Hi, I’m Caitlin :)
I work in marketing for Australia’s independent creative scene – helping artists, promoters, venues and festivals get in front of audiences who genuinely care.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably somewhere on the spectrum of deeply overwhelmed about marketing.
Am I doing enough? Am I doing it well? I’ve spent all this money making the thing and forgot to leave anything to promote it.
Or you know me personally and you’re reading out of a sense of obligation. Hi Mum!
But it’s real, right? This is how everything starts – and that’s okay. I’ve been sitting with that feeling myself.
Right now, I’m sending this out with zero subscribers. The thing pushing me to hit send is knowing that my thoughts, skills, specialty and occasionally brilliant personality have value.
Getting here wasn’t magic or luck. I hired someone to do my brand. I’ve been working quietly for years, building the kind of projects I can now talk about. I have the privilege of carving out time in my workday for things like this. It’s not bravery or courage – just sheer will (and the obligation, as a marketer, to practise my skills on myself).
A lot of the problems I see artists and organisations face – struggling to grow beyond their existing audience, getting more YouTube views, converting Instagram followers, selling tickets – are symptoms of the same thing: lack of strategy (and maybe knowledge of the tools to help you).
Throwing more posts into the void isn’t the answer. Paid advertising can get you in front of new people, but without a strategy it’s like paying to put flyers under the windscreen wipers of parked cars in a suburb you’ve never been to.
The fix starts with thinking about your marketing as a whole – the system you’re building, not just the posts you’re making. Who are you talking to? How will they hear from you again? How are you moving them from awareness to action?
It’s not about doing everything. It’s about doing the right things in the right order, with enough consistency for them to work. That’s when you start building something bigger than your next single or your next show – and it’s the same thinking that applies to things like booking tours or choosing the right markets to play. (More on that soon.)
So if you’re lying awake at night wondering why the numbers aren’t moving – you’re not broken, you’re not failing – you probably just need a plan.
For now, humour me – message me and tell me the one thing about marketing that’s currently keeping you up at night. I might answer it in the next issue.
Yours in marketing my own marketing,
Caitlin xx