Facebook Ads can be an exceptional platform for musicians who are looking to build brand awareness, establish a fan-base, sell albums, and promote events and concerts.

Accomplishing these goals, however, simply requires strategies that look a little different from the tactics used to promote services or drive quick eCommerce sales, making most conventional Facebook Ad strategies that you’ll see online not-so-effective for musicians who are trying to expand their reach with the platform.

Fortunately, there are Facebook advertising strategies that are tailor-made for musicians, allowing you to drive the results that you’re looking for in a relatively quick and cost-effective way. In this post, we’re going to take a look at Facebook advertising for musicians, including five key strategies that will help you reach your fanbase so that your career can thrive.

Fuel Your Funnel with Organic Social Media Posts 

Advertising on Facebook will typically be most effective overall when you’re setting up marketing funnels that nurture users through the entire sales process.

A funnel will account for each stage of the buyer’s journey, creating content that connects with users at each stage.

When it comes to Facebook Ads for musicians, setting the stage with strong organic social media posts can bolster the impact of your actual paid ads.

Let’s say you want to promote the release of a new album to drive immediate sales, but you want to minimize your overall ad spend. Your best option is to create retargeting campaigns that show your ad to users who have seen other content from you before and are interested in what you’re doing. This is where Facebook marketing for musicians and paid advertising overlap.

How to Set Up a Funnel for Facebook Ads for Musicians

Here’s what this might look like:

• Create strong, engagement-focused content on-platform to garner engagement. This can include “behind-the-scenes” content to get likes and clicks, or posts asking users to guess the title of your next album to leave a comment. Videos that are instantly attention-grabbing like your hit singles and content that shows your band’s personality will be key.
• Boost the most high-engaging organic posts. A great option would be boosting a video showing behind-the-scenes content of the album’s creation and hit singles. Either way, choose videos that have plenty of organic engagement already. This allows you to take advantage of the social proof that the post has accumulated organically, and then later retarget users who watched the video all the way through.
  You can promote most organic posts on Facebook by clicking the “Boost Post” option next to the post on your Page, or by choosing the “boost post” objective in the Ad Manager.

• Create retargeting campaigns based on your on-platform engagement encouraging users to purchase. You can create custom audiences to target users who have liked or commented on certain posts, or users who have watched certain percentages of your video. Send them to a landing page where they can join a waitlist for your new album, preorder it, or purchase it directly. You can run additional campaigns later based on abandoned carts.
  You can do the same with Facebook Stories, capturing users who have interacted with your Stories and pushing them through the funnel. Stories Ads are also incredibly effective for building brand awareness and driving clicks on both Facebook and Instagram, so make sure you have vertical, mobile-friendly video so you can run Stories Ads as a part of your main campaign.

Turn Views into Leads with Lead Magnets 

Whether you’re an artist trying to sell albums or an artist trying to book events, lead magnets can be your best friend.

Most customers won’t download an entire $15 album right away just because they were semi-interested in the clip they saw on your ads, and they almost definitely won’t hire you for a wedding, local event, or to play at their restaurant.

This is where Facebook’s lead ads come in. Facebook’s lead ads allow you to collect user information on-platform without the customer ever needing to leave the app. The form is mobile-friendly and will even auto-generate most of the needed information, like their name and email address.

You can offer a lead magnet here. You can also send users to your landing page with a “get more website visitors” ad. Either way, you can ask users to fill out the lead form in exchange for a lead magnet. Here are a few examples:

• A performing artist trying to sell albums could offer the first 100 users a free branded t-shirt.
• You can offer a free MP3 file of one of your songs on the site.
• Event performers can offer resources. Think: a guide on how to put together an event playlist or recommended songs to walk down the aisle to.

Landing Page Design Tips for Musicians

Your landing page should be clean and simple in terms of design, and it must match the ad that sent viewers to it. This means you need to be offering exactly what’s been offered in the ad campaign—no bait and switch allowed. Your landing page should also do the following:

• Feature the offer clearly in large text, and then explain why it benefits the user in smaller text underneath.
• Have the lead form featured next to this information and above the fold.
• Use a short lead form, asking for as little information as possible.
• Explain terms of service and feature a privacy policy, letting users know that they’re opting into receiving an email from you and that their information will be protected.
• Let users know that you’ll email them the lead magnet; automatic downloads through Facebook should be avoided.

This is a great example from wedding musicians Sax and Honey. They offer a free ebook with tips and guidance for wedding planning, which is featured on their “wedding services” page. They only ask for email (though asking about your event date and/or size would be useful information you could collect here, too), increasing the likelihood that users will complete the download.

Engage Lost Leads with Retargeting Campaigns 

If users have visited your landing page but ultimately didn’t convert, retargeting campaigns can hopefully re-engage them.

When you have Facebook’s tracking pixel installed on your site, Facebook is able to capture anonymous-to-you user IDs as they travel through your site. You can then create retargeting campaigns based who visited your site, including what pages they visited. You can even specifically retarget abandoned cart users. Do this by creating a campaign to target users who saw your “added to cart” page but not the order confirmation page.

There’s another option here, too. Once you’ve collected lead information like an email address, you can follow up even without the tracking pixel. This is an essential advantage;  the iOS 14 update that has an automatic prompt for users to opt-out of data tracking may significantly impact your ability to retarget based on-site and web activity.  Creating custom audiences for re-engagement campaigns, therefore, can help you continue to reach your leads even without the pixel.

And in order to drive leads to ultimately convert, your best bet will be to feature a strong offer. This brings us to our last strategy…

Entice Leads With an Irresistible Offer

Once you have your lead’s attention, it’s time to pull out all the stops with an irresistible offer.

If your ad campaign has any kind of special offer or deal, it’s much harder for people to just walk away. It’s even harder to ignore if the deal is perceived to be available only for a limited time. This could be access to a special edition of an album, a discount on the album or merchandise when you purchase, or even the chance to win two seats to a local concert if you purchase the album.

You can use offers to generate album, ticket, and merchandise sales accordingly, especially when you’re using lead information. 

Your custom audiences lists will be your best bet here, leveraging the lead information captured to create targeted campaigns. You can upload your lead information in an excel file to Facebook Ads to create a custom audience from a list. This will allow you to show ads to those specific users. Again, this option circumvents any potential limitations to data-tracking, because you’ve had customers give you their email addresses while opting-in without any pixel needed.

Pro tip: If offering ticket sales for in-person events, make sure that you’ve got location targeting on, too.

Offer Best Practices

For best results with an offer, consider testing the following:

• Offer discounts. Discounts (and free returns if applicable) can go a long way in driving sales.
• Use language like “special edition” or “limited time.” This leverages scarcity to create urgency, which may drive people to act immediately on a sale that they might have otherwise scrolled past.
• Really sell the offer. Don’t simply say “buy a vinyl, special edition.”  Instead, opt for “Our album is a blast from the past, so get our high-quality vinyl, the way music should be played” or something similar. Explain why users should take the specific action you want them to, and what they get out of it.
• Consider using Instagram carousel ads. If you’re selling more than one item, Instagram carousel ads are a great option. These are square, multi-image or video ads that allow you to highlight different songs, products, or even events. You can learn more about how to create Instagram carousel ads here.

Facebook Ads for Musicians: Final Thoughts

There’s no denying that music is a tough industry, and growing a listener and fan base is challenging. Fortunately, having the right marketing strategies in place can help you promote your music effectively. This will allow you to build a brand, sell more, and book events. Facebook Ads can be a crucial part of your growth strategy; taking time to test out these 5 tactics can help you see how they work for you!

What do you think? Which of these tactics have been most helpful for you? What are you most excited to try when running Facebook Ads for musicians? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!