Promotion will be critical to selling your releases. There are a few different areas of promotion you'll need to cover - or at least think about covering, budget allowing:
- Radio - terrestrial radio, satellite radio, internet radio
- Print media
- Online media
- Clubs
- Advertising - posters, print ads, internet ads, and if you're super flash, TV ads
Your first decision is whether or not you will handle promotion yourself or if you will hire someone else to do the job. Note that most PR companies specialize in area of promotion. They may cover commercial and college radio, they may cover only print media, and so on. In other words, if you hire out the work, you will likely be looking at paying several separate companies. Although you will want to reserve the bulk of your budget for any release for promotional costs, upstart indie labels may not have enough money to hire outside PR for all parts of a promotional campaign.
To cope with your budget constraints, there are a few options:
Do all of your promotion in-house. If you have never done promotion work before, you will need to do some groundwork, like building up a press database.
Hire PR for certain parts of a campaign. If you think you can handle print and web promo yourself, but you aren't sure how to navigate radio, for instance, this is the way to go.
- Contacting the Press: The Dos
- Contracting the Press: The Don'ts
- Press Releases 101 - including press release templates and info about when to send out a press release
- Do I Need to Hire Music PR?
