2 Must-Use Tools for Creating Better Facebook Ads for Your Music
- 03 May 2017, Wednesday
Whether you want to sustainably sell your music online, acquire new targeted fans or just punctually promote your news to your fanbase, Facebook advertising has become the reference point over the past few years. With its titanic database and a lower cost per click (CPC) than the competition, it would be a lost opportunity if you neglect this promotion channel. Even if you can only invest a few euro per day!
However, let’s be honest, Facebook advertising is an art in itself. If you launch your first campaign tomorrow and you have no background in advertising or marketing, chances are that you will struggle to make your first ad profitable. Rather than directing you to Facebook ad professionals, I encourage you instead to train yourself in Facebook advertising. It takes a bit of time, budget and energy, but this way you will truly understand how this platform works; you will learn to communicate about your brand better and in the end you will save significant sums.
Thus, in this article I would first like to touch on two fundamental tools that will enable you to boost the effectiveness of your advertisements by identifying audiences that are highly interested and likely to buy YOUR music. These are the conversion pixel and video views ads. Indeed, as you will see, these two methods allow you to reach more qualified fans than via interest targeting. And more qualified fans equals more clicks on your ads, therefore cheaper and more efficient campaigns!
Tool #1: The Conversion Pixel for your Official Website
Before you do anything else, you have to set up your conversion pixel on your official website if you want to be able to take full advantage of Facebook ads for your music. This is one of the very first things you need to do, simply because it allows you to identify, track and reach visitors of your official website (who are mostly pros, super fans and potential fans) through Facebook.And for good reason, it would be a huge waste to let these Facebook users go. Judging by their interest in your music project, they would convert well and with a low CPC.That’s why you need the conversion pixel, a short HTML code that Facebook gives you and that you can add in a few clicks on your official website.Thanks to this, whenever someone visits your band site, the information will be sent automatically to Facebook, which will keep it for 6 months in order to be able to track user activity (page visits, conversions, etc.) and identify them in the ad manager. In short, with the conversion pixel you can use ads to reach all the users who visited your site in a given period, whether you have their email address or not, whether they like your page or not, whether they stayed 20 seconds or 10 minutes, as long as they have a Facebook account!You will just have to create some custom audiences to target them, depending on the different pages that have been visited on your site, for example in order to:
1. Promote your next gig to people who have visited the "Concerts" page of your site and who live in the region.2. Send a discount code to people who have visited your merch store.3. Promote a commercial offer (CD, service, bundle, etc.) to those who have not bought it yet.
Setting up the Facebook pixel and custom audiences is easy and free, so you have no reason not to do it today! Be careful, if you have more than one website or if you also use a third-party platform to sell your music, you should install the same unique pixel everywhere. You can then create advertisements specifically for each site.But for this, the first step is to add the pixel to your main site; you just have to go to this page to learn more about it.
Tool #2: Video Views Ads for your Music Videos
The pixel is fine, but how do we identify the most interested fans directly on Facebook? By looking at the likes, comments and shares? Yes but also no.Why? Because you would miss out on the silent majority of your super fans. Those who are passionate, but who do not shout it from the rooftops for various reasons. Thus, the most effective solution is to generate as many views as possible on your native videos using advertising.How is it related? Contrary to what you may believe, the purpose of promoting your Facebook videos is not only to gain exposure. We need to look beyond that. It is also to once again develop qualified audiences of users and subsequently create extremely powerful campaigns.Indeed, Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based on the percentage of the video viewed by potential or current fans.
For example, you can tell Facebook that you only want to have in your custom audience the people who watched at least 25% or 50% of the music video. We assume that if the person stayed that long watching your video, it means that he/she enjoyed it at least a bit. Thanks to Facebook you can find it out and use it in your marketing!The goal is to create a custom audience targeting only those users who have seen more than 25%, 50% or 75% of your video, in order to know who the most committed fans are and target them in your next campaigns.One can then use this custom audience in ads, but also duplicate it with the lookalike audience feature. Facebook will simply take this sample of super fans and find hundreds of thousands of users whose profile and behavior closely resemble this sample so that you can contact them. Amazing, right?However before you play with the custom and lookalike audiences, you need to initially set up video ads that will generate enough views. Without this, you might not get a large enough sample of super fans for the next part.
And for good reason, if you only have 1000 views on your Facebook video, you're not going to be able to do anything interesting. You are going to have very few people viewing at least 25% of the content. Ideally, if we want to create a very good custom audience, we need a very large sample of people who have seen 25% or more of the video.Hopefully, the cost of Facebook views is very low! So let’s start by creating an ad to promote your music video and generate views, then create a custom audience and then a lookalike audience.
Conclusion
By adding these two tools to your advertising arsenal, you'll have everything you need to better promote your music online through Facebook.Indeed, custom audiences and lookalike audiences that you qualify through these methods are ultimately far more cost-effective and efficient than just targeting by interest (music genre, similar artists, radios, concert venues, etc.).Now it's up to you to do the test and put these two tools to work into your Facebook strategy!Thanks for reading this post! Subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you never miss our blog posts!
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