Your Band and Advertising
~Bacon's Blog~
Featuring Photographs of Russian band TSYGUN by Rita Fevraleva
Here's a big topic that I don’t address nearly enough. I’m going to tell you how to target your ads on social media. Understanding the core concepts behind advertisements on Facebook and Instagram is one of the most fundamentally important skills that you can teach yourself in 2019. Now, I know as well as many of you that this might not seem cool. I get it. Social media ads are sort of the devil. They are the reason Trump is president. They are the reason that you always see ads for made to order shirts for "Tough Guys who like Vikings born in November." I get it. It’s frustrating.
However, there are a lot of easy ways to target your ads that are actually going to pay off for you in the long run, and that’s what we’re going to get into in this post. Moreover, we’re going to delve into something more fundamental: the logic that you need to deploy when figuring out how exactly you want to target your ads. We’re going to dig deep into why you should be hyper-targeting, and then guide you through the process of how to grow your advertising strategy in a meaningful way that will actually pay off. It’s gonna be a helluva ride.
The key to understanding all ads on Instagram and Facebook is that they are looking to find the cheapest possible click. In layman’s terms, this refers to your lowest common denominator fan. So, if you are trying to push ‘kvlt black metal’ you shouldn’t use the term ‘black metal’ as part of your targeting settings in Ads Manager. If you put ‘black metal’ in the targeting settings, you will get Cradle of Filth fans, when you were actually hoping to get the same people who like Darkthrone. Your ability to hyper-target is incredibly important when trying to reach that next level. At the end of the day, you can’t be marketing to who you want your fans to be. You need to be marketing to who your fans are. Yes, you may want all black metal fans to like your project, but right now, you’re a lot more likely to get clicks out of the dudes who are already in your niche.
The thing is, you’re not going for just the cheapest possible click -- you’re going for the cheapest possible sale. It’s the conversion you should be focused on. This is why smart ad buyers employ a tailored approach towards how they target their audiences. For example, if you have a really big German audience, then go and run an ad in German. People like to feel catered to. They will feel especially catered to if you’re not a German-speaking band, but you make that effort anyway. The ads you run everywhere else in the world can be in English, but running the right one to that core fanbase is going to win. You need to be looking at the analytics, because you have those numbers available and aren’t taking as much advantage of them as you should be. I know this, because I have them available and I don’t do it as much as I should.
ТЛЕН (TLEN) by TSYGUN
Another big part of hyper-targeting is getting granular on geographic and personal levels that are contextually relevant to your promotional campaign. For instance, let’s say you’re a band about to embark on a 30-show tour of Europe. You could do what foolish bands do, which is just run one big $150 ad and say “Hey, Europe, we’re coming for you.” Or, you could get the most bang for your buck, and run individualized ads targeted to each city you are playing. You could say, “Hey, Paris, we’re coming for you!”, “Hey Belgium, we’re coming for you”, and so on and so forth. You get it. Yet you don’t. Why? Because it’s a pain in the ass and you’re lazy. I get it, but here’s the thing. If fucking Kreator can shoot individualized advertisements for each and every of their dates on the Decibel tour, then you can run the same ad slightly edited across 30 different markets. It’s not hard. You genuinely care about this stuff, right? Right?!
Now, I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass. This shit can be super fucking hard. Not only can it be super fucking hard, but it’s also going to take a lot of work on your end. Constant experimentation and refinement of your target audiences is inherent to the process of making sure things are performing nicely. As a general rule, you want to be paying around 75 cents per click for audiences you are targeting on Facebook, and under a dollar per click on Instagram. A little higher is okay. Those numbers are by no means precise, and in a few months they might be wrong again – but I know a lot of you guys like having detailed info like this, so I’m doing my best to give it to you.
This is also part of why I like to run lots of smaller ads before I run bigger ones, and why I run a lot of smaller ads in general. It not only gives you the ability to target more effectively, but I’ve found that the sheer power that you get from constantly optimizing pays off more in the long run rather than taking a bunch of $50 shots in the dark. There are two kinds of people who take $50 shots in the dark: people who are bad at targeting ads, and people who actually buy their own drinks in Vegas. Both of these people are the result of bad planning, so don’t be like them.
I hope this makes sense as a general primer on targeting your social content. I know that it’s some pretty complex stuff, and I’ve experienced firsthand how overwhelming Ads Manager can be. That being said, once you know what you’re doing, it’s easy to run effective ads that are going to get you traction. Once you understand some of the basic concepts behind how these ads work, then you’re going to get a whole hell of a lot further. If you guys like this article, I can get even deeper since obviously this is only the beginning. Just realize that social media ads need to be targeted not at who you want your audience to be, but rather who your audience actually is. Because when it comes down to it, that audience is a lot bigger than you might expect.
Matt Bacon (IG: mattbacon666) with Dropout Media is a consultant, A&R man, and journalist specializing in the world of heavy metal. Matt also co-hosts the Dumb & Dumbest podcast with Curtis Dewar of Dewar PR.
