The Ultimate Advertising Toolkit for Musicians
Advertising music is not the easiest task for musicians. With this Advertising Toolkit for Musicians, learn how to boost your music career with top advertising tools to increase your reach and impact.
The Ultimate Advertising Toolkit for Musicians
by Randi Zimmerman of Symphonic Blog
As an independent artist, it’s typically up to you to manage your own advertising efforts. The problem is advertising your music isn’t so easy. On the plus side, there are tons of platforms built specifically to make this process less of a headache for artists who may not have the budget for a massive marketing team or the time to dedicate to mastering every step. To help you out, we asked our team about some of the most useful advertising tools for musicians in 2024. Check them out right here…
Spotify Marquee
Familiar with pop-up ads? This is a version of those you actually won’t hate. If you’re looking for a new way to drive more listeners to your latest release, Marquee could do just the trick. Spotify’s Marquee is a full-screen, sponsored recommendation of your new release to Spotify Free and Premium listeners who have shown interest in your music and have the potential to listen more. When a listener sees and clicks your Marquee, they’ll be sent directly to that release.
With this tool, you can market your music to people who genuinely want to see more of your music and track exactly how they engage with the release after seeing the Marquee. Because these campaigns are targeted to specific audiences based on factors like location, age, listening habits, and music preferences, it will only be shown to users who are most likely to be interested in the music being promoted.
Adcritter
AdCritter is a digital advertising platform that simplifies the process of buying and running ads across various channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and more, without the need for advanced marketing expertise. If you’re an independent artist, odds are you don’t have thousands to shell out on advertising. With Adcritter, you can get badass, elevated advertising and a user-friendly interface that anyone can manage. With this platform, you get pre-built ad templates, audience targeting options, automated ad placement and even budgeting tools to help you manage how much you’re spending to get the most of your efforts without breaking the bank.
This platform is $149 a month, but you do get 30 days free to try it out and make sure it fits your needs. If you’re looking to spend a little extra and get more in-depth tools and guidance at your disposal, this is a great option.
Feature.fm
We have a partnership with Feature.fm to bring Symphonic clients a fully fledged music marketing suite right in the SMS. With more music being released than ever before, Feature.fm helps you market your music, tours, and content with a marketing suite built specifically for music. With it, you can engage your fans in seconds with innovative tools like:
- Artist Bio Links
- Pre-Release Links
- Release Links
- Contest & Unlock Pages
- Tour and Event Links
- Podcast Links
- Short Links, and so much more…
When it comes to advertising specifically, they offer some great tools like Sponsored Song Campaigns, Pre-Save Campaigns, Playlist Targeting Ads, Native Audio Ads and so much more.
Toneden
Toneden is a marketing platform that can help you grow your audience and engage with your audience with automated marketing campaigns across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and more. You can target specific audiences, schedule posts, and track the performance of your campaigns to optimize your strategy. In addition, you can create customizable landing pages to help you promote new music releases, merch, or events. Plus, these landing pages can be optimized to capture fan data and drive conversions so you can see exactly how your efforts are paying off.
Through their integrations with Facebook and Instagram, you can create, manage, and optimize your ad campaigns across these platforms with audience targeting, automated bidding, and A/B testing features to ensure campaigns reach the right people.
Musicmap
Musicmap isn’t necessarily advertising platform, but it does offer a wealth of information for artists in the research phase of their advertising efforts. Musicmap is a music recommendation engine where users can enter the name of an artist or band they like, and the platform generates a “map” of other artists that are musically similar. This is useful to know if you want to check out what other artists similar to you are doing with their advertising efforts. You can use the artists similar to you as keywords for your social media advertising platforms like Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, and get a better understanding of what fans of similar artists are responding to.
Amplify
Amplify is a great platform that lets musicians promote their music with creative link pages that truly represents them. Their smart links, pre-saves, bio links and more are all seamlessly designed to make an impact on your audience.
They offer a variety of page types to help you share whatever you have going on with ease, including:
- Release Page: Link to your music and content across all streaming platforms and elsewhere on the web.
- Pre-Save: Hype up your fans for new releases and preload your launch day success.
- Bio Link: This is your stage. Easily add your latest releases, merch, socials, videos, links, and more.
- Event: Sell tickets to your event or tour. Link to any provider, and enrich your page with media, embeds, shop, email capture and more.
- Reward: Reward your fans for joining your email list, following you or subscribing to your content.
Found.ee
With the Found.ee Managed Ads Program (MAP), artists like you can now book high-quality digital ads on websites like Pitchfork, Complex, Billboard, and Rolling Stone – for a fraction of the cost of hiring a marketing agency. Found.ee’s ad experts design your ad and then set it up for you, to generate the most results possible with their expertise; all you’ll need to do is submit a simple form. How it works is experts will book your ad based on your goals, monitor your ads to make sure they are performing well and share your results in real time. They can even help you design your ad creative itself – including playable banners that feature your music.
In Conclusion…
The Ultimate Advertising Toolkit for Musicians
When it comes to choosing the right advertising platform, it’s important to consider how much money you’re willing to spend, how much time you have to invest, and what results you’re aiming for. If you need a more automated approach, a full service platform like Adcritter may be more cohesive. If you only need certain tools, Amplify or Feature.fm may be a more cost-effective approach. No matter what you decide on, these tools are some of the best in the game to take your advertising efforts to the next level.
You got this!
