Should Independent Artists Need to Think About Facebook Ads?

If you're thinking of promoting your music using Facebook ads and you're just getting started, this article is for you.

Facebook ads are not magic; like every other tool, they have pros and cons. Running and managing Facebook ads involves time, budget, and creativity. There's a learning stage, and it requires time off from the studio.

If advertising features like Facebook Ads (also known as meta ads) are essential for promoting your music, this article will help you gain a basic understanding of them.

By the way, Facebook ads also include Instagram ads, Threads, Messenger, and Audience Network.

Let's get started.

Facebook Ads and the Music Industry

It's not easy to be noticed in today's saturated music scene. 100,000 singles come out every day on streaming platforms, and music artists should use every tool available to promote their music. Spotify playlist promotion, social ads, SEO, and newsletter email lists are some of the promotional tools artists can use to promote their stories and music; they all involve some technical skill in order to promote your music properly.

Facebook ads are an important additional tool, but unlike the other tools, they require a bit more knowledge and technical skills. They also require content creation, similar to social media in some ways.

What Are Facebook Ads?

Facebook ads can be created using your Facebook Ads Manager, and you can manage all of your ad placements on the other platforms: Instagram, Messenger, Threads, and Audience Network. They are created using an ad campaign, which uses three stages to create a campaign: campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

Without diving too deep into the technical process, the tool allows you to run your paid ads with a campaign objective and target audience or custom audience. The ads will appear in people's feeds, enabling you to reach new fans and generate streams and exposure for you and your music.

Should You Use Meta Ads as an Artist?

You can find all the information needed online to start promoting your music with video ads, but there are some things you should consider:

Content Creation

To get the lowest Meta Ads conversion ads, you'll need to create many ads presenting your music. For example, mastering video content creation and platforms like CapCut are essential to making many videos presenting your track. This takes time and money, and it will come at the expense of your songwriting or studio time.

Your Ads Manager Learning Curve

It takes some time for your ads manager to learn your specific audience and potential fans. Time is money, and you'll need to consider that in training, the Facebook machine comes with a cost for the first couple of months, and some of your budget will be spent on machine learning. Facebook and Instagram are tricky platforms to advertise on, and you can come up with a situation where you run the exact ad campaign twice and receive different conversion results without even knowing why. Free video views do not come for free on Facebook ads.

Conversions

Conversions are the specific metric that measures how much you will pay for one stream.

Some advertising companies measure conversions as site clicks, store visits, and increased website traffic to outperform the competition.

Conversions could be very expensive, which might make this whole operation heavy and pricey. This will cause you to spend money too fast with little results.

To overcome the high price, you'll need to create a lot of videos so you can determine which ad delivers the cheapest conversion and lowers the price you'll pay per music stream.  The more the advert resonates with your audience, the less you pay for each conversion.

Why Should You Use Facebook Ads

Using ads to promote your upcoming release or new album can be very beneficial.

Once you've mastered the technical side, you'll reach a new audience.

Pros of Meta Ads for Artists

Targeting

You can send your new release links to a brand-new audience, connect with new fans, and target people based on age, location, music genre, streaming platforms, hobbies, interests, fields of study, and many more. You can target male rock music fans in a specific city or meditation music lovers from India; you could also target similar bands to show your ad to their fans—if you think your music is identical to a famous band.

Targeting could be precise and focused on your desired audience. Big advertisers are using audience narrowing through the specific filters offered on the Facebook ad manager, but also artists can find it very beneficial; for example, if you're planning to advertise your live show in your area. Today Facebook has the best overall coverage for any advertiser. 

Small Budget

Once you've mastered your skills with the Facebook Ads Manager, you can start advertising with small budgets. $5 to $10 per day could be a nice way to start with some attention-grabbing from potential music fans.

Double-check that you're receiving results on your Spotify for Artists profile. Streams, likes, and followers should start rising slowly. The bigger your budget is, the more effect it will have on your streaming. It's essential to focus on your conversion price; the higher your conversion price, the fewer results you will receive compared to the same amount of daily budget. As mentioned before, the more content you have, the better conversation you'll get.

Meta Ads are Perfect for Promoting Music

Instagram ads are a great way to promote your music videos, album art, or behind-the-scenes videos.

You can set your brand voice and share it with many people very quickly.

Music lovers, typically ranging from 18 years old up to 33 (based on Spotify research), are mostly on Instagram, with some presence on TikTok.  Instagram's users are more diverse in age, with a significant presence of users in the 25-34 age range.

What better way to share your sound with potential new followers?

Data and Insights

You can use Facebook analytics data to figure out who likes your music, where they are located, whether they are using a desktop or mobile device to interact with your music or your website, how old they are, whether someone bought your event tickets through an Instagram mobile device or Facebook desktop, and many additional statistics that will help you make a better decision next time you hit the publish button. For artists, there are additional statistics on the Spotify for Artists profile, so everything is highly measurable.

Why You Should Avoid Facebook Ads

Learning Curve

Setting up your Facebook ads campaign could be a daunting task. Starting your ad profile, setting up the conversion, and overcoming errors are some of the obstacles you would encounter on your way to running ads. Adding to that, the learning curve you would pay to understand which audience works best or which advert generates the best conversion. You most likely pay a learning fee in your first couple of months.

Easy to Waste Money

Following the last paragraph, poor targeting combined with bad creatives will result in low results and a waste of your money. You could find yourself wasting a few hundred dollars before you achieve some decent results for your music or business.

Creating Creatives

You might find yourself turning from a music artist to a video editor or a promoter. Like mentioned before, you need to create lots of creatives in order to reduce the conversion price; this takes time and effort. Also remember, if your music or your content is not appealing and interesting, running ads will not amplify your music career.

Tips for Running Successful Meta Campaigns

• Video ads are a much better way to promote your music than static images. You can use AI video generators to create new content for your music.

• A/B tests - Test different audiences and different creatives to check out which one works best with the lowest conversion price.

• Use conversion tracking tools—some websites, like Toneden or Hypeddit, offer conversion tools to track your activity. Watch YouTube videos about it for more information.

Additional Promotion to Consider

Playlist pitching platforms

If you're looking to trigger Spotify's algorithmic playlists using Facebook ads, you'll need all the help you can get. Triggering the algorithm can be done in 10 days from the moment your song is public on Spotify. Artists need to generate 8,000 to 10,000 streams, likes, and follows to signal the algorithm it's a potential hit and should be added to the algorithmic playlists, such as Discover Weekly or Daily Mix. In other words, Meta ads might not guarantee you these results by themselves, and you can use all the help you can get.

Using Spotify playlist promotion will help you achieve the goal and generate additional streams using mass playlist submission.

 Final Verdict

Yes, Meta ads are useful, but they have a very detailed strategy. 

• Meta Ads can accelerate your growth if you have the power to generate a lot of content

• It's a long-term investment that will be a powerful tool when learned to work with.

  
  
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Resources:

Visit our TikTok music promotion plan

Submit music to Spotify playlists

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