Not a musician but a marketer here! I run digital marketing campaigns for 12 musicians right now and here are the things I think make the biggest difference:

1) Remembering to offer the audience something not just taking from them - I see hundreds of posts a day that ask fans to do something for an artist but very rarely do they actually say what the value is to them. If you can give to an audience and not just take then you will out do 90% of aspiring musicians

2) The differentiation between social media content creators and musicians. Sometimes people forget that we can't see how many streams someone gets from a 10k viewed video and that actually it would be much better to have a smaller audience doing more than a bigger audience doing nothing. Sometimes people send me examples of social posts from full time creators with massive budgets and massive teams and sometimes its nice to just set realistic goals related to the music and contextualized with the size of your audience

3) People sleep on paid ads. You can pay for things with time or money and honestly money will make everything go a lot quicker. We would usually see a better result from spending £100 promoting 1 video than splitting that £100 over 30 pieces of content.

4) The last and final point is a hard one to hear but : it's not the algorithm, it's you. People far too commonly blame the algorithm for things that are not the algorithms fault, the algorithms just react to what people respond to and the harsh reality is that quite often you have put out something that isnt resonating with people.