How to Promote your Music using Instagram and Facebook Ads

Do you often stumble upon Facebook & Instagram ads and surprise yourself by clicking on them and discovering incredible artists? Would you like to do the same thing with your musical project but you don’t know how? Here are all the steps to use Facebook Ads to promote your song and reach thousands of people quickly in a few clicks!

1 – Create an artist page and not a personal profile

Your ads will encourage people to take a look at your page, so making it look nice is a crucial step:

• Make it visually appealing: choose nice profile and cover photos that stand out and fill your news feed with qualitative and varied content.
• Be professional: provide as much information as possible (contacts, social networks, website, labels, bookers, etc.).

2- Define a Facebook ads strategy

What is your objective?

• Gain more followers? 
• Make your music known?
• Promote your latest release, clip, EP?

In any case, the main goal is to BUILD TRAFFIC on your page!

To do this, I advise you to create a Traffic campaign: the most used campaign that generates the most visits on a website / page.

☝️ If you want more than just a simple visit on your page (buying a record, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.), then you will have to use the Conversion tool, but it will not be effective if you don’t already have a good fan base.

3 – Who to target and how?

Once the campaign objective has been defined, you now need to create “ad sets” in your Facebook Ads manager, i.e. “groups/types of people” to be targeted that will be called audiences. You can adopt different strategies:

1. Targeting people who have already interacted with you = Personalized Audience

• This audience is made up of people who have interacted with you already on your Facebook page, Instagram profile, website (and in this case, you’ll have to install a pixel on your website, you’ll find more info here), an email list, etc…

2. Targeting people similar to your personalized audiences = Similar Audience

The most effective and SIMPLE targeting in my experience! Once you have found a personalized audience (see above), Facebook Ads provides you with an audience of potentially interested people ranging from 1 to 10%, + or – large and + or – similar to your initial audience!

Here is an example below with an audience similar to my Groover Facebook Page.

☝️To target large enough even if the budget is small, an audience similar to 3% is a good compromise!

3. Trying to target people who have never heard of you = Advanced Targeting

Target people based on…

• Musical styles

• Similar artists

• Popular music pages

• Various media

There are many possibilities! The best way is to brainstorm about everything that revolves around your project and see what Facebook Ads offers you based on that, then test, test and test again. Facebook will also automatically suggest pages to target.

If you run out of ideas, you can browse Audience Insights to find out more about your Facebook page audience and find suggestions for similar pages.

It is possible to add several features/interests at the same time to make larger audiences. BUT BE CAREFUL- I advise you to separate them as it will be easier to analyze what is most effective.

For example, if you put Rock, Pop and Folk in the same audience, you will certainly have a large audience that will allow you to reach an even larger audience, but you won’t know which one of the 3 is the most effective. So if you decide to duplicate your audience in 3 and create 3 different sets of ads: one FOLK, one ROCK and one POP, you will be able to analyze the results very easily, and quickly remove what doesn’t work!

☝️ To duplicate just select the audience and click on “Duplicate”. 

IMPORTANT: For the types of  targeting mentioned above, do not hesitate to refine your audiences so as not to spend money unnecessarily. Facebook Ads allows you to choose the gender, age and country of the targeted people. If you know that your music has no interest in being shared to such and such a place or person, change the settings- your campaigns will be more effective!

4 – Define the placement of your ads

Now that Facebook owns Instagram, your ads can be broadcasted wherever you want: on Facebook or Instagram on either mobile or desktop.

To optimize your campaigns even more, you can remove placement locations you think are useless! For example, the right column on Facebook in my opinion is not very relevant, but others will tell you the opposite: it all depends on the content you are promoting and your audience.

The most important thing is to keep the “News Feeds” and “Stories” formats separate!

☝️ It is not forbidden to put the same format on all your ads, but I strongly advise you to use square formats (more advisable than the rectangle format) for the news feeds and 1080x1920px formats for the stories- it makes all the difference.

5 – Set a Facebook ads budget

This is no secret: the more money you invest, the more likely your ads will reach the right people. However, you can still get good results with any budget!

Every artist has a different budget, so you just have to adapt your audience and strategy to fit your budget. If you have a small budget, then you can start by promoting your song in a particular country or even city. It’s up to you to define your priorities!

☝️A budget of only 2€/day for a well-targeted Instagram story, for example, can be very effective.

6 – What content to promote?

Originality will always prevail! Don’t hesitate to ask your friends and family for help, look at current trends on design sites (Pinterest, Freepik), and get inspiration from other artists! If you go to the FB library, you will have access to other artists’ online ads. 😉

Always be on the lookout for new features offered by Facebook. For example, lately, it’s the story format ads with polls that are making an impact.

| Read also: Instagram for Musicians: How to Gain New Followers in 2020 

☝️ If you’re not an ace at photoshop, some online tools allow you to easily create designs by yourself like Canva 

Ideas for engaging content to promote :

• An excerpt of a song with an attractive visual

• Animated lyrics of a song

• Videos of live performances or a clip

• Concert dates

• Feedback received on Groover: a cool phrase from a media, label or pro in quotes, an addition to a big playlist, etc. = make influence marketing work, directly accessible on www.groover.co!

You now have all the tools to create your ad on Facebook. All you have to do now is test, constantly monitor, analyze and optimize. One last piece of advice: once the ads are online, don’t hesitate to invite, follow up, and interact with the people who liked and commented on them!

– Translated by Mackenzie Leighton –

To get feedback to share, check out Groover⭐️