The Artist’s Guide to Facebook Ads: Set Your Goals

Urska Jaksa

Feb 26, 2021

In this three-part guide, you’ll learn how to master Facebook advertising as a musician. Getting a grasp of all three chapters is crucial for creating efficient campaigns that will boost your career. 

After the intro and choosing your objectives, these will be our next steps in the musician's guide to Facebook advertising:

2/3: Target the Right Audiences

3/3: Mind the Design

With 2.4B people using Facebook and Instagram daily, the power of these connected digital platforms is evident. In this guide, we’ll help you leverage it.

In 2020, coronavirus blocked a vital source of revenue for musicians. With live events at a standstill, the music industry found itself in a challenging situation and had to turn to online channels. One positive outcome, however, is that musicians could take advantage of the tools that were already there.

To get the job done, you have to reach your target audience and stand out in a sea of content. This is where paid promotion can make a difference. The goal is simple: Get in front of the relevant public for as little money as possible.

With Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can create Facebook and Instagram ads exactly as you need them: pinpoint locations and interests, test ad designs, etc. It’s not easy, but it’s well worth it.

LET’S SET THE FOUNDATION

👉 Identify your revenue streams

Musicians around the world have been asking themselves: How can I earn a living as an artist if there are no ticket sales and no live gigs?

Having several different revenue streams reduces risks. These are the three main complementary strategies to concert revenue: 

• selling merchandise,
• selling releases online, and
• pay per stream.

For some of you, your main source of income is streaming, for others, it’s releasing new songs and selling them online, etc. It’s best to start with one and expand later.

Know where your money comes from and how much you can spend on marketing.

👉 Set up your Ads Manager account

If you don’t have one already, follow the simple instructions here. You need a Facebook page and a credit card.

👉 Learn how to manage your profiles

Make sure your profiles are in order. If you’re not a master of the craft already, here are some instructions that will help before we take it further:

• How to Promote Your Music Online on Social Media
• How to Win Instagram as a Musician: Your Go-to Introduction
• 13 Proven Tips to Up Your Instagram Game as a Musician

NOW, OFF TO BUSINESS

There are three steps to successfully launch your Facebook ads:

#1 Choose the campaign objective

#2 Target your ads to the right audiences

#3 Create ads that will grab attention

Let’s cover #1 first: Choosing the campaign objective

You start your ad creation in Ads Manager by clicking on “Create Ad”. The first thing you have to do after you name your campaign is to choose your objectives. There are several options, but we’ll focus on three categories: Traffic and Video views in the Consideration column, and Conversions in the Conversions column. Always start with the end goal in mind.

➡️ Consideration type campaigns: Use when you’re acquiring a new audience and are warming them up to your offer.

• Traffic: When you want to generate traffic to a specific page – in most cases your website or a dedicated landing page (e.g. you’d like to send people to your Beatport or Spotify page to check your music).
• Video views: If you want to increase the views of a video published directly on the platform (e.g. you’d like to get your new track in front of potential customers to see how they engage, then use the engaged users in future retargeting campaigns).

➡️ Conversions: Use if you want your fans to download your release, sign-up for your newsletter, buy your merch, etc.

There’s one caveat. In our experience, this type of campaign only works when you’re in charge of your tracking (with a correctly installed Facebook Pixel or Conversion API). Put simply, you can optimize for conversions only when you can track/measure them. This isn’t possible when you're driving traffic away from your Facebook/Instagram channel or your website (for example, leading people to your Beatport, Discogs or Spotify page). 

💼 CASE IN PRACTICE

UMEK, our co-founder and the #1 Techno producer on Beatport, is just about to release a new track on Beatport (learn the 5 key steps for optimizing your Beatport releases here).

A short 15-second clip with an inviting call-to-action will be perfect, prompting listeners to check and get the release on Beatport. He’ll choose “Video views” as his objective. Later, this will allow retargeting to engaged users only (those who’ve listened to the sample online). We’ll cover this in the second part of this series.

The second option is a “Traffic” consideration campaign, which will lead people to his Beatport profile to check his portfolio.

UMEK also has a label, 1605. Because it's his own website, he was able to install the Facebook Pixel, Facebook’s tracking snippet. He can measure how many fans come to his site from the ads and what they check out, which tracks they listen to, etc. This allows him to re-target the same users with useful and relevant content and exclusive special offers. This is where a Conversion-type campaigns make sense.

➡️ Next step: Target the Right Audiences

As a music data company, Viberate crunches the numbers to help everybody in the music industry make better, data-fueled decisions. When setting up your advertising campaigns, analytics can save you loads of time.

Give Viberate a go. It will be extra useful when you dig into your audience and explore other artists in the next step. Sign up and unlock loads of handy features.