My top 7 tips to successful Facebook ads for musicians. How to effectively promote your music, grow your fan base and make more sales with killer Facebook campaigns!
In addition to following the proven music marketing strategies in the article linked above, you’ll also want to explore paid options to effectively promote your music, videos and other related content.
I’m a HUGE fan of Facebook ads. Why?
Well, first off you have direct access to nearly 1.5 billion active users that you can promote to (yes, that’s billion with a “B”) . It’s also one of the only current platforms that you can get such super niche targeting at such a low cost.
In other words, with a relatively small budget and a little know-how, you can easily set up an effective Facebook campaign to help accelerate and expand your reach.
However, there are a few things you’ll want to know first before you start spending a bunch of money on ads. Maybe you’ve even posted Facebook ads in the past, but haven’t yet seen any real results.
Well, I wouldn’t rule them out just yet. First, let me share my seven best Facebook ads for musicians tips with you to help get you off on the right foot 🙂
Facebook Ads for Musicians
1. There’s MUCH more to Facebook Ads than the “Boost Post” button
The boost post button you see in the bottom right-hand corner of every Facebook fan page post you make is simply Facebook’s “EASY” button.
Keep in mind, using this option can potentially work for you – it’s a very simple and straight forward way for you to increase the reach of your particular post.
Side note: You may already know that over the years, as the algorithms have changed, Facebook has continued to limit the organic reach of your posts. This is somewhat to encourage the use of their ads product – however, you can still see great organic results if your existing audience is actually engaging with your posts – i.e. commenting, liking and sharing. This lets Facebook know that your other followers will most likely enjoy it as well, and they’ll help populate it to their feeds without you necessarily having to sponsor it.
When you click “Boost Post”, you have a few basic options to choose the amount of money you want to spend, how long you want to promote the post and the option to show it to your existing fans, and even their friends. And this might sound okay for starters, and it very well may give you some initial results. However, depending on what you’re promoting specifically, there’s a lot of your target audience that you might be missing out on if you’re not exploring the advanced features in the ads manager.
2. Know Your Niche!
To get the absolute best results with Facebook ads and make sure you’re not throwing a bunch of money away, you’ve got to know your target audience. Know the specific people you’re trying to reach with your posts. When you hone in on a super niche audience, you’ll be magnitudes more likely to find the people who actually want to hear your music and further connect with you.
A big time mistake that I see many up and coming musicians make when running Facebook ads is that they try to target everyone, or at least a much larger audience than they should be.
For example: Let’s say you’re a Hip Hop artist who primarily raps to East Coast beats. Instead of trying to target anyone who’s a fan of Hip Hop music as a very general, umbrella genre – why not set up your targeting for very niche terms related to underground or New York style rap music? You may even try targeting the fan bases of East Coast artists already established in the game. If this is setup and executed properly, your budget can really go a long way to reach your potential fans!
So how do you do this exactly?
3. Create Custom Facebook Audiences
You can pick the specific people you want to reach with your ads by setting up custom Facebook audiences in the ads manager. Depending on what you’re promoting, you may want to set up an ad that only targets a certain subset of your existing fans, or setup a custom audience based on interests like I eluded to in tip #2.
Two ways that I personally use custom audiences that work extremely well for me!
- Import your existing Email List – Assuming that you’re already building your list through an email manager like Aweber or Mailchimp, it’s very easy to export all your contacts and import those into a new custom audience in the ads manager. Facebook will then associate the subset of those emails that have active Facebook accounts and allow you to show targeted ads to them. This is big!
- Recent website visitors – You can also couple your email list audience with your recent blog and website visitors. It’s very easy for you to install the tracking pixel Facebook provides on your entire site, or even select pages you specify by keyword targeting to collect all of your traffic into a new audience. Fans, or potential fans who have already been to your site at least once will most definitely people you want to follow up with. Why not easily set that up with just a few simple clicks in the Facebook ads manager? Don’t sleep on this one! This is by far my most used custom audience.
4. Have a SPECIFIC Purpose for Each Ad
Focus on what your main objective is, what you’re actually trying to achieve with each particular ad. To get the best results from each ad, I’d recommend limiting each post to one specific action.
For example: If you’re trying to gain more “likes” on your Facebook fan page, and grow your existing followers, you would want to set up a single ad that has that specific objective. You wouldn’t want to ask people to like your page, opt in to your list and buy your music all in the same post. You’d be better off setting up three separate campaigns, so that you can better track the specific actions taken for each.
5. Promote MORE Than Just an Offer
I’ve seen many up and coming musicians who will only allocate an ad budget when they’re running a special promotional sale (i.e. Buy 1 Get 1 Free, Album Pre-launch for 50% off, etc). Personally when I do run special offers or sales, I make sure my ad is setup for a small subset of my existing fan base – primarily my email list, website visitors and most definitely fans who have already spent money with me in the past – my true supporters!
Facebook ads should be used for much more than just you selling something.
But one of the most important things with any kind of marketing is testing, testing, testing. So if you haven’t seen the initial results with your ads, just know that this stuff does work if it’s applied properly and people actually like your music, videos and content – and actually engage with it.
6. Compelling Images
When creating an image ad, make sure your pictures are nice, professional, catchy and speak to your niche.
Side note: Facebook currently limits your ad images to only display up to 20% text. I’ve recently been experimenting with adding my post’s headline to the lower third of the image, and have seen some great results. You may even want to set up image split testing when creating your ad and test out what’s working best for you.
Remember that many people are only on Facebook for short amounts of time to get caught up on any news, gossip or anything else that quickly catches their attention while scrolling through their feed. So if your ad is shown to them, make sure it cuts through all the clutter – that it’s compelling, easily understood and enticing to click.
7. Develop a Budget (start small and scale up)
Don’t be afraid to invest, but also know that you can (and should) start with a very small daily budget. Test some things out over a considerable amount of time, and as certain ads start to perform well for you, go ahead and slowly start allocating more budget per day to those. Again… testing, testing, testing!
Facebook Ads for Musicians
Afterthoughts
You can continue to use Facebook as a free platform, and if you continue to post truly engaging stuff – that your following continues to like, comment and share – you can definitely extend your organic reach and do okay without spending a dime. However, there’s a huge benefit to using Facebook ads to scale your impressions, build deeper connections with existing fans, building new ones, as well as expedite the growth of your music career and generate more income.
Let’s Connect!
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About the Author
Travis Cole has been operating TCustomz Productionz, LLC full-time since 2011 and hopes for it to serve as a source to help many music artists, producers and entrepreneurs worldwide achieve their dreams of success.
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