A year ago, we told you about our Workstation marketing tools, available exclusively to The Orchard distributed clients. Now that thousands of campaigns have been executed on Facebook and Instagram through the advertising tool, we’re here to highlight a few elements from the best-performing projects to help you launch even more successful campaigns.
Let’s get started!
Deciding on a Campaign Objective
Choosing the type of campaign you want to run is pivotal to ensuring that your campaign reaches the goal you set out to achieve. There are several ways you can optimize your campaigns to reach your desired goal, the most common are outlined below:
- Are you looking to drive users to listen to a release on streaming services via a landing page? Create a campaign optimized for traffic with the link to stream featured in your ad.
- Want to get your artist in front of as many users as possible? Boost an existing post optimized for awareness to increase recall with your ad.
- Is the goal to drive link clicks to an external destination? Create a campaign optimized for traffic to your website or third-party store.
Overall, the objective you optimize your campaign for should reflect the goal you would like your ads to achieve.
Tip: Make sure you have administrator access to the Facebook page you will advertise from and the Instagram account is properly linked to the page. The page will also need to be associated with a Facebook Business Manager account, otherwise ads will not be able to run from it.
Creative
Recent studies show that brands only have between 3 and 6 seconds to capture user attention while they are browsing in their social feeds. This being true, we found that creatives that prominently feature the artist and release as quickly as possible were most likely to capture user attention and drive strong results. Take a look at a few examples of successful creative used by some of our labels below:
The takeaway here is to get right to the punchline with ad creative! Show the artist’s face and the best clips of the release as quickly as possible.
In addition to the content itself, the message and thumbnail that accompany your creative are just as important as the image or video you are using. Try to make sure your ad text and thumbnail messages are complementary to one another and avoid repetitive messaging between the two when possible. Short messages with a clear call to action typically make for the best performing ads. you can use CTAs like “click to stream”, “click here to follow”, “listen now”, “buy now” or anything that incites the action you are trying to promote.
Tip: Try to create ads that feel native and compatible with the content the artist would post organically.
Audience Targeting
Selecting the right audience to target is crucial as you want to only serve ads to the most relevant users as efficiently as possible with your given budget.
Start by setting your desired audience demographics and territories. You can determine these based on your artist’s existing fanbase demographics, the demographics you think will respond well to the release, priority streaming territories, or all the above!
Next, make sure the audience size and amount of territories are in accordance with the budget you are set to spend. A smaller audience is generally harder for the Facebook algorithm to reach, meaning your results may be more expensive. This isn’t necessarily bad if you are looking to reach a niche audience, but adding territories or interests that make the audience larger may help campaign performance. However, while grouping multiple territories together may expand your audience reach, and your ads will likely be skewed toward areas with lower ad competition rather than distributed evenly in each location. Try to find a balance of a few locations that are similar in size and culture that are relevant to your artist and release.
Tip: Create different campaigns when trying to reach diverse territories and group them by similar language and currency value. e.g if you want to target North America, create one campaign for US and CA and other for MX.
Additionally, there are a number of different audiences that could be interested in your release; and focusing your ad campaign on one specific audience can sometimes prevent your ads from reaching all of the interested users. Our general rule of thumb is to spend your ad dollars on audiences who align with three main targeting goals:
Engage your fans – Also known as remarketing audiences, this shows your ads to people who have previously engaged with your Facebook or Instagram Page.
Grow your audience – Also known as lookalike audiences, this targeting will show your ads to people who are nearly identical to your current fans.
Expand your reach – Show your ads to people who share certain interests.
Tip: Use all available targeting options when creating your campaigns.
Campaigns that reported the strongest results were built with multiple types of targeting, including custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and similar interest targeting.
REMEMBER!!
Although these tips will help you build better campaigns there is no magic formula, every campaign should be different and adjusted to your goals
