Influencer marketing is a growing channel for brands looking to improve awareness, consumer sentiment, and consideration—by 2022, companies will invest more than $15 billion into influencer content. [1] [2]

Within the music industry, influencer marketing has shown considerable promise, allowing new artists to leverage the highly-engaged followings of established creators as well as benefit from the earned media (free publicity from organic shares and reposts, not paid media) brought in by viral videos where their songs are at the center.

For record labels and agencies, we identified four scenarios where effective campaigns can drive key results for artists.

Situation: Your Developing Artist Doesn't Have a Large Fanbase of Their Own—Yet

A key challenge of breaking a new artist is that people don’t yet know who they are and there isn’t existing advertising data to create audiences to target.

By partnering with influencers who overlap with your desired audience (or the audience of competitors), you can leverage highly-engaged communities on the recommendation of a trusted digital creator who incorporates your artist’s music into their content.

Situation: There Is a Limited Budget for Video Content Production

With music videos ranging from $2,500 for indie acts to $700,000 and more for top pop stars, influencer content provides a cost-effective alternative or supplement for artists who have limited video budgets but want superstar-level reach [3]. The numbers above don’t take marketing costs into account either.

For one developing hip-hop artist, a 10K budget allowed for the creation of 21 short videos from 8 creators and resulted in nearly 1.5M views and 220K comments and likes on Instagram.

In this scenario, influencer marketing streamlines content creation and distribution for smaller, developing artists with limited resources.

Situation: An Artist Wants to Tap into a New Regional Market

In order for an established act to increase awareness in new, location-based markets, many advertisers will increase advertising budgets in the desired regions. This is a good practice, but it can be improved by partnering with creators who have a direct link to local fanbases and understand their nuances.

Not only will you create campaigns more relevant to this specific regional group, but you will also expedite market penetration. This process of influence on social media was recently summed up by Twitter: “since conversation [...] is driven by influential people who are the first to talk about and share things, what matters to them eventually matters to everyone.” [4] In this scenario, the result of influencer marketing is an organic following in a new location.

Situation: An Artist Wants to Reinforce or Shift Brand Messaging

For an artist who wants to reinforce or shift their brand messaging to better align with a target audience, influencer marketing proves useful.

Here’s one case: a rising singer wanted to increase awareness for his latest single among rap and R&B audiences. To do this, we partnered with hip-hop dancers and twerkers to create choreography based on the song.

The results exceeded our expectations: on a budget of 10K, seven videos by seven creators received over 3.5M views, 1.8M views from reposted content, and 760K engagements. On one of the top-performing videos, 22% of comments either mentioned the song or included a positive sentiment about it.

This same approach can be used for an artist looking to improve awareness within a new community they do not have direct or historic access to—for example, a hip-hop artist within a skater community or a European pop act within the US beauty market. By partnering with established, trustworthy creators within these communities, artists can more easily improve and spread their message.