This video comes courtesy of Steven Cravis and is best viewed at 1080p. If you like his tutorial, please head on over to www.stevencravis.com and show him some love!
Recently, I posed a question to my fellow Music Thoughtsters regarding their use and success with Facebook Ads. Ben Sands responded:
… I have tried (sparingly) both Facebook Ads and Google Ads … while they maybe raise profile to some unmeasurable degree, I can’t say for sure that they led to one CD sale or Download …
That comment led to the following response from Cathleen Trezza of Firewisp Music:
… There’s a few reasons why you can’t tell if your ads lead to sales.
The first is that the primary purpose of ads is to build awareness, not sales. It typically takes several impressions to build that awareness and you haven’t even got to the part where they’ve thought about whether they like the song enough to buy it. I don’t think ads are a good way to build awareness of music, obviously because ads are visual, music is not unless you are selling sheet music or music services or the like. If you’re selling lessons, targeted ads are a good idea.
Radio stations, YouTube, and the like are better for tasting music. The problem though, is that you basically give away the baby and potentially satisfy your listener’s needs by putting it up on those mediums in some cases. But if you can get your music covered on a popular YouTube show with a regular update cycle, you will probably do better than an ad hoc method.
The other problem with Facebook is the targeting. People who are on Facebook, even the ones who click your ad are NOT READY TO BUY. At least, not most of them. That’s why you don’t see an uptick in sales.
People who browse on iTunes, cdbaby, amazon.com and other etailers ARE ready to buy, and your conversion rates on those storefronts are a much better value for your advertising dollars. Of course, the ideal situation would be for your album to be on the front page of all these sites in the music department for the top 100 songs and albums. People will not sort through 1000 songs to find yours. There’s no reason to look that hard when the top 100 is just sitting there. And next week it will be a little different. This is part of what make iTunes and Amazon so vexing; it’s hard to get visibility.
For this reason, there is a thriving invisible marketing force working on these platforms geared toward getting visibility on higher value areas of the storefront. That might mean creating just enough profiles to make reviews or paying stay at home moms to write comments and rate products. If you aren’t aware that it is there, you might be finding yourself being swayed by that glowing review that really came from someone who was paid. To be sure, there are some people who volunteer reviews, but certainly not all are honest.
In any case, if sales is the goal, then higher visibility on the storefront should be a priority over random targeting.
The best way, though to get attention and branding is to do a lot of great shows for a lot of different people. Offline activity drives online activity …
I thought that was a fantastic and well thought out response to Ben’s reply. Do you have anything to add to the conversation? Leave your thoughts below!
AUTO PLAY IS ANNOYING
There is nothing more annoying to me (and sometimes frightening) than when I visit a band website, only to be greeted with the band’s current single through my PC speakers. Besides being annoying and unnecessary, there are two very good reasons off the top of my head as to why you should never make your music auto play on your website.
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Imagine this … You’ve been writing songs and playing in a band for as long as you can remember. You’ve played more shows than you’ll ever remember and your band is comprised of some of the best musicians you’ve ever played with. Life is good. For the second or third time this year, you get a call from a friend asking your band to play at a charity event with the understanding that you won’t be paid. As has happened at past events, the event organizer is counting on you to pull in attendees (i.e. your fan base) for this event and some of the proceeds from this event are going to be set aside to pay for things like the event staff, the sound company and other miscellaneous expenses. Do you feel pressured or guilted by this?
