After all of your hard work creating a brand new product, a new song, or anything else that you may want to announce to your audience, you’re likely going to be excited to get what you made out there as soon as possible. This is completely fine, as it shows that you’re proud of what you made. Unfortunately when you launch something you’re excited about too soon, without any notice to your following, that announcement can get drowned out in the social media of that day. By dropping your announcement without planning, you’re missing out on an opportunity to build demand for what you’re about to release.

A drip campaign can be simply defined as a slow rollout to an eventual announcement. Similar to a dripping faucet, each “drop” represents a new piece of information that can either generate excitement or inform your customer base/audience.

If you have a product to launch, you can first announce that you’re going to announce a new product. Then you can announce its product category, then you can start to announce different aspects to what the product actually is. Are you launching a new t-shirt? Announce the new shirt, then the next day announce your production collaborators, another day post a video of your production process, another day post a photo of the final products inside of a closed box, then post some of your inspirations for the shirt. Finally after teasing the new product, post photos of influencers wearing your new design, leading up to a post that contains the actual link to buy the product.

If you’re announcing a new song or music video, start by posting a teaser to the song. This teaser can simply be an image or graphic, where you say “new music soon” in the caption. If you’re releasing a song, then release the album art or song title next. If you’re announcing a music video, post a still from the video or a behind-the-scenes shot. Keep posting relevant media to the song or video, and after a week or so, go ahead and drop the final release. This will keep your audience engaged, and looking forward to what you’re about to put out there. If you’re releasing an album, follow this same strategy, but also pick a few singles from the album to post 15 second snippets of to generate that demand.

This tactic is used by almost all major artists and brands. Any major label release will have teams of marketers, graphic designers and video editors that are all working to generate hype around an upcoming release. Most brands make product announcements before that product goes on sale.

By breaking an announcement post up into several posts, you can stretch out the reach of that announcement over several days to even weeks or months. With every post there is an opportunity for new people to find what you’re going to announce, which means there’s more opportunity for people to want that product. If you’re lucky enough, or have an engaged enough following, a single customer may see several of these announcement posts, which increases the likelihood that they purchase your product or stream your art.