With 120,000 tracks published to streaming services every day, the work music marketing and promotion teams do to help their artists stand out is more vital than ever.
So to help you do more with the time and resources you have, we’re sharing 7 easy-to-implement time-management strategies for record label marketing and promotion teams.
1. Streamline your communications
Ever wonder how much time gets wasted due to poor communication?
Grammarly did, and what they found should concern any business leader… On average, poor communication costs every one of us 7.47 hours a week. Almost an entire day each week!
Equally concerning? Many of the tools created to help us could be hindering us.
Emails, calls, texts, and Slacks create a disjointed flow of information. Key details get lost in lengthy threads or miscommunicated in rushed messages. People forget what they talked about in meetings. The list goes on.
To prevent this, consider establishing dedicated Slack channels for specific projects (and setting ground rules for how they should be used), standardizing status updates, and sharing meeting summaries. (There are tons of AI tools that can transcribe and summarize meetings for you.)
Tools like Grammarly can also help ensure that the email or document you’re sending is clear and succinct.
Additionally, collaborative platforms can be a game-changer, allowing you to store all of your data in one place so nothing gets lost.
Artist Growth Workspace, for example, is an industry-specific events and project management platform that lets users:
- Manage shared artist and roster calendars
- Request and approve promo requests
- Store notes, contracts, and other critical information
- Request tickets, passes, and guest list access
- Upload receipts to a shared financial ledger
- Associate important contacts with events, such as streaming and radio
You can also access it while offline, ensuring that everyone is aligned around a single source of truth, whether or not they have an internet connection at the moment.
2. Rethink meetings
How many meetings have you attended that, as the saying goes, could have been an email?
If you said half, then you guessed correctly. Of the 31 hours on average that we spend in meetings each month, employees report feeling that half of that time was wasted.
Sure, there will always be times when a meeting or call is needed. But much of the time they’re just not necessary.
So what can you do?
For one, be selective about what optional meetings you attend. Ask yourself: Will anything relevant to my job be covered, or am I going just to be seen?
Or if you’re the one scheduling the call, consider whether it might be more effective conducted asynchronously. That is, via written updates.
And if a meeting is necessary? Be sure to share an agenda in advance. That way everyone has the opportunity to come prepared.
3. Centralize your artists’ events and data
Can you tell, at a glance, where your artists will be and what they’re doing? What about their data? Is it all in one place?
If not, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities for your artists. Not to mention, juggling multiple calendars, documents, and databases is a giant time suck and can lead to mistakes.
With dedicated record label management software, your entire team can access all of your artists’ activity, data, events, finances, and more in a single, permission-based system. (Meaning you control who can access and edit what information.)
Planning a radio campaign to coincide with an upcoming album release or tour? Or maybe you’re looking for opportunities to cross-promote artists with similar fan demographics?
Workspace can help you keep track of it all. You can even use it to request guest passes to your artists’ events with built-in workflows you won’t find in generic project management tools.
Read more: 10 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Artist Management Software
4. Manage distractions
Feel like you’re constantly being interrupted? According to a 2022 study by Next Work Innovation, you are! About 15 times an hour, in fact.
It's a recipe for reduced productivity, increased mistakes, and elevated stress.
You're not powerless, though! While you’ll never be able to prevent every interruption, you can rein them in by:
- Checking your email only at set times each day
- Evaluating whether you need to be in chat groups or email distribution lists
- Blocking out time for specific tasks (more on that in a moment)
- Resisting the temptation to reply to messages and emails right away
- Setting time limits on apps you don’t use for work
- Muting non-essential notifications
You may also want to try using a timer or productivity app.
One time management strategy, the Pomodoro technique, involves alternating 25-minute work sessions and five-minute breaks with longer breaks at certain intervals. However, there are many different time-based productivity strategies that can help maintain focus. Try a few to see what works for you.
5. Batch similar tasks
We mentioned blocking out time for specific tasks, but it’s worth taking a closer look at how batching similar tasks can increase your productivity and … happiness?
That's right, people who get more done are 52% more likely to report feeling like they had a good day at work.
By getting in the habit of lumping together similar tasks — responding to emails, conducting outreach, writing online ads, analyzing streaming data, etc. — even for short periods of time, you’ll find it easier to avoid what researchers call “goal switching.”
Basically, goal switching is when you jump from one task to another before completing the first, and it can cost a person up to 40% of their potential efficiency. In an eight-hour day, that’s just over three hours!
6. Templatize workflows and processes
Streamlining operations through templatization is another strategy that lends itself well to the marketing and promotion functions of a label.
For example, creating ready-made templates for press releases, pitch and marketing emails, and social media posts allows quick customization without the need to start over every time.
Just be careful to avoid overusing templates. For this reason, you should consider building a library of templates.
Likewise, applying standardized checklists and project plans to marketing and promotional activities ensures that all necessary steps are taken while minimizing time spent building project plans.
This is also an area where an industry-specific management tool like AG Workspace helps.
Workspace features built-in workflows for requesting and managing guest passes and tickets, as well as a dedicated promotions request workflow. Plus, you can create your own custom event schedule templates for streamlining the management and communication of activities and other events.
7. Look for new ways to leverage data
Data is crucial for every record label’s marketing and promotion departments.
While there’s certainly no shortage of tools for tracking and measuring marketing spend, ad efficacy, streaming data, and the like, historical performance and event data often gets overlooked.
By merging data from an artist’s past performances with that of a streaming and social data aggregator like Chartmetric, you might identify new opportunities or uncover unique insights about past campaigns.
Say one of your artists saw a significant uptick in streams in Detroit back in January 2023 but you’re not sure why. By filtering that artist’s past events in AG Workspace, you might find that the spike coincided with a certain in-studio performance and — what’s more — it had a outsized impact compared to similar events in other cities. From there, you could then develop and test a hypothesis about why that particular event yielded greater engagement with an artist’s music.
That’s just one example of how looking at data in new ways can yield powerful insights about prospective super fans.
It’s also essential that you continually evaluate data to refine your message and identify winning formulas. And AI can help. Due to its ability to identify patterns and other insights that us humans miss, AI tools like ChatGPT can be immensely valuable when it comes to analyzing your data. You’ll even find countless sample prompts to help you ask the right questions.
Just keep in mind that your organization may have rules regarding unvetted web tools. If in doubt, consult your organization’s policies.
Do more with Artist Growth Workspace
By implementing these 7 time-management tips, record label marketing and promotion teams can boost their efficiency, freeing up more time for creative and strategic tasks.
Try Workspace free to experience firsthand the difference an event and project management platform specially designed for the music industry makes for your organization.
