A No-Nonsense Guide To Marketing Your Indie Project

📚 Production Solutions: A Proven Strategy to Market your Indie Project on a Shoestring Budget.

Are you selling tickets to your cabaret show or trying to increase subscribers to your podcast? Do you want more views of your web series or your YouTube page? Maybe you’re planning a screening of your new documentary or the local premiere of a musical you’ve been developing for a decade. 

If you need an audience, then you need marketing!

The good news is that you’ll be able to add “Marketing Maven” to your resume before long. 

The bad news is that marketing an indie project is so much harder than it sounds, especially for solopreneurs. And the hard truth is that audiences won’t appear unless they know about your work and find it worthy of their investment, whether that’s time or money or both.

The big boys on Broadway and at Netflix have marketing departments with budgets that can support everything from social media campaigns and Google ads to billboards in Times Square and 30-second spots on Hulu.

Indie projects tend to have marketing budgets that resemble the price of a new pair of shoes. Maybe they’re a nice pair of shoes, but still...

So how do you market your beloved indie project on a shoestring? You make sure you have the F.A.C.T.S.! And here they are:

FOCUS 

When it comes to marketing, you can’t do it all. There are not enough hours in the day for an indie creator to post effectively on every digital platform, maintain your website, hustle for publicity, hand out postcards, sustain your network and pay attention to the creative project you’re marketing. 

You and your marketing strategy need to be focused in order to be effective. And yes, you should have a marketing strategy! Here is one that I’ve used myself and seen work for other indie projects (after your initial planning and set-up, it requires about 10 hours per week to maintain):