Digital Marketing for Musicians

Ingredients for a successful digital marketing campaign for music releases:

1. General strategy

2. Targeting strategy

3. Timeline strategy

4. Using re-marketing audiences

5. Great content

6. Optimisation

Meta platforms Facebook & Instagram are businesses that exist because of their advertising revenue. In 2022, they made $130 billion USD from advertising revenue. So these platforms very much operate on a ruthlessly pay to play basis.

For us, this means that if you’re not promoting content with ads, you’re only reaching a small percentage of your followers. Though ads can sound a bit intimidating at first, you don’t have to spend much, starting from a small $5 campaign, and working your way up from there can still have an impact on who you reach.

Carefully thought out digital marketing ad spend is essential. Because your content isn’t pushed to all of your followers automatically, organic growth is slow unless you have a lot of offline marketing activity going on, and algorithms don’t really show your content to people who aren’t following you.

Putting ad spend behind your content in a carefully structured, strategic way that maximises it and uses re-marketing audiences is a great way to make sure your content reaches the people that you want. To do that, you need a decent understanding of how the ads managers works, what targeting options available, different targeting strategies and a good understanding of how to structure campaigns so that you can optimise them, and only spend budget on targeting and placements that you know are going to work. When you have a good grasp of how to use the platforms, you can spend a small amount at a time, and still reach the people you need to.

This article just focuses on paid digital marketing, but there are heaps of other ways for you to reach new audiences eg. collaborations with similar artists on posts, remixes, gigs etc!

1. Strategy.

   Start with your own wider strategy, take time to think about your music career goals, or the goals of your current project and the people you’ll need to reach to achieve it. Eg. festival placements? You’ll need to reach promoters, film sync opportunities? You’ll need to reach music supervisors, more streams? You’ll need to reach new listeners.
   From there, you can think about how digital marketing can support that.

2. A targeting strategy.

   This will determine how many ad groups you need in your campaign. Who do you need to reach? Festival promoters? Listeners? Music supervisors? What do they want to see? Eg. festival promoters will want to see you have a solid and engaged following, listeners will want to see awesome content and genuinely great tracks that they want to listen to over and over again.

   Whatever the goal, determine who you need to reach by target group eg. 1. Listeners, 2. Industry. For each group, you can then look at Meta ads manager and look into the targeting options available that will help you reach these people.

   Some common targeting options:

   1. Listeners: target people who are interested in artists that are in your genre.

   2. Industry: target people who are employed in relevant industry areas, then add a 2nd filter

   3. Engaging existing followers: re-marketing to anyone who’s engaged with your pages over the last year (this also includes anyone who’s liked, commented, clicked or watched your content but not necessarily followed you)

   Choose your placements:
   Placements are where you choose your ads to show up eg. Facebook feed, Instagram stories, Instagram reels, YouTube skippable in-stream pre-roll.

3. A Campaign Timeline Strategy.

   Know when you’re pitching your music out to the digital platforms, so you can time your pre-save campaign a week or so before then. If they can see there’s interest in what you’re doing already, that can only be a good thing. We generally recommend doing a pre-save campaign to your existing audience via re-marketing, then allocating most of your budget towards the release day campaign.

4. Maximise your budget by using re-marketing and lookalike audiences.

   On Meta, you can set up re-marketing and lookalike audiences. This allows you to promote your content via ads manager to people who have engaged with your content for a certain time period (the max period they allow is 1 year). You can set this up for Instagram engagement, Facebook engagement, and website visitors if you have a pixel installed. We set these up so that a) it’s cheaper to market to these people, and b) we can show multiple pieces of content to the same group of people, increasing the number of touch-points (how often they see your content), this builds familiarity and connection. You can also use re-marketing exclusions here.

5. Amazing content.

   This is incredibly important. If your content is truly engaging and well produced, your audience will find it more engaging (note - you don’t get to decide whether it’s engaging - they decide that) learn from every piece of content you put out. Why is this important? If content is engaging it’s cheaper to reach people. Make sure your content is in line with the aesthetic of your niche genre.

   Promote posts by pulling your existing posts through to your ad groups rather than create ads - this keeps all of the likes, comments and shares in one place. We call this “social proof” in corporate marketing, it basically makes it look cooler when people are scrolling past, has a bit of a FOMO effect. If you create ads from scratch, it splits up the engagement between each ad group. Creating ads from scratch is super handy if you’re A/B testing content though.
   
   Visual content guidelines for your “hero” content on release day:

   Ideally video, something eye catching, even better if it’s on point for the aesthetic of your sub-genre. It should feature the best part of the song to really draw people in and encourage them to click through.

   • Reels: 9:16: less than 30 seconds

   • Stories: less than 15 seconds - need the original file 

   • 4:5 (or Square) IG feed post (with 1st frame to fit the square on the grid):

   • Facebook: Square video/photo post. 

     Note 1: these time indications are there due to what ad manager allows us to promote.

     Note 2: preferably the visuals should focus on “out now” wording.

   Follow it up with some other content like:

   • Behind the scenes content

   • A montage reel of all the press coverage including reviews, notable publications etc.

   • Video clips from live shows or band practises.

   • Interviews

   • Funny shit, whatever else you can think of - get weird within ad guidelines lol.

   
   Add this sort of stuff into the campaign as different touch points, so you’re building a bit of story, connection and familiarity.

   
   What’s not allowed: Meta doesn’t allow any nudity, vaping, smoking etc. in their ads.

6. Optimisation

   Learn how to structure your campaigns so you can easily see which target groups are performing well, and which aren’t, which placements are doing well, and get to know what metrics to look at to understand where you should be directing your budget.

We’ll soon be releasing a video course where we’ll take you through a few examples to give you some ideas, take you through how to use the tools, so that you can run your own digital marketing campaigns. Sign up to our newsletter below, and we’ll let you know when it’s ready!