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Facebook Ads Strategy for Musicians

April 9, 2019

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Apr. 9, 2019

Creating ads on Facebook is a great way for musical artists to get people interested in their latest album, tour, merch, and other promotions.

Learn how to use the videos you already post online to craft an ad campaign to drive your off-platform goals and see real-life examples from three artists below.

Please make sure all of your content follows Facebook’s Terms of Service, which includes requirements regarding intellectual property.

1. Find the audience you want through video

Craft meaningful, fun, creative videos for Facebook in varying lengths and formats (we recommend videos that are 3+ minutes long) that align with your business goals down the line and that highlight the artist, close up, during the first 3 seconds.

Examples of videos to post:

Live performance footage to drive ticket sales
Performance footage to drive merch sales
Performance footage or stripped down performance footage to drive streams
Fun/creative video initiative to announce album release and drive streams (for example, a 15-second teaser with the artist speaking directly to the camera)
Fun/creative video that debuts merch to drive merch sales

2. Refine your audience

Use Facebook advertising tools to reach an audience of people who are most likely to be interested in what you want to promote.

From the people who watch your videos on Facebook and Instagram, you can create a Custom Audience. You can then create a Facebook ad to show to this qualified audience. Learn more about creating a custom audience from video views here.
You can also set up a Facebook Pixel for your website. This is a piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your Facebook advertising campaigns.
Use the Pixel to create a Custom Audience from your website that matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook. You can then create a Facebook ad to show to that audience.
Using the two groups above, you can then create a Lookalike Audience to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your established audiences.
We also recommended targeting a broad audience when creating an ad, such as the region and age range you’re targeting plus a broad interest layer based on musical genre.

3. Create an ad that will drive results

Think creatively when choosing imagery and videos for mobile ads. Even simple changes can make a big difference. See our tips for image and video optimization.
Test different versions of the ad creative by creating a split test. A split test lets you see which ad works best so that you can improve future campaigns.
a. For example, for wearable merchandise we often see that static image carousel ads (potentially of the artist wearing the merch) drive the strongest sales.
With campaign budget optimization, Facebook will distribute your budget across ad sets to get the best results for the campaign. Put all of your audience sets and different creative assets into a single campaign so that the campaign budget optimization can drive the best possible business outcome.
Measure the success of your ads based on increased video views, sales, awareness, or conversions.

4. IRL Examples

Tash Sultana

1:
About two months after her album Flow State was released, musician Tash Sultana posted a video of her performing a song off the album. The video post was boosted using Facebook ads to reach more of her existing and potential new fans.

Target audience:

Followers of similar artists, related festivals, and music outlets on Facebook
Followers of Tash Sultana

Results: Over 1 million video views

2:
The team then created a Facebook ad to promote related merchandise to their US audience. Based off the audience of the previous video, they created a few audience sets for the ad.

Target audience:

People who watched at least 3 seconds the video
A Lookalike Audience of those video viewers
Followers of Tash Sultana

Results: Ad exposure drove over 1,000% increase in conversion, resulting in nearly $11,000 in incremental sales that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

3:
Using the results from that campaign, the team used the same creative to create another Facebook ad to promote the same merchandise to a worldwide audience.

Target audience included all of the previous audience sets, plus:

People who had visited the website but didn’t buy anything (created using the Facebook Pixel)
A Lookalike Audience of people who did make purchases

Results: Ad exposure drove over 300% increase in sales, with an incremental return of 3x on ad spend.

Midland

The country music group posted a video of a live performance and built an ad campaign audience using those viewers.

After the video premiered, they created an ad campaign for new merchandise.

Target audience:

People who watched at least 3 seconds the video
A Lookalike Audience of those video viewers
Excluding people who had purchased something from Midland’s website over the previous month

Results: By posting their video to Facebook and then using video engagement custom audiences, Midland was able to drive meaningful merchandise sales to fans who engaged with their “Burn Out” video.