What’s the Best Smart Link Tool for Promoting Your Music Effectively?
A Smart Link is essential to the success of your music, it is also known as landing or pivot page. The purpose of Smart Link is to point a user to a single web page that contains links to all the different places people can buy or stream to your new release. Most Smart Link sites act like landing pages where you’re also able to place pixels and tags to collect data on all traffic you drive to that page whether it be organically from links in your bio or through digital advertisements. You could also leave the link in the description of your music video so viewers can follow up on what platforms they can stream or download it. But how do you decide what is the best smart link tool? Keep reading to find out.
This is a great platform some the biggest in the music marketing industries use like Universal Music Group, Warner Music, and Sony Music. However, a con is LinkFire is mostly catered for companies, not for independent artists. The essential features that are required for your success are only available for higher-priced plans. You can get more out of the free plans from the other tools. Some of the dope features that come with the free plan are listed below.
- You can add/remove the service destinations.
- You can select a song that visitors can sample on the landing page. You can also choose a YouTube video, but it doesn’t show as an embedded video. If you click on the cover art, it will pop up a video with the video playing. It doesn’t look good though because when I tried it, the cover art was zoomed in on one corner.
- Can’t include additional links to your social media or website.
- Adding a Facebook Pixel for retargeting is reserved for only premium members, starting at $150/month. Google Analytics tracking is only available in higher paid plans.
This platform off the bat reels you in because it offers Smart Link as soon as you sign up for their account and it’s very simple to create because the layout is so clean and organized. It is a very accessible platform for your music. For example, even if you don’t have a video for your song y ou can choose to play a short snippet of one of your songs. The services to play the song preview are YouTube, SoundCloud, Deezer and Spotify. Lastly, it allows you to collect a lot of data from your followers including, landing page views, the number of unique visitors, click-throughs to a music platform, the number of clicks each listed service gets, referrers, top countries, and top cities. So, I definitely think ToneDen is one of the better tools to take advantage of and they also include a lot in the free plan.
- Manually select which digital platforms to include. There’s even an option you can select that will automatically sort the music platforms based on how many times it has been clicked on. This makes sure that the most popular option is on the top of the list.
- Change your landing page image (where your cover art is) and add a page background.
- Include your social media and website links.
- Embed a video on the top of the landing page.
What makes this platform unique is that it only displays music platform options depending on what country the person is viewing from.It also allows your fans to choose which playlist to add your song before it is even released. The landing page also includes a ‘follow’ button for Spotify. Lastly, you can also add an additional button for your playlist if you’re looking for more playlist follows, so it gives more artists exposure.However, some cons about the platform include it’s very overwhelming visuals, it is not the clearest when used from a computer. Also, unlike other platforms it doesn’t allow you to collect data from your followers like emails and usernames. Overall this platform is what you make out of it, listed below are some additional features that are included in the free plan.
- Include all your social media and website links.
- Add your logo and change the colors of your page to match your branding.
- Add/remove/reorder the music platforms/retailers.
- Select a song to preview or embed a YouTube video instead.
This platform is finally making its comeback after being rebooted for a while. In my opinion their website isn’t the most appealing, because it doesn’t look like a music site, it seems to be all over the place. However, the main page has the online application so, in that aspect it is easy to use. It also includes a lot in its free plan. Smart links, landing pages. Automatic audience creations, remarketing audience sharing, interactive ad builders, emails ads, etc. All In all, I feel like this platform still has a long way to go to reach its fullest potential, so it wouldn’t be my first pick.
Odesli
You might previously know this platform as SongLink, this is best used if you are looking for something quick and easy to use. For the most part, It is free, you can create your smart link, but you have to sign up for an account to do basic customization. If you upgrade to their premium plan for $1.99 a month, you get extra features like a custom smart link URL and add a Google Global Site Tag. Which is considered to be a reasonable price. However, if the visuals and layout of an app are an important element for you this may not be the tool for you. To take advantage of any of the features you do have to pay that small fee.
Feature.Fm — OUR RECOMMENDATION
What is so great about Feature.Fm is it’s simple with its layout and most of its exclusive features are free. When you initially login you can select ‘Create a Pre-Save Link’ from the welcome screen. There is also an option where you can send followers to a specific URL after they pre-save. If you’re offering an exclusive download or access to a secret video, this would be a good place to do it. I believe Feature.Fm comes with the entire package and is more free that’s why I think it’s the most effective platform. Some additional features are listed below.
Free plan
- Include all your social media and website links.
- Add your logo and change the colors of your page to match your branding.
- Add/remove/reorder the music platforms/retailers.
- Select a song to preview or embed a YouTube video instead.
- Advanced retargeting settings (adding Facebook or Google Pixels) are only available for paid plans.
- Customize the smartURL link. It’s in the ‘Organize’ section when you’re creating the pivot page, which can be confusing because it says “Enterprise Only” next to it. It’s referring to creating folders, but typing in your own link name is free
Originally published at https://www.l1neupdigital.com on September 4, 2020.
