How I Saved This FAILING Music Ad Campaign

Recently, I did a video showing the marketing campaign so far for my band's new song, Cold. And the campaign was going pretty bad at the time that I showed that video, but I was talking about things that I was doing to try to improve it going forward. Uh, and it's been some time. I don't remember how many weeks it's been, and then it'll be a couple more weeks by the time you see this, but the campaign has actually improved dramatically due to a few unique twists that I did. So, the kind of moral of this video is, yes, there are plenty of times you should give up on a song because not every song will just do well. Some songs will just do worse. There actually are some party tricks you can pull to drastically improve a song. So maybe don't give up right away, especially not after the first thing you tried. So let me walk you through what I did here. So the first thing we did is I had this regular EDM EWM cold streaming campaign. I covered this campaign in the last video. I'm not going to go over the nitty-gritty of all of it, but we had 29 adsets. Right? Look down here. 29 adets. All of these things are different audiences slash videos that I was trying. I don't know exactly how many videos I tried by the time I was done, but it was a good amount. I'll click on edit and I'll open this up here. There was um I don't know, there was at least 12, I would guess, just between the different types of videos that I had. So, a bunch of different types of videos that I tried and 29 total adsets. And the best I could do after all of that was an adset that was 51, another adset that was 44 for a for a total lifetime average of 61 cents per conversion. pretty rough. Like not the worst thing in the world, but pretty bad. Everything in in marketing is really relative, right? If if the best result you've ever had as a dollar and your new song is 60 cents, you're going to be pretty thrilled. If the best results if you all your results are normally 20 to 30 and your new result is 32, you're going to be pretty pissed, right? Um I see this all the time just when I'm talking to different artists. They'll there'll be an artist that's upset with a campaign that costs 30 cents a conversion because they're used to getting between 15 and 25 cents a conversion or something and they're very fortunate they get results that good, but that kind of just is what it is. Different different people have different baselines for results. Different different things do differently, right? So, but this case was doing pretty bad by my own standards. And so, I tried a bunch of things, right? We had this 61 cent. I also tried instead of using feature FM as a landing page, I also tried going to submit hub links just to see if the different conversion event would be different. Spoiler alert, you can see wasn't, which is good, right? I I would hope that a different landing page wouldn't make much of a difference. And in case essentially it did the same, right? If I let this run longer, these probably would have been the same results. But then I tried a few things, a few new things. You'll notice there's some way better results up here. So what what what's up with these? So, and and by the way, I actually cover this in my newsletter, musicmarketing Monday. If you go to musicmarketingmonday.com or click the link below, I have a newsletter that I send out most Mondays when I when I can get around to writing things. And you you'll get kind of early insight into things I'm trying in the music marketing world and all just kind of free advice and stuff. Doesn't cost anything. There's no monthly subscription option either. It's just 100% free. Just, you know, go go join it. More content straight to your inbox every Monday. Anyways though, I covered this in one of the recent things initially was these two different playlists. So what I did is I made two playlists that kind of fit this theme. I did a deaf tones core playlist and I did a new metal playlist and um I'm using the song and actually other songs by the band in these ads. I'm promoting the playlist instead. So the nice thing is I can like run the ad and then show like this is the playlist that I'm promoting, right? And so what that does is it just gives people more of like a value proposition. It's like, oh, I don't have to check out this unknown artist. I can just check out this deaf tones core playlist. And if I jump in here, you'll see it's actually all tier one countries as well. So, if I look at breakdowns by country, 35 cents in the USA. Let me sorry, let me jump down here. You can't see it. It's behind my face. So, it's doing really good. Actually, that's a very good result for the US. Um, and it's because I'm in front of that playlist. And so, that that does a few things, right? That that adds more like growth to the song. Um, but we're going to come back to this page in a sec. We also did the same exact thing for for new metal. So, same tactics, but I think in here it just everything was just better. Um, it's all tier one as well. So, 23 cents tier one only, mostly United States. So, very good result, right? We were we were having 60 cents a conversion tier one and two. Yeah, that was a big improvement. But the problem with promoting a playlist, while I do have multiple songs by the band in there and I can use multiple songs to advertise the playlist, it doesn't give you the same engagement as a campaign directly to a song. Like there's there's a bunch of downside sending two people to a playlist. You don't get as many saves. You don't get as many streams per listener on the song. You don't get as many playlist ads on the song. You get followers in a playlist, more streams per listener across your catalog, but algorithmically that doesn't help the song as much for vocal driven music. Um, and so what I did is I I just wanted to make more ads. That's what this EWM cold streaming dynamic thing is. And now I'll walk you through this. There's only one ad set, one ad kind of, but I'm using dynamic creative. I'm using these videos that I I was on TikTok once and there was this random company that got like promoted to me called Cashy. Not a sponsor. Don't know them. Haven't even paid for their subscription yet. just using their free trial. Um, and then I edited out the watermark in the free free trial. So, I hope that's okay. But, um, I'm probably going to subscribe to the service because it this service allowed me to just make a bunch of like kind of loweffort ads in different categories. Um, and they worked, right? They actually freaking worked. That's the only difference between this campaign. One is dynamic creative, but I haven't seen dynamic creative inherently do better or worse. In fact, I have more data points of of it doing worse. But overall recently, I've actually been using a lot and I've had better results with dynamic creative. Not better. I've had just as good results with dynamic creative at the expense that or not the expense at the trade-off that I can make things faster, right? Because I don't have to make every single video. I can just dump them all in creative. And if I can be faster there and spend less just raw wasted time doing that, I can focus more effort doing things uh like that have more impact, right? like getting more creatives or trying more audience testing. In this case, I didn't do anything. I just uploaded them and threw it and then it just immediately worked. And now we're getting 27 cents a conversion. And if we look at the country distribution, we can see what happened. The number one country is actually Turkey. Oh yeah, that actually brings me to the second point. There's actually two changes for this campaign. One was the dynamic creative. Two was this new video platform that I'm I'm testing out. Uh and three was I added Turkey. The reason why I added Turkey is I've seen a lot of other alternative metal hard rock bands do very good in Turkey, right? Multiple people that I've seen with ads and so I'm I threw in Turkey there. Now, the interesting thing is it's not only doing good in Turkey, right? This campaign is doing most of the results are coming in Turkey, but it's 29 cents in the US and it's 31 cents in Mexico and it's 34 cents in Brazil. So, this thing did better everywhere. It just also did the best in Turkey. So, there's actually a few elements to this. So, the real point of this video is to show that like I could have given up, right, long into this first campaign, 29 adsets and all these videos. But then I pivoted, right? I tried a different streaming or tried a different uh landing page service. I tried two different playlists. I tried a different video platform, made completely different videos I would never otherwise make. And then launched Dynamic Creative with countries that I don't normally even target. And it's paying off. We I started all this stuff back here around August 24th. And you can see the saves went from like 80 saves a day up to 140. And I think I'm actually spending less than I was back here. So I'm spending less and I'm getting double the saves. Pretty significant bump in playlist ads and and a few other things. Right. And the streams did go up. It's just a little harder to see, right? There is a lift obviously from 2,000 up to 2,300, but it's just a little more subtle. When you look at the saves, it's like much more significant overall. Um, but anyways, moral of the story, don't give up. But also, I want to just add, sometimes do give up. A lot of people will really go down the rabbit hole with a song when they have like another song that's about to come out or they have a bunch of older songs they never tried. And the reality is some songs do just never work. For me, I was very adamant that this was going to work because this was our first new song release in over two years. That was a brand new song. So, I really wanted this to work well and I now I have it working well, right? And now we have a new song we're going to be scheduling out in in a little bit. So anyways, hope this helpful. If you want to see more about how you can run campaigns like this, check out this video to see the entire process from start to finish. I do also have a course if you're interested in that kind of thing. Check this out right here. And I do have consulting links and there's agency stuff in the description if that's more your cup of tea. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.