The Quite Great Music Marketing team have promoted a variety of music videos over the years and you can easily see the impact it can have.  At the top end the work Quite Great did on the track Rockstar for Nickelback shows how important creative video content can be to enhance interest in a video and in turn help UK radio promotions and TV plugging departments. There was an array  of PR creative  elements that made it to the national newspaper gossip columns and this must have assisted the work carried out by national TV and radio promotions teams to gain more exposure.

However when you are a small band finding your way you often have to try and create a low cost or free music video even if you have to grab a friend or favour from someone with a video camera and a bit of equipment.  There are video companies offering services as little as  £1000 or £500 which is cheap so you have to make sure you have some creative thinking to make the budget worthwhile.  The aim is simple, to get some viral exposure, its not about making it to any of the terrestrial channels.

Quite simply you will rely on one of 3 things to get your music video promoted.  None of these are from guarantees and promises from web companies and cheap digital agencies claiming to give you thousands of ‘real’ YouTube hits as this is often just not realistic without real exposure.

First it goes without saying that it has to be a great song with a gutsy performance, the type that people will remember, one that will get passed around and shared across social networks.

Two with a combination of the first point, a bit of creative or quirky thinking that has something that is fitting with the song, there has been some awesome examples from the likes of work we carried out for Mooli and that fantastic track, Automatic.  You combine a buzzing performance with an ear tingling track, catchy storyline resulting in a bucket load of views from a variety of sites individually targeted to spread the word.

Finally we have the third point, good old controversy! If you want a quick hit or at least people shouting about you then go down the controversy route but this contains the most risk as you can easily lose control of the viral exposure and the type of conversation it generates across the web.  Negative PR is the risk here and as the old saying goes ‘any PR is good PR’ is not always true as this can come back to bite you so if you are going to take controversy risk then make sure you have a disaster recovery plan in place (or at least plan how you may turn the negatives into positives).

What ever you decide to do a music video offers a great opportunity for your band so use it wisely.