Social media is a powerful channel for advertising your business venture.
By 2025, experts expect the number of social media users to explode to 4.41 billion.
Many businesses are tapping into this massive social media reach to connect with potential customers, promote their services and grow their businesses. Among all the social media advertising platforms, Facebook has proven to be very lucrative. Many musicians are already killing it via Facebook Ads, as it's a very cheap and yet effective tool for getting yourself known to the world.
This article will explain the ins and outs of advertising own music on Facebook.
Why Facebook Ads To Promote Your Music?
The benefits of using Facebook Ads are generally the same regardless of the profession, niche, or industry. Facebook ads' most potent feature is targeting, which empowers you to reach your target audience with shocking precision.
What Are The Benefits?
There are many benefits of using Facebook Ads to promote a music business, including:
With all these benefits, no wonder Facebook ads for musicians are so popular. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.
The Initial Steps Of Starting A Marketing Campaign
In this section, we will cover everything they have to do to start a Facebook marketing campaign. It all starts with a business Facebook page. Without one, you can’t run an ad campaign.
Haven’t set up a Facebook Business account yet?
No worries.
Here’s an article that’ll give you step-by-step guidance on how to do it. With your Facebook page ready, move to the next step.
Learn How The Ad Manager Works
To create result-getting Facebook ads for musicians, you must understand how the Facebook Ads Manager works.
Your Facebook ad revolves around three pivots: a campaign, ad set, and ad. These three tabs form your ad campaign structure. Understanding how they work will help you produce aligned ads to reach your target people.
Let’s look at each.
Campaigns
Think of a campaign as the substructure of your Facebook ad. Here, you choose your advertising objectives, such as driving traffic to your website or landing page, boosting ticket sales, getting more likes on your Facebook page, or gig bookings.
Ad Sets
With your goal as the backdrop, you move on to ad sets. The ad set tab shows you how to run your ad. Here, you use Facebook targeting options to decide your audience based on location, gender, age, interests, and more in the detailed targeting feature. Plus, you set a budget and set a schedule. Finally, you decide where your Facebook ads will appear.
You pick an audience based on location, interests, gender, and more. At the ad set stage, you also set your budget and schedule. Lastly, pick the best ad placements to give your Facebook ad campaigns the best chance of success.
Ad
The ad is the finished commercial your potential customers will see. Using the ad tab, you pick the type of ad creative you will use to reach new fans and people who might attend your shows. The ad formats you can use include images, videos, carousels, collections, slideshows, and more.
The tabs tie into each other. A campaign contains ad sets, and an ad set contains a certain number of ads, as shown by the image below.
You now know the structure of Facebook ads, it’s time to determine your aim.
Settle On Your Promotional Objectives
Before you launch your first ad, determine your campaign objective.
What do you want to achieve for your music career with the campaign? The campaign goal is what you want people to do after seeing your ad. The objectives fit into the stages of the sales funnel: top (awareness), middle (consideration), and bottom (conversion). Let’s unpack each of the Facebook ad campaign objectives:
Awareness
These are objectives that generate interest in your service. Outside of your loyal fans, nobody knows who you are. To get more fans into your circle of the diehard fan base, you must make more people aware of your band’s existence. In the awareness objectives section, you must introduce people to your music.
Liam Payne drove awareness of his new music via Facebook advertising.
The ad simply announces the arrival of a new single.
What made it engaging is the ad type. They really stacked it up through mesmerizing augmented reality ads. See the campaign numbers below.
A 5.2-point increase in brand awareness and a 19-point increase in ad recall is certainly a good return for a brand awareness campaign.
Consideration
Consideration objectives take the conversation deeper. Now that people know about your existence, use different strategies in your ads to make them think about your music. For example, you can share a free music video so people check out, and eventually buy your new album.
The IAM Music Institute used Facebook ads to promote a free event.
The goal of the campaign is obvious. Get those who are interested in attending the event to reach out for more info. Even the call to action “interested” captures the essence.
Conversion
These objectives encourage those who are considering your music to buy your music or pay to see you perform live. For instance, you can use the handy store traffic objective to craft a campaign to drive traffic to your online store so they buy your albums.
Here is an example of conversion-focused music Facebook advertising.
It’s an advert that promotes a new single.
The goal?
Download for a fee on iTunes.
The campaign produced notable results for singer Sigrid.
As your music career grows, your campaign objectives will change. As a new music act, you focus on awareness objectives as you spread the word about your music for people to know what you are about. For more mature and well-known musicians, they will craft ads for musicians that drive conversions.
Decide On Your Target Audience
Facebook allows you to advertise based less on keywords and more on interests.
Interests theinterests and hobbies of the people you want to reach.
Interest-based targeting helps you reach a bigger audience size. Not only that. You connect people whose interests are similar to the audience that bought your music in the past. So your ads convert better.
We will now look at the audience set up for a Facebook marketing campaign.
There are many audience variables you can use to build your audience. We recommend you pick your target people based on adjacent interests.
To create a custom audience based on interest.
There are two ways of creating an audience.
First, you can create a new audience from scratch.
Or, use existing fans to find Lookalike Audiences who share similar traits with your current fans. Target only the fans (via the Connections option) or they could use the Custom Audiences feature.
Choose Your Ad Format
Facebook gives you plenty of options to reach your audience. Here are the different Facebook Ad formats at your disposal:
Image Ads
You can use still images to showcase your band, album covers, announce an event, or share breathtaking shots of stunning venues where you will be performing. Image ads have minimal text. They let the visuals do most of the talking. For a sample image ad, see the one below.
The ad above announces an upcoming performance, with a pic of the percussionist dominating the ad.
Videos
A video ad combines eye-grabbing images, sound, and movement to engage your audience. Video ads are perfect for musicians because they allow you to turn up the volume and show clips of your songs and performances.
Here’s a video ad specimen.
There’s no better way to show off a car show than using video.
Many musicians have found videos as the best format for promoting their music. That’s because videos are moving and are the closest you can get to a live show. Besides, video is a popular medium with most Facebook users.
Slideshows
Facebook slideshow ads are video-like ads that use text, sound, and motion to tell your musical story beautifully across devices. Importantly for musicians, they load quickly, therefore they play well on every connection speed.
Instant Experiences (Canvas Ads)
Instant Experience is a full-screen experience that opens after someone taps your ad on a mobile device. Create an Instant Experience to visually highlight your band, albums, or upcoming shows. Instant experience ads are absorbing and have a live show feel to them.
Stories
Stories appear on the Facebook News Feed or Instagram Stories. Similar to Instant Experiences, they are visually striking. They are good at driving action. If you are selling show tickets, story ads are one of the best ways to sell as many tickets as you can because they are absorbing and inspire instant action.
Carousels
Carousel ads showcase up to 10 images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link. They fit the bill for promoting many songs from an album using a single advert. If a prospective customer is interested in a song, they click the link which leads to a landing page where they can get more details.
Collections
The collection format features multiple products and opens as a captivating Instant Experience when someone engages with it. Your customers can discover, browse, and buy your music or tickets to your events from their phones in a visually appealing and immersive way.
Now that you’ve noted the different types of ads for promoting your music, let’s dive into how you can improve them.
Split Test Your Creatives
Facebook ads aren’t perfect right out the gate.
You refine them as you go.
Be observant. Watch how your fans interact with the ad, what links they'll be more likely to click, whether the ad is informative or just pretty. But being observant isn’t enough. For this reason, it's essential to perform split tests (also known as A/B tests).
Split testing is comparing two or more variations of a web page or elements of an ad to see which one performs better than the other.
You can use split tests to:
To do a split test, go to the Ads Manager Toolbar. It has all running ad campaigns or ad sets you can base your tests on.
Here’s how you go about it:
Remember: you can duplicate tests by selecting Custom. This allows you to duplicate a current campaign or ad set and edit its variables in the new test Facebook ad campaign.
Split tests help musician marketers measure the effectiveness of their tactics. You can then fine-tune the ads to get more engagement.
Prepare Your Adverts For The Public
After deciding on your Ad Set and naming your campaign, it’s time to work on preparing your ads for public display.
To do this, go to Conversion Event Location and select Facebook Donation.
At this point, can select your ad placements, delivery, audience, budget/schedule, bid strategy, and optimization.
For ad placement, these are all the available options:
Don’t know the best position for your advert? Let Facebook do it for you. Facebook can do ad placement automatically using its powerful machine learning algorithm.
Then there’s the budget and schedule section.
For budget, you have two options: daily budget and lifetime budget.
With a daily budget, you choose how much you want to spend per on your campaigns for 7 days. This keeps a tight grip on your limited advertising ad spend. As for a lifetime budget, you tell Facebook about how much you want to spend for the entire campaign and they take advantage of bidding opportunities without daily caps. A lifetime budget maximizes your ad spend.
No experience running Facebook ads? Then we recommend you opt for a lifetime budget, so Facebook takes care of everything for you.
Finally, consider ad delivery and scheduling.
For delivery, decide how frequently the ads will appear to your target audience and Facebook fans based on the budget and length of the campaign. Your target users must see the advert as many times as it takes for them to convert without being bombarded with promotions. The right frequency for ad delivery is 2-3 times every 7 days.
That’s enough to keep your music in the minds of users without mind without swamping them.
3 Facebook Ads For Musicians Examples
Need inspiration for your next Facebook advertising campaign.
Here are 3 examples to help you come up with winning ideas.
It’s a straightforward video ad.
Its strengths include:
Another music ad case study is from Headlines Music hall.
They used an unforgettable bold red and white contrast for the ad to stand out. Plus, they provided all the tour info on the image. All that’s left is for people to click “book now”.
The third and final example is from Unlax Music Store.
It’s a conversion ad for convincing people to buy right away. It works because it:
Use Facebook Ads For Musicians To Make The World Your Stage
To wrap up, Facebook advertising works like a charm.
It can elevate your music career to stratospheric levels.
But you have to know how to work the system. It’s all about mastering how the Facebook Ads Manager structures ads and maximizing them. It won’t happen overnight. Test, tweak and redeploy.
Eventually, you will find the winning formula and get the entire world to dance to your tune.
