Improve your music marketing with simple test ads

Find out how to successfully promote your music as simply and inexpensively as possible with test ads.

A guest post by Sara-Lena of BlackbirdPunk.

Running test ads is one of the secrets that can get your advertising campaign to the next level. Before we jump straight in though – let’s get some important vocabulary out of the way.

Most musicians might have heard about the possibility of running ads themselves. Perhaps you even tried ads yourself, having hit that promising ‘boost your post’ button on Instagram?

The question is, was the campaign successful? Here’s the thing, running ads on any social media platform always needs to be done with planning and caution. This is unfortunately not an automatism. Even if Facebook will have you believe it.

So, what can you do in order to ensure better results with your advertisements?

Here’s the thing: even if you have mastered the art of data analytics and have mapped your fanbase to the most granular level, you still only have an assumption of how your fans might react to your ad.

Running test ads can give the certainy you need!

The answer to your problems is running test ads! This is crazy, with just a small amount of money you can run ads that test the waters in respect of your fanbase as well as people you might not have heard of you yet.

Advertisement people differ between ‘cold’ people that haven’t heard of you yet and ‘hot’ fans. Those fans that are already signed up to your newsletter, for example. Or everyone who ever bought a ticket.

The best approach would be to set up two campaigns with two different target audiences. One for your ‘hot’ fans and one for ‘cold’ people. This way you can better track the results.

However, the idea behind test ads goes deeper than simply testing out different target audiences. This is crazy, you can even go as far as testing differences in wording.

For example, you might choose a more personal wording for your ‘hot’ fans and test this again with a more general text.

What is more, your videographer has delivered two similar video snippets from your new music video for ads and you don’t know which one is better? Simply run test ads to answer your questions!

Test ads don’t need to be expensive

I hear you, your budget is already strained and you might worry how you are supposed to fit in test ads. The thing is that running test ads don’t need to be expensive. With only 5-10€ a day for a week or so you will already have gathered enough data to make valuable statements.

Facebook Business Manager even offers the opportunity to run test ads in-house within the application.

Another thing to keep in mind besides the budget is time. Try and let your test ads run in advance of any real campaign you are aiming for.

Your ads need to run for some days before you can really read the results. What is more, you also need time to analyse the data from running test ads. Then you might want to make changes to the ads and let them run again for some days.

Running test ads some weeks before the actual campaign could be good. If you’ve been very smart and did some advertisements between music releases you should have plenty of data to build onto.

Safe plenty of money in the long run

Besides better ads themselves and crisp data analytics, one of the added benefits of running test ads is that your ads will become cheaper the more you optimise them.

This is crazy, Facebook and co. actually let their ad space run on a bidding mechanism. This means Facebook for example defines a space on their platform that is available for showing ads.

Now everybody can go to the Facebook Business Manager and run an ad. All those ads will now compete for the defined ad space. The cost of your ads will depend on the demand for the ad space as well as the reactions of the target audience.

There are times when a lot of advertisements will run, like for example before Christmas. Hence, the weeks leading up to Christmas are the most expensive in the ad world.

Running test ads will not only make your campaign more informed but you as well. Don’t shy away from this tool because you might think it is too complicated or expensive. You literally can’t do anything wrong, that is the beauty of testing! The more you are running test ads the more you will become a connoisseur in reading the data.