How To Advertise Your Music On Facebook

This post was written by Lisa Occhino and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog. Lisa Occhino is the founder of SongwriterLink, a free songwriting collaboration website that matches you up with exactly the kind of co-writers you’re looking for. She’s also a pianist, award-winning songwriter, and graduate of Berklee College of Music.

Having a Facebook fan page for your music has so many benefits besides displaying your “like” count to the world. Some advantages of fan pages over personal pages are rather obvious — such as separating your personal and professional life, having no fan limit (versus the 5,000 friend cap on personal pages), using Insights to get key metrics about your fans, and getting taken more seriously as an artist overall.

But for any musician who’s trying to get more fans and figure out how to better engage their audience, Facebook Ads Manager is invaluable.

Ads Manager is a powerful tool that allows you to create, manage, and measure Facebook ad campaigns. With some testing and tweaking, advertising your music on Facebook can be one of the most budget-friendly and effective ways to reach both current fans, and get new music fans.

1. Define your goal

You need to have a way of measuring the success of your Facebook ad campaign, so the first step is to set a specific goal. Attach concrete numbers and a deadline to it. The more detailed you make your goal, the better.

For example, if you have tour dates to promote, how many tickets do you want to sell, and by when? If your goal is to build your email list, how many new signups do you want in the next 30 days? If you’re about to release a new single, how many downloads or streams are you hoping for in the first week? What’s the crowdfunding target you need to hit by the end of the month?

Should you run a “like” campaign?

Although Facebook ads can certainly help increase “likes” on your page, we wouldn’t recommend making that your primary goal for a targeted campaign. If those new “likes” are mostly random (or worse, spam accounts) and the people behind them are not actually engaged with your content, it could end up costing you more to reach your real fans.

2. Determine your budget

The great thing about advertising on Facebook is that you can test out your ads first with a small budget and determine what works best before putting more money into them. You can set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget (meaning day-to-day spending will vary slightly, but you won’t exceed the total budget you allocate for the lifetime of the ad set).

Facebook ads work on an auction, so the cost is determined by your targeting and the amount of competition among other advertisers for that audience.

Depending on the goal you’ve set, you can choose to pay for your ads by cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). CPM is a better choice if your goal has to do with spreading awareness and inexpensively reaching as large an audience as possible. CPC is usually a more expensive way to advertise, but the upside is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad, so it can be a smarter option for conversion-oriented goals.

3. Identify your target audience

Another big benefit of advertising music on Facebook is that you can get as specific as you want with your targeting — which means that you’re not wasting your precious dollars on advertising to people who aren’t likely to care about your music.

If you’re new to Facebook ads, you’ll probably need to play around with different targeting options for a bit until you hit on the right combination. In Ads Manager, you’ll be able to see in real time how your estimated reach changes as you make tweaks.

Here’s an overview of all of Facebook’s audience targeting options, but as a musician, you’ll definitely want to explore some of the following:

• People who already like your Facebook page
• Friends of people who like your Facebook page
• People who are interested in bands similar to yours
• People who live in your city (if you’re trying to build up your local fanbase)
• People who live in cities where you plan on touring
• People who have engaged with your Facebook videos
• People who have visited your website (you’ll need a Facebook pixel to do this)
• People who have subscribed to your email list
• Lookalike audiences of any custom audiences you’ve created

Sometimes, even a small change in your targeting can make a big difference in your conversions. Within your campaign, try running different ad sets targeted at different audiences, and compare the results to get a better idea of what’s most effective.

4. Create your ad

You have several options for the format of your ad. Ads that feature a single image, a link, and a call-to-action button (such as “learn more” or “sign up”) are common, and video ads are becoming increasingly popular.

Other options include carousel ads (featuring multiple images or videos that people can click through in a single ad), slideshow ads, and collection ads, all of which you can read more about here.

For musicians, we’d recommend starting out with a simple single-image link ad or a video ad, depending on what your objective is. A link ad would be a great choice if you want to drive traffic to a landing page on your band website or your online merch store, while a video ad would be effective to promote an upcoming show, tour, or new music video.

When you create a new ad in Ads Manager, you’ll be guided through selecting your objective, audience targeting, budget, schedule, and placement (i.e., where it’s going to be displayed). After you finalize those settings, you’ll then be taken to the section where you choose the format, media, and text for your ad.

Once you’ve reviewed all of the details, click the “place order” button. Your campaign will be under review at first, but as long as it meets Facebook’s advertising guidelines, the status will update to “active” shortly thereafter.

Ads vs. boosted posts

If there’s something you’ve already posted on your Facebook page that you simply want to be shown to more people, boosted posts are a quick and easy way to do that. However, keep in mind that options are more limited if you boost a post rather than create an ad.

5. Measure your ad’s performance

The work isn’t over once your campaign is active! While it’s running, you need to track its performance and make any necessary adjustments.

Ads Manager provides all the metrics you need to help you figure out how well your ads are doing. For example, if you’re testing a few different ad images within one campaign, you’ll want to go into your analytics after a few days and see which versions are performing the best for the lowest price. By turning off the versions that aren’t performing as well, your budget will get reallocated to the more successful ads, giving you the most bang for your buck.

While best practices for Facebook advertising remain consistent, the tools are always evolving and improving. So keep testing, keep experimenting, and keep tracking your results!

Read the original article here.

How to Advertise Your Music Using Google AdWords

This guest post is by Lisa Occhino and was first published on the Bandzoogle web site.

You’ve probably tried boosting your posts on Facebook, and maybe you’ve even run a few ads on Instagram. But have you ever considered how powerful Google’s search network can be for advertising your music?

Optimizing your online presence for Google is super important, and there’s a lot you can do to increase organic search traffic to your band website. But in this article, we’re going to explore how to advertise your music using Google AdWords.

Although big companies pour thousands of dollars per month (and sometimes even per day) into AdWords campaigns, the great thing about the platform is that you can completely customize it for your own needs and budget, no matter how big or small.

Even if you invest just a few dollars a day, you can see how many people are shown your ads, how many people click through to your website, and which ads and keywords are outperforming the rest.

For example, let’s say you’re a local band looking to get booked for wedding or corporate gigs in your area. If you run an AdWords campaign with the right geo-targeting and keywords, you can essentially guarantee that you’re reaching people who are actively looking to book bands like yours. And the more relevant your ads are to your target audience, the less you actually end up paying per click.

Define your goal

First, ask yourself: What am I looking to get out of an AdWords campaign? Whether it’s selling tickets for a show, booking local gigs, or driving more traffic to your website to get email list signups, it helps enormously to have a specific goal in mind right from the start.

You’ll find that there are many different elements to experiment with as you go through the process of setting up a campaign, so don’t get frustrated if you don’t hit your goal the first time around. Sometimes, a small change can make a big difference in how effective your ads are.

How much does AdWords cost?

AdWords uses a cost-per-click (CPC) model, which means that you only get charged when someone actually clicks on your ad, no matter how many times it’s shown. You can set whatever daily budget you’re comfortable with, and you can rest assured that you’ll never spend more than that amount per day.

Your CPC is largely determined by how many other advertisers are bidding on the same keywords that you’ve selected. While keyword competition and maximum bids are both important factors, AdWords also takes quality and relevance into consideration — which means that better ads are rewarded with lower costs and better placement.

How to find relevant keywords

The keywords you select play a crucial role in the success of your ads, so it’s important to set aside some time for research before you dive into creating a campaign.

Put yourself in the shoes of your potential fans. What would you Google?

Google’s free Keyword Planner should be your first stop. You can use it to find out how often keywords are searched, how competitive they are, and even discover new keywords that could be effective for you. You can supplement your research with other free tools like Google Trends and Wordtracker.

As you research, start building a master list containing your most important keywords. You’ll need it to create your ads, so keep it handy!

We highly recommend that you read through our in-depth guide to keyword research (which also includes advice on what to do if search volume for your band is low), because the keywords you choose to target will make or break your campaign.

How to create an AdWords campaign from scratch

In this section, we’ll walk you through how to set up a simple Search Network ad.

There are other types of campaigns you can set up through AdWords, such as Display Network ads and YouTube video ads, but we suggest that you get comfortable with Search Network ads first, and then explore the other options later if you’d like.

Note: We’re using the new AdWords experience for this tutorial. Here’s how to switch if you have an existing AdWords account with the old experience.

1. If you don’t already have a Google AdWords account, head over to the AdWords homepage and click the “start now” button to sign up for free.

2. Once you’re logged in, click “campaigns,” then click the plus sign to create a new campaign.

3. You should now be on the “campaign type” screen. Click “search network,” then select your campaign goal.

4. After clicking “continue,” you’ll see the page where you enter all of your campaign settings.

To keep things simple for your first campaign, we recommend selecting “no” for “add display network” and keeping most of the default settings. Certainly feel free to specify different locations or languages based on where you are and the audience you’re targeting.

5. Enter your daily budget and your campaign start and end dates, and then click “save and continue.”

6. You should now be on the screen where you set up your ad groups. Using the master keyword list you built earlier, create two or three ad groups with sets of related keywords in each so that you can see what kind of searches are best for reaching your target audience.

Try not to go overboard with this — for now, stick with just a handful of relevant keywords for each ad group. You can always add more later if you’d like.

Important: Read up on keyword matching options (i.e., controlling the kind of searches that trigger your ads), because poorly matched keywords are one of the biggest money-wasting mistakes that beginners make with AdWords. If you have some flexibility with your spending, a broad-to-narrow strategy is the way to go. But if you’re on a really tight budget, your best bet is to start with narrower targeting and less traffic while you get the hang of AdWords, and then expand from there.

7. After you hit “save and continue” on your ad groups, you’ve reached the final step of the process: creating your ads. This is where you enter the headline, URL (which should be a landing page that’s highly relevant to the search), and description for your ad.

Google recommends creating at least three ads per ad group to see what messaging works for your potential fans. Here’s a complete list of best practices for search ads.

Pro tip: You’ll see a better click-through rate if you use keywords from your ad group in the ad headline itself.

8. Once you’ve finalized your ads and entered your billing information, you’re done with your campaign setup!

At this point, it’s a good idea to go back through the campaign and review everything you’ve entered to make sure it’s exactly what you want. You can make edits to your budget, ad groups, keywords, and ads by using the menu on the left side of the screen.

It might take a little time for for your ads to be reviewed, but once they’re approved, they’ll automatically run between the start and end dates you specified for your campaign.

Test and measure performance

As with all forms of digital advertising, running a successful AdWords campaign requires consistent testing, tracking, and tweaking to get the most bang for your buck.

Be patient for the first few days and allow the data to accumulate. In about a week, you should start to have an idea of which ads and keywords are performing better than others. Keep a close eye on them, and pause any ads or ad groups that are clearly not performing well at all.

If you’re seeing promising results after a couple of weeks, consider increasing your daily budget. If not, don’t panic — just continue testing different combinations of keywords and ad copy until you find your sweet spot.

It’s a good idea to log into AdWords at least once a week to see how your campaigns are doing, and make any tweaks if necessary. You can avoid wasting a lot of money if you regularly review the search terms that led to clicks on your ad and carefully build a negative keyword list.

If you’d like to gain a deeper understanding of the platform and start experimenting with other types of ads besides search ads, the AdWords Help Center is a great resource.

Lisa Occhino is the founder of SongwriterLink and the Director of Marketing & Communications at Soundfly. She’s also a pianist, award-winning songwriter, and graduate of Berklee College of Music.

How to get your music featured in Spotify playlists

This article was written by Lisa Occhino for Bandzoogle. Lisa Occhino is the founder of SongwriterLink and the Director of Marketing & Communications at Soundfly. She’s also a pianist, award-winning songwriter, and graduate of Berklee College of Music.

Stream counts are a big indicator of success on Spotify, but there’s another factor that plays an enormous role: the number of times your tracks have been added to playlists.

According to BuzzFeed, one out of five plays across all streaming services happens within a playlist, and that number continues to grow. Half of Spotify’s global users listen to human-curated playlists (as opposed to algorithmic playlists), which generate more than a billion plays per week.

There’s no arguing that people love and trust playlists for music discovery. And since there are millions of playlists, you have a great opportunity as an artist to connect with super-niche audiences who truly dig your music and want to support you.

Spotify playlists are created and curated in a few different ways. The most popular playlists (like RapCaviar) are curated by Spotify’s in-house team, and are obviously the most coveted features. Other Spotify-owned playlists start with big data and are then sorted and perfected by Spotify employees.

Then there are the purely algorithm-driven, personalized playlists, like Discover Weekly and Release Radar. There are also branded playlists curated by record labels, companies, and influencers. And finally, there are user-created playlists, which anyone (including you!) can make.

What many artists may not realize is that Spotify not only tracks a myriad of metrics within the platform, but it also crawls hundreds of music blogs, keeps tabs on social media buzz, and measures it all against key tastemakers’ listening activity on Spotify. This is the engine behind playlists like Fresh Finds that can really move the needle on an independent artist’s career.

So, it makes sense to think about playlist features as just one piece of a comprehensive strategy in which all of your efforts complement one another. Press and social media mentions feed Spotify features, and vice versa.

5 steps to increase your chances of getting featured

1. Get verified

Becoming a verified artist on Spotify is really easy — just go here and fill out the short form.

That verified checkmark next to your artist name not only indicates that you’re legitimate, but also gives you more control over your artist page and access to a wealth of stats and fan insights (which we’ll dive into in the next installment of our “Streaming for Musicians” series).

Just recently, Spotify announced a new beta feature that allows all verified artists to submit unreleased music directly to their worldwide editorial team for playlist consideration. Although they’re still testing this feature and will likely modify it based on partner feedback, there’s no downside to jumping on this opportunity if you’re planning a new release soon. You can learn more about how to submit and what they’re looking for here.

2. Get active on Spotify

The more active you are on Spotify and the more your songs are being added to playlists, the more likely you are to get noticed by both human curators and the algorithm.

Make sure that you’re regularly releasing new music, even if it’s just singles or EPs. Focus on promoting your artist page and building up your Spotify following to ensure that your new tracks appears in your followers’ Release Radar.

Especially when you’re first starting out, you want to try to build up that social proof as much as you can so that you have a solid foundation for the long run. Be sure to link to your Spotify artist page from your website, share it on all your social media pages, and include it in the occasional email newsletter to your fans.

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3. Start small and work your way up

While getting featured on the big, official playlists is the dream for most artists, the algorithmic playlists drive a staggering number of listens. So if you simultaneously work the algorithm and pitch niche, independent curators, you’ll be much more likely to pick up steam on Spotify and get noticed by some of the more influential curators, or even Spotify’s own editorial team.

First, set aside a chunk of time to do some listening and research. Find playlists that you think your music would genuinely be a perfect fit for. Once you’re feeling good about the list you have, make a note of which playlists are algorithmic and which are curated.

For the algorithmic playlists, your best bet is to build up as much buzz as you can, both on and off Spotify. For the human-curated playlists, find out who created them (the username will be linked right at the top, under the playlist title and description) and whether they’re open to pitches.

4. Write a compelling, personalized pitch for each curator

If you’re connected to any sort of publicist, manager, label executive, or other industry person who knows a relevant curator, definitely work those contacts as a first stop. Otherwise, track down the contact info for the curators on your list who accept submissions, then write each of them a personalized pitch explaining why your song would be perfect for their playlist.

The guidelines for this are essentially the same as when you pitch music journalists, talent buyers, or anyone else. Put yourself in their shoes, and figure out why they should care about this particular email from an artist they don’t know, especially when they have an inbox chock-full of similar emails. It’s clear what the benefit is for you, but what’s the benefit for them?

Communicate your authenticity and that you’ve actually taken the time to listen to their playlist. Keep your message fairly brief, but be specific about what you’re asking, and make it as easy as possible for them to say “yes.”

5. Keep up your online presence and broader PR efforts

If you do manage to snag a playlist feature, no matter how small, do everything you can to leverage it and keep that momentum going. Shout it from the rooftops on all your channels, and thank the curator to show them how much it means to you.

Deepen the relationship by inviting them out to a live show if you’re ever playing in their city. If it’s a big enough feature and you have a budget to work with, you may want to consider working with a PR firm to squeeze everything you can out of it and roll it into even bigger opportunities.

If you haven’t gotten any traction yet with playlist features, don’t panic or give up. It may seem like artists go viral overnight, but honing your craft and building real buzz takes time. Remember that this is just one part of your strategy, and that maintaining your online presence and working on your bigger-picture PR efforts will all feed into Spotify’s algorithm.

You can make your own playlists, too!

As you work on building your Spotify presence, don’t forget that you can also create your own public playlists and feature them on your verified artist page. It’s a great way to engage with your fans and also show support for fellow indie musicians.

You’ll want most of your playlists to be comprised of other artists’ songs, with just one or two of your own tracks thrown into each. You can curate playlists around just about any theme, but we’d recommend starting simple (and searchable) with a genre, mood, or activity.

You can even collaborate with other artists and bands on a playlist, and multiply your efforts by cross-promoting it to each other’s audiences. It’s a win-win all around!

Also check out: Streaming for Musicians: How Does It All Work?

Read the original article here.

The most important thing to remember

When you create music and want to share it with others, the most important thing to remember is this: Be real, be yourself, be honest, be patient, be positive - and be grateful.

From my thirty years as a composer and music artist, this is what I have learned. You will find thousands of web sites with advice, training, courses, teaching you to set goals, to work hard, how to beat the competition, how to be successful... But as long as you are not true to yourself and your music, all this is a waste of time and energi. If you - however - let your heart and not your lust for success create your music and guide you when promoting your music, you are already successful!

- Helge (artist Homeless Balloon)