How do you know that you are getting closer to your goals?
Well, first you have to have goals.
I won’t dive too deep into goal setting, but if you are looking to learn a new technique, I recommend checking out ‘SMARTER Goals’.
The SMARTER Goals framework comes from our Homie and brilliant music entrepreneur, Simon Tam. His approach stems from the very popular ‘S.M.A.R.T. Goals’ technique, but then he adds two more letters to the acronym like this:
S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Attainable
R - Relevant (to your long term vision)
T - Timely or Time Bound
E - Everyone (in your network)
R - Revisit (often)
There are two big takeaways here:
Once you have created your SMART goal, you have to take another step to leverage everyone in your network.
The last step is to make sure you are revisiting your goals often (at least once a week).
For a deeper understanding of the SMARTER Goals technique, visit this page.
Now that we understand goal setting, let’s dive back into measuring milestones and explore the timely or ‘Time Bound’ part of your goals. What are the time frames that you should be looking at to create milestones?
Start by zooming all the way out.
In other words, what is the longest term vision that you have for your life and career?
Think on a timeline of at least 10 years for the first part of the exercise. Write that vision down, using the SMARTER Goals framework. Remember, how are you going to leverage everyone in your network? And set a weekly reminder to revisit that long term vision.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s use an example that someone’s long term goal is to have at least a million fans actively listening to their music… to make it even more specific, the goal could be one million Spotify followers in 10 years. That’s a clear goal that is SMART.
The next step is to break down that long term vision into milestones. For this exercise, the milestones could represent 10x growth and be:
1,000 followers
10,000 followers
100,000 followers
1,000,000 followers
Think through the difficulty of achieving each of the milestones above.
The first thousand might be really tough for some, but the step from 100,000 to 1M means that you have to reach 900,000 new fans!
After you have broken down your vision into big milestones, figure out where you are right now in relation to your next one.
Keep breaking it down until you have a clear goal for the next 12 - 18 months.
Sticking with our example, if you currently have 1,000 followers and you want to get to 10,000 followers within 2 years, you could break it down like this:
Triple your current audience size in one year (taking it from 1K to 3K), then triple that again (3K to 9K). That gets you pretty close to 10x growth in 2 years.
Keeping those numbers in mind, let’s say you currently have 1,000 followers and your new SMART goal is to grow to over 3,000 in one year. So you need to gain 2,000 new fans in 12 months. To keep the math simple, that means you should be achieving this monthly milestone:
Get an average of 150-200 new fans each month for the next year.
WOW, doesn’t that sound much more approachable and actionable than just hoping to get to a million fans one day?
Because we started with SMART goals, our milestones are easily measurable so that we can know whether or not we are on track to achieve them.
Now comes the fun part… initiatives!
Once you have a smaller approachable goal, you have to decide on your strategy to achieve it. A strategy is driven by initiatives, which are basically ideas, experiments, and actions that you perform to attain your goal.
If your goal is to get 200 new fans per month, how will you do that? Here are a few initiatives that you might consider:
Play shows and ask the crowd to pull out their phones and follow
Release more music (this can even be stripped down or alt versions, re-releases, etc.)
Collaborate as a featured artist on other people’s releases
Post more content on social media that drives traffic to your Spotify account
Use digital marketing and social media ads
Use playlisting services (but be careful because a lot of them are bots)
Find influencers that will share your music and talk about you.
Use organic/guerrilla marketing tactics like searching hashtags to identify superfans. For more info on this strategy see Gary Vee’s Instagram Strategy to grow your brand.
Once you have all of your potential initiatives listed out, be sure to rank them according to these parameters:
The difficulty or amount of time that each one takes
The monetary cost involved in each initiative
The potential impact that each one might have in getting you to your goal
For instance, if you are considering using playlisting services, maybe you know an easy connection that is fairly inexpensive, but it mostly brings passive listeners, NOT followers and fans. So even though it seems appealing, it may not be a good strategy for this particular goal.
That is why you have to revisit often and measure what is working!
In reality, you will probably use most, if not all of the initiatives above. But you must revisit them and measure them often to see what is actually working the best. Change your strategy and mix of initiatives to prioritize the ones that are most effective and efficient for you.
And don’t forget… LEVERAGE EVERYONE IN YOUR NETWORK!!!
The importance of your network cannot be overstated… especially in the music industry. This is such a crucial step in goal setting that so many overlook. Once you have your initiatives figured out, go through each one of them and brainstorm on how you can leverage everyone you know to strengthen your strategy and results.
You must be constantly growing your network with others that are on similar or complementary paths. That’s one of the main reasons we created HOME, to surround you with people who are high achievers that you can learn from and lean on during difficult times.
Milestones won’t always be easy to achieve, but if you learn to be goal oriented, break down bigger goals into smaller ones, measure your milestones, and constantly adjust your strategy to leverage your strengths, you will be well on your way to accomplishing your life’s vision.
When you reach those milestones, make sure that you take a moment to celebrate your achievements! For more thoughts on that, check out my blog post called Celebrate Your Wins.