Music Marketing with Facebook Ads featuring Kyle The Ally

In this episode Kyle Markland and I talk about marketing your music with Facebook ads, how to get a better cost per conversion, how artists should think about risk, and more!

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Important Points:

Andrew and Kyle are talking about how Facebook Ads Manager treats ToneDen and Hypeddit conversions differently, with Hypeddit typically delivering higher quality listeners.

Andrew and Kyle give advice when running A/B tests with Facebook ads, to aim for at least 10 data points over 2 weeks with $10/day per ad set to get statistically significant results.

Kyle suggests for music ads, to use high quality video (not just iPhone) with attention to lighting, framing, color correction. Performance videos tend to work best.

Kyle talks about writing short, catchy ad captions tailored to your target audience and asking questions or being quirky which can help grab attention.

Podcast Outline:

[00:56:00] The best music marketing advice is to be mentally prepared for any scenario, as music is subjective art and people may not like your music. – Kyle

[00:01:14] The advantage of having an engineering background in the music marketing business. – Kyle

[00:02:32] Using Facebook ads to promote an album and learning from mistakes and experiments. – Kyle

[00:04:11] Why Hypeddit gives higher quality listeners according to Facebook conversion data. – Kyle

[00:06:02] How taking a risk can pay off when you’re starting your business. – Kyle

[00:07:04] The origins of the “Kyle The Ally” moniker. – Kyle

[00:09:45] Hypeddit vs ToneDen – Kyle & Andrew

[00:10:47] The importance of high quality video – Kyle & Andrew

[00:12:47] For guitar-based genres like rock and metal, audiences like seeing full band performances, especially drummers for some reason. – Kyle & Andrew

[00:15:52] As an engineer you solve optimization problems using data, so music marketing with its analytics is very compatible, just a different application. – Kyle

[00:18:41] Science and engineering use rigorous methods to find the best available truth, which helps with data-driven marketing. – Kyle

[00:20:07] If a campaign performs poorly, try broadening the audience first before making other changes to let Facebook optimize. – Kyle & Andrew

[00:24:44] Optimizing the thumbnail can help since it provides the first impression on social media feeds. – Andrew

[00:27:48] Short, punchy 1-sentence captions work best, like “This is a song for people who live for the mosh pit” for a metal band. – Kyle

[00:31:16] Whatever video you use, make sure it’s high quality, well-lit and composed to give the best first impression. – Kyle & Andrew

[00:43:17] Why you should use Facebook’s A/B test feature just to separate audiences, but track metrics manually to do rigorous statistical analysis. – Kyle

[00:51:14] Getting under 10 cents per conversion for niche artists and growing them thousands of Spotify listeners. – Kyle

Wise Words:

[00:00:56] “You have to be mentally prepared for any scenario. Because, you know, even the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” – Kyle

[00:01:49] “Thing is you’re going to fail a lot more than you’re going to succeed in general. And honestly, I think that’s true with most things in life.” – Andrew

[00:15:32] “Engineering is all about optimization problems. When you put it in those terms, running a Facebook ad campaign to promote some piece of music on Spotify is not that different.” – Kyle

[00:28:28] “Put yourself in the shoes of a prospective listener. What kind of person listens to your music? What do they enjoy about the kind of music you make?” – Kyle

Resources Mentioned:

• Kyle The Ally Website – link
• Kyle’s YouTube – link
• Learn how to grow your YouTube channel – link

Learn More:

If you enjoyed this interview you might also like this one I did with Tom DuPree III about music marketing with Facebook ads.