Content, Community and Conversations: the 3 pillars of Organic promotion.

(A case study of Aiseh’s Tired).

In a world of content overload across industries, the work of standing out has become more difficult. In the music industry, even the big guys are struggling to create sounds that cuts across and is widely accepted for a long time because of how saturated the space is currently.

This makes the work of artistes coming from the ground up with no backing or financial support twice as hard. Because, asides from the taxing job of creating sounds that people want to hear, there’s the bigger job of pushing it to them with little or zero budget.

This article is centered on using creative ways to push a song or a brand leveraging content, community and conversations using Aiseh’s ‘Tired' as a case study.

For every artiste out there operating on zero budget (no paid push, all organic), what you’re about to read is a proven strategy to drive engagement to your song and achieve your set out objective, be it streams or awareness.

I’ve seen and made this strategy work, the most recent being a project that I was part of the marketing team — The Party Boy EP that generated 1.3m impressions on Twitter alone and 24k streams under one week of release following this strategy.

Let’s dive right into it!

Sorry, don’t dive yet!

Before we get into the crux of the gist, I’ll like to emphasize on the importance of wetting the ground for yourself as an artiste by doing 3 things:

1. Create a brand around yourself: your brand is what comes to people’s mind when they think of you. Simply put, people’s perception of you. Branding is how you shape that perception in their minds. Steadily communicating who you are, what you do, your purpose, beliefs across all touch points is called branding. Have a voice, know your target audience and communicate this always.
2. Set an objective for your project: what do you want to achieve with this project? Is it awareness? Do you need more people to know about you? Do you want streams? Do you want to connect with your audience on a deep level? You sure want to have real fans that won’t just stream and go. Whatever your goal or objective is, set it and work towards it as you leverage this strategy I’m going to share soon. Remember to make your goal SMART. The best way to do this is to make sure it’s easy to say if you hit your goal or not at the end of the campaign.

Stream tired here: https://linktr.ee/Talented_Aiseh

Branding and Objective

Omosefe Joseph Aisosa aka Aiseh is a music artiste based in Benin city, Edo state. He has released several songs to his name with a clear cut brand that’s centered on dropping relatable, Godly songs for people from all works of life.

He has other projects to his name like his first mixtape titled Growing and Zoneout sessions in 2017, his EP during the pandemic 4 EP, and his Kanye’s cover, Grinding. Click the links for your listening pleasure.

His most recent work 'Tired' will be our case study for this article, I’ll walk you through how he is using the 3C’s strategy in pushing his song organically.

On ‘Tired’, Aiseh clearly set out to achieve 3 things:

• Virality: to get more reach.
• Streams: to gain more streams.
• Connection: to gain more fans.

We’ll see how he’s working to achieve these 3 in a bit. Keep reading.

Content, Community and Conversations (The 3C’s of organic push)

Content.

Tired is that one song you go to after a hectic day. A song that comes on the radio and you want to hear it to the end, it’s soothing. A respite for everyone going through it with a simple message — if you’re tired, Rest. Don’t quit.

Aiseh thoughtfully crafted this piece with the help of Kylo his producer and Peecliff who mixed and mastered it with the aim of reaching out to people who just want to chill and vibe without wanting any external stress.

So, when it comes to the question of whether the song is a good one, he already answered that. That’s the first thing, make your song worth listening to with good sound and great production. By doing this, you already set yourself up for easy promotion.

Another point to look at in content is your designs (artwork and promo designs).

Fun fact: Aiseh created the designs. An all round creative.

But, incase you can’t design to save your life, get a designer, you can’t do without one or learn basic design on canva. Aiseh already built anticipation with the dope cover art. It was dope on every side, pun intended.

He didn’t stop there, he went ahead to create other mad designs for promotional content. This is very important as you don’t just want to release a song and go, you need to keep dropping promotional contents that doesn’t feel like promotion drip by drip.

Community

I can’t stress this enough. For an artiste looking to run on zero budget or organic push, you need community. Not just a community, an active one that knows you, a community you engage with.

They’re like your foot soldiers to help you spread the word. They could be your group of friends, church people, network or an organized group. But, they f*ck with you and will do stuff for you.

You get people to engage with your work by engaging with theirs, don’t be in a group and only engage when you need help, it doesn’t work that way. It follows the law of reciprocity.

For Aiseh, he’s well known on Tribe of Judah as Ice Prince’s greatest fan and he engages with members a lot, so when it was time to drop his song, he created the anticipation on the group and everybody stood up for him waiting the date of release. And because the song was good, it was widely accepted on the group.

Another thing to note here is community listening. Listen for feedbacks from your people, filter the advice, take what you want via thorough decision and let them know when you implemented their advice, it makes them feel loved and part of your journey.

In Aiseh’s case, he first released Tired on Audiomack only, but with community request, he expanded his DSP listing to cover other areas.

Building a network cannot be overemphasized too, Tired got airplays on radio due to the connections he built on Twitter. Guys, step out and make friends. Network! I dey tell you now.

Conversation

This is what sustains your songs on cha(r)ts. What you do before the song drops is called building anticipation, wetting the ground and preparing the minds of listeners. But, after a song drops, you should drive conversations to sustain the song.

This works for blaqbonez and we’re seeing it work for Aiseh, it’s over a week now and his song is still doing good, talk about Top of mind awareness.

How do you drive conversations you may ask.

It comes with planning with respect to your objective and a touch of creativity.

Aiseh has strategically employed the use of user generated content (UGC) to push the song. We’ve seen listeners sharing videos where they’re vibing to the song. We’ve also seen the use of comedy skits and humor to push the song. There’s also story sharing where listeners share their Tired stories and lastly, the forthcoming IG Live tagged 'a safe space for tired people’ where he plans to host listeners to a session of sharing stories and real talk. Please, save the date and tune in as you’ll be hearing all these from the Aiseh’s mouth.

The sweetest part is that all these doesn’t feel like promotion or marketing at all. It feels so natural because it ties to a general pain point and also addresses an important message of not quitting especially in a world filled with stressors.

I’ll love to see what Aiseh’s results at the end of his campaign. I hope he really tracks these efforts' performance. One way to do this is to use hashtags. Say #TiredbyAiseh, #Tired and #Aiseh. This way, he can measure social impressions, engagements and streams and tie it to his goals of Virality, Streams and Connection.

You as an artiste can take a cue from this and build your zero budget promotion strategy for positive results.

Stream Tired by Aiseh here: https://linktr.ee/Talented_Aiseh