songs, showing behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the tracks, and videos of her singing the songs live. For independent artists like Yana, social media offers several advantages such as access to direct communication with fans, low-cost marketing opportunities, and audience analytics and feedback. Her TikTok content reflects many of the strategies associated with successful independent artist promotion. Her Instagram account served as a way of emphasising key dates regarding the release of the EP. The consistent colour palette alongside the professional photography on her instagram posts help build a strong visual identity. The personal captions on the post help create a sense of authenticity, which engages her audience more. Yana’s visual branding reflects many key trends among successful alternative-pop artists. These include; cinematic visuals, nostalgic aesthetics and emotional storytelling. Having a strong personal aesthetic helps her compete within the indie and alternative-pop market by differentiating her from mainstream commercial artists.
Gantt Chart
Financial Planning
The artist currently has access to studio time and equipment for free through university, and does not need to pay to get the music mixed and mastered as they are good friends with many young producers. If the artist was to not use the university studios, it would cost around £11 an hour to record at Pirate Studios.
Recording one song takes an average of 2-3 hours, and the EP would consist of 6 songs. £198 would be spent on studio time in total. For the social media campaign, no money would need to be spent in order to carry it out. In order to use DistroKid to upload the project to Spotify, an account would have to be made with a cost of $24.99 for the yearly plan. As this is a small scale project by an independent artist, many of the usual financial costs are not unnecessary due to the artist utilising the resources they have already been provided with.
Promotional Materials
The promotional materials for this campaign are designed to increase engagement, create a string brand identity, and encourage streaming from the audience. Digital content is the biggest part of the campaign as social media has become one of the biggest ways that young people discover new music. TikTok will play the biggest part in the digital campaign, with lots of short-form teaser videos featuring songs from the EP will be used to share the music and gain interest. Posting videos with relatable captions with the lead single off the EP as the music behind will help with audience interaction as it will encourage people to comment on the videos. Behind-the-scenes videos of writing the songs, for example harmony breakdowns and showing how the songs were recorded will help create a more down-to-earth feeling between the artist and followers. Instagram Reels and Stories will include a heavy focus on visuals, with a continuous colour scheme, and more professional looking photos and posts compared to the TikTok videos. Across the university, the artist’s workplace, and local pubs posters will be put up advertising the music, with QR codes linking directly to Spotify and social media pages. The campaign will mostly be made up of consistent posting on TikTok, in order to boost the videos place in the algorithm, and to gain as much attention regarding the release of the EP as possible. Frequent posting on TikTok places the algorithm in the creators favour, which can be used as a tool for promotion.
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