With about one billion daily active users on Facebook, this social media platform remains a cave of wonders for businesses, brands and artists. Other than catching up with friends and loved ones, Facebook can also be used to advertise and promote your products and services to a very large audience.
Facebook is an incredibly popular platform with a wide range of people using it. Users tend to spend large chunks of time browsing the feeds and profiles. With such an incredibly diverse demographic, using targeted ads can be refined to target exactly the right kind of audience for brands and businesses.
It’s very important to understand who your target audience is in order to make the most of Facebook ads. Of course, to get visitors interested, you must create quality content that you improve week by week to lure in new fans.
For musicians, Facebook is a fantastic tool to get your content in front of the right audience. Content and audience being the most important elements in that sentence. Anybody who understands how to ‘hack’ these two will see success on Facebook.
In order to do so, there are free tools available that will help you narrow down your audience and optimize your content too. I’ll be using Yori Olijslager as an example of how artists can set up a Facebook/Instagram ad using these free tools to convert content into sales.
Yori is a producer and a drummer from the Netherlands, who like many others, lost most of his revenue through the coronavirus epidemic. I have coached him for quite some time now and we saw this as an opportunity to create some online products around him to begin selling.
Alongside creating and performing music, Yori has been tutoring and teaching drumming too. We saw this as a perfect opportunity to embark on teaching music production as one of his revenue streams.
We started using Facebook ads for the purpose of attracting new customers to his music production tuition. Starting with a fairly small campaign we set up the ad with the goal of improving the process as we go.
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Set A Goal
Knowing what you want to achieve with your ad is the first step. Do you want to achieve higher visibility for your profile? Are you looking to sell a product? Is it more clicks and comments you’re looking for?
It’s easy to get lost in the quick results Facebook ads generate. Which of these numbers are important to you? Sure, you can get lots of likes on a post but was that the intent? Do not get lost in these vanity numbers where it looks good on paper but you need to see results where it matters.
If you’ve got nice content flowing on your page then you might want to just attract visitors to view your stuff which means there’s a higher chance of people checking out your music, etc. This is useful as the organic reach is declining and you need to pay to be seen nowadays.
The content you create for the ad will need to reflect your goal. It’s advisable to test out a few different formats to see what type of content leads to clicks, likes, link visits, etc.
For Yori, the goal was to sell lessons in music production. We wanted them to receive an email where they could book a free consultation. We wanted to automate most of the lead generation process through facebook and had a hypothesis that if we spent $30 we could get a customer paying $45 per hour which means he’s profited. Then the chances of them rebooking more lessons is higher which would then lead to even more profit from the $30 spent on the ad.
2. Select Your Goal on Facebook
Once you know your goal, you then need to tell Facebook/Instagram what it is. This will determine what tools you have available to edit whilst making the ad. For example, if you choose the ‘engagement’ as the goal, you will not be able to add a CTA (call to action) button that leads to a website or sign up form.
Facebook offers numerous CTAs. The more common CTA buttons include “Send Message,” “Apply Now,” “Download,” “Learn more” and “Contact Us.” Each of these serve clear purposes for your business; whether that’s building brand awareness or creating an immediate connection between the audience and your business.
The best practice is to have a website with Facebook Pixel installed, a piece of code that sits on your website and connects Facebook to your site. Then you’re able to tell Facebook to track a particular page on your site, and when an action is made there, Facebook records the user’s information to create new audiences you can target ads to – based on the users interests/likes. This allows you to reach people with similar characteristics which means they are more likely to be interested in your products/services.
As Yori doesn’t have a website yet, he cannot create a landing page to collect information. So in this case we will use the Facebook Lead ad form which pulls users data from their profile and populates the forms if they want to sign up/learn more.
3. Create Your Audience
The old skool way of setting up audience targeting on Facebook ads was to select the parameters yourself. This can be risky as you are basing the information on what you think is best. Facebook has gotten a lot smarter and now its algorithm can generate audiences based on likes, interests, etc. – allowing your ads to be seen by the right kind of people. The two audiences it generates are either custom audiences or lookalike audiences.
A Custom Audience made from a customer list is a type of audience you can create to help build your reach. It’s made of information – called “identifiers” – you’ve collected about your customers (such as email, phone number and address) and provided to Facebook. Prior to use, Facebook hashes this information.
A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers/visitors. Inserting a simple line of code onto your website allows Facebook to track the activity on your website and feed it back to your ad centre, refining the audience type to better match your existing customers.
As Yori doesn’t have the Pixel we decided to create some custom audiences based on who has already interacted with his content. He’s been active on Instagram using video content so we selected audiences based on who watched any of his videos for more than 15 seconds.
These guys who stayed tuned for 15+ seconds are obviously interested in the content so it makes sense to target them again, through using an ad. As it takes on average 5-7 impressions for somebody to remember your brand or take an action, retargeting ads are very useful tools.
It’s this reason that it’s better to focus your attention on people who have already visited or interacted with you than to seek out brand new audiences. Build that rapport with people who have already shown an interest and nurture it. These are the guys who are converting to sales, right?
Once we have the custom audience prepared, we then need to create a lookalike audience, because in addition to retargeting the guys who have already engaged with your content, we need to find new audiences that have similar interests. See where this is going?
Once you have created your custom and lookalike audiences, you need to select these as your audience on the ad. So instead of inserting the parameters you just select a custom audience or a lookalike audience that you have already created in the audience manager.
4. Create Your Content & Caption
When creating content to use as an ad, you need to bear in mind that you’re essentially a visiting guest to random people’s newsfeeds. You must make content that looks like it belongs on their screen.
From the very start your content should deliver value, be personal and get to the point. Make sure that viewers can easily understand what it is you’re telling them. If you want them to click somewhere, you need to tell them. Be direct, clear and welcoming.
This is the first draft of the ad – Yori uses video to present himself, his value and why they should click on the ‘Learn More’ button. This will continue to develop. As you can see, Yori is missing a lot of information in the caption and the headline/call to action next to the ‘Learn More’ button isn’t being put to the best use.
You need to optimize the content in the caption. For example, like what I am doing here with my ads for my webinars. If you put valuable content in the video and caption, you optimize on the real estate and the conversion will be higher; especially if you do not send them to a landing page with more information.
5. Mailing Lists
The aim of Yori’s ad was to collect contact information of anybody interested. The next step is to send them an email to get them to book his free consultation. If you use landing pages, the leads from your ad will automatically integrate with MailChimp, the email service, if you have integrated with SquareSpace.
It’s super important to have your leads on your email service, as they will need to receive a welcome email, introducing yourself and the details of your service. I’ve stressed the importance of this before in my beginners video Email Marketing for Musicians.
The welcome email is the first impression and first email audiences will receive from you. Make it count. Include a call to action, invite them to your streaming sites, show them your most recent YouTube video. It’s a great way for new leads to get more value and get to know you better.
Since Yori is using Facebook’s Lead ads, we need to connect this with Yori´s Mailchimp. This is done through Zapier.
Now, whenever somebody fills out a Facebook Lead ad form, they will automatically be placed in the list you select on Mailchimp and automatically receive a welcome email.
For Yori we created an automated email which sent them to an online calendar they could book a free consultation.
6. Analyze Your Numbers Against Your Goal
Here we were tracking the cost per lead, which was $1.13. This means Yori paid $1.13 to get somebody to sign up for more information about music production lessons. So by using $35 he got 31 hot leads. This then resulted in 3 signing up for lessons with a revenue of $135.
What’s so interesting here is that Yori paid $35 to get $135 worth of business. This is called a customer acquisition cost. You need to determine the lifetime value of a customer. On average, how many lessons do they buy over time? Which means the $35 dollars is a good investment with a great ROI.
I have raised funding several times using the formula customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. If the CAC is lower than CLV you have a great business case that can be scaled.
Your success is once again in the metrics. ALWAYS be on top of these numbers as it is the key to your success.
Make sure you check out my YouTube channel with top tips on how to grow your brand and audience through using Instagram (the correct way).
