How To Promote Your Tour / Concert with Meta Ads

In this video, I'm going to show you how to run a meta ad campaign that nearly every single artist you've ever seen live has run. And that's a campaign to target people who live within a certain range of a city and make them aware of your show and then convert and then go buy tickets to come to your show. Essentially, this is a campaign of how to get more people out to your shows. And if you're a music artist that's play shows or wants to be playing shows, aside from like promoting your music itself, this is one of the most common campaigns that you need to learn how to run. worth. >> Now, the first thing we have to mention before we dive into actually building a campaign is that there actually are several different ways that you can do this depending on your relationship with the venues or promoters or whatever the relationship is between you and the show. Uh you don't always have very much control in how you can sell tickets, but sometimes you do. For example, if you do have control or maybe you're throwing the show yourself, you can use a platform like Eventbrite or a platform like Poshv or even your own online store like Shopify or Squarespace or Wix and sell tickets directly on a site that you control. You can see all the backend analytics. You can see the email addresses. You can install a meta pixel on your page and track purchase conversions. And this is the best case scenario that you can possibly have because it means in ads manager, you know, in the place where you actually run your ad campaigns, you will see a cost per purchase, which is your cost per someone actually checking out and either buying one ticket or more than one ticket, which is just allows you to have much more accurate data. What ends up happening most of the time is though, you're you're dealing with a third party who wants to sell tickets on their platform. Whether that's on the venue's website, whether they're working with a promoter and they're using a site that they control, or if you're fortunate/ unfortunate enough to be to be large enough to be working with Ticketmaster, Ticket Master gives you nothing. No tracking, no back-end analytics. Um, and in those cases, what you end up having to do is work with whoever your rep is to get you added to like a weekly, bi-weekly, or more often report that can get sent out via email. And then you're going to run a campaign like what I'm going to show you in this video. So, essentially, that's the most common scenario, at least here in the States. Um, and so that's going to be my default, but almost every tactic that I'm going to show you here applies if you're running it on your own site as well. So, if if you have like, let's say, a website link or a ticket master link, something where you're like, I have no way to track who's making it to this page, what you don't want to do is you don't just want to come to Meta and run a traffic campaign and send people directly to that page. You're you're going to end up getting a bunch of bots that are are just clicking on the ad, but then not appearing on the page. And it's it's just not going to work, in my experience, or it's not going to work nearly as well as running a conversion campaign. Pretty much I pretty much never run traffic campaigns. Pretty much everything I do is some type of pixelbased tracking to ensure you're getting real people or at least higher intent people on the other side. And if you've seen any of my meta ads for streaming videos, which I'll link to on here, so this shows you how to run ads promoting music on streaming platforms using meta ads. You'll know that I'm a big fan of using landing pages. And in this case, this is feature FM. There's a bunch of other great options like smart noise, hyped it, smith hub links, which is free, but uh feature FM and smart noise, which I have links for both all all of those platforms in the description. Um they they have something called tour links. So like this is a smart link for a song, but you can also go and make a tour link. So I'm going to click create a tour link. And uh they integrate with bands in town. So, if you're on bandit town, which if you're not on bands of town and you're an artist that's playing shows, you should be on bandit town. Maybe in the future I'll do a more dedicated video about that, but you can skip and set up manually, but just just for the sake of example, I'm going to type in some artist. I'm going to type in periphery because I believe they have a tour coming up. And this just is an easy way to just import a whole tour. Um, but it allows you to have this page. So, you have this page that you now control. On this page, you can install a Facebook pixel, which means you can track of all the people that visit this page. Do they leave the page? Do they make it to the page in the first place? And then, do they click one of these buttons to go buy a ticket? And that allows you to run that conversion campaign on Meta just like you would a streaming campaign. So, it basically, if you've run that streaming campaign before, you're already going to be familiar with 90% of what I'm going to show you with with the exception of a few small tweaks. Now, if you're using feature FM and you're using this bands in town import, I want to just caution you about one thing. Um, don't trust the bands in town link. Sometimes what it does is it is if you're on a phone, it forces the user to like um authenticate with Facebook. Um, and that can cause a pretty big big drop off and it's very frustrating. And I don't like even risking that at all because if you're spending a bunch of money in ads, why risk it at all? So, I I use this just to create the link and get the first data in, but then I come in and I actually just remake the buttons from scratch, which is very annoying, but then you don't have to worry about that risk. I told this to feature FM and apparently it is a band in town thing that they're working on making them stop. So, you know, little bit of behind the scenes stuff there, but either way, this twirling still saves you a bunch of time because it imports all the stuff and then you make your new link and then you can just, you know, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, delete the original, etc. And maybe maybe if by the time you're seeing this video that bands in town quirk isn't a concern anymore. Um, but either way, that's my experience lately. So, you have your tour link and there's two options here when you're doing this. You could make one page that has every destination on it. You could also make individual pages that just have one destination on it. So if you have a full tour um you know let's say in this case for example for Periphery right they're touring in Romania uh and a bunch of other countries around there you know Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic but then they're coming back to the states and they're doing Philly, Massachusetts uh you know all the way to Canada and then all the way to Utah and California around the whole states essentially. So um you know when you're running these ads you you want to run individual ads per region. Um, and but let's say you're promoting the show kind of far out. You might people might be clicking on this November 8th, California thing. So when they come to this page, you have to scroll really far. So sometimes I just don't worry about it. But sometimes I will make multiple pages either one per date or one per region. So it might be like make a European one, make a Eastern States one, make a Western States one if if the list is long. And of course, if you're just worrying about one show, this is not a concern at all. So anyways, set up this page, get your metapixel installed in there. I also have a very long metapixel tutorial video I'll link up here um so you're familiar with that. Basically just copy that number and throw it in here and then click save and it's pretty much identical over on smart noise. I don't I don't think they have the bands in town integration although I might be wrong but either way it's great. And if you're looking for a free option you can manhandle it in submit hub links. So submit hub links even though it's a smart link platform you can still make tour links by manually editing what the buttons say to make it tour link and I've used that and it works. So, if you're looking for a free option in a pinch, Submit Hub links is customizable enough to make it happen. So, that being said, now we have our link with a pixel installed on it. And you know how that works, which means we can make our ad. So, I'm going to come back to Met Ads, and we're not going to make a traffic campaign. We are going to make an engagement campaign because it is a conversion objective. Um, if you were selling something on an Eventbrite page or a Posh VIP page or your website, you would want to use sales. In this case, I'm going to use engagement because it's the same type of campaign essentially as I'm running for streaming campaigns. So, I'm setting it up very much like a streaming campaign. We want manual engagement. I'm just going to call this tour test, but if you were naming this, you might call it something like August 15th, Los Angeles, California. Right? So, that way it's it's it's dated and location for what the day of the show is. Basically, you would have one campaign per show. If you're doing a tour, sometimes I will have one campaign for the tour and then individual adsets for the dates. Um, it kind of depends how I'm feeling in the moment. Um, but let's just say this is this is really just like a show test. So, maybe I will label it. I'll do like um August 15th, Boston, Mass. And um I'm going to leave it as adset budget optimization here. And we're going to click next. We have some boilerplate settings we have to change. So our conversion location, we're sending people to a website. So we're going to click website. Um we choose our pixel. Our conversion event for feature FM is feature FM click which if you again if you haven't seen that pixel video um I'll I'll link it at the end of the video as well the two videos the meta editorial and the pixel video so you can reference them after. In that video I talk about the different platforms amount events they fire. In this case it's feature fem. So we're using feature fem click. And then we get to our spend. Now a lot of times I use daily budget but for a tour show promo campaign I like to use lifetime budget because a lot of times artists think about campaigns like this in a much more finite manner because you're running them from a finite time period. Right? Like let's say this is August 15th. So I'm filming this July 23rd. Um, I don't know when you'll see this video, but that's, you know, that's a good 3 weeks out. And that's roughly when I might do something like this. Sometimes you run it as early as a couple months out. Sometimes you'll start at a month out. You usually wouldn't wait till two weeks out. But, so this is an unreasonable time. It also depends how much money you have as well. But, um, a lot of artists are getting paid a fixed amount for for their show. So, they'll they'll spend a certain percentage of that fixed amount for the show. So, they might come in and be like, "I'm going to spend $100 promoting the show. I'm going to spend $250 promoting the show." And there's not really a right or wrong answer. It's it really is just kind of the more the marrier. Um, you know, it you've probably been a victim to this at some point, but you you're scrolling social media or whatever and you see a post from your favorite band saying like, you know, thanks so much this city for for being for an awesome night, whatever, and it's your city and you're like, I didn't even know they were touring. I had no idea, right? Th this is the purpose of this campaign because um you know, you're spending so much effort to throw these shows and no matter how much you do, you would inevitably have fans that are like, I had no idea you were you were in town. And you're like, I've been posting about it for months. I ran a bunch of money in ad campaigns across multiple platforms. Um we send emails on our email list and text to our text lists and inevitably there'll be people that miss it. So, you know, there is too much here, but usually people are doing on the order of, you know, a hundred to a couple hundred, unless it's a larger show, right? If if you're talking like a just bigger capacity, 500, a thousand, multiple thousands, then um the amount you're going to spend is going to get bigger because the amount of tickets you could sell is is larger. So, um yeah, well, I'll just say 250 for now, but keep that in mind. Um and then we're going to set the start date to now. We're going to set this end date to August 15th. So, it's going to spend this amount of money between this time period. And now we get to our targeting, our audience. And what we want to do here is we don't want to let Meta just target whatever the heck it wants. We want to further limit our audience, reach a limited audience where we can set audience controls to specify who sees our ads. We don't want to trust Meta's AI in this situation. Now, I'm going to go to locations, and I don't just want to run it in the entire US. In this case, it's Boston, right? So, I'm going to go to Boston and drop in the city. And it puts a mile radius around Boston. And um I can expand this. I can come up here and [snorts] I can increase it or decrease it. And the way I would think about this is um how far would fans drive to see you? Either people that already know you or people that don't know you. Like, would they drive 50 miles? That's that's you know that's a good depending on where it is in traffic that might be an hour and a half drive. So keep that in mind right? Will people drive an hour and a half to see you? Maybe. Maybe your fans will but maybe new people won't. So if you're targeting existing fans you're retargeting then it might make sense to do a larger mile radius. And if you're doing a smaller or a new fan new group of people it makes sense to do less. Right? If no one's heard of you before you might do a tighter radius because you're relying on people just being like I got nothing to do. I could go see this cool band that I've never heard of. Um, but they're not going to be willing to drive an hour and a half, right? They they might only be willing to drive very little and maybe just people who are walking and then you might go to the bare minimum here. This wouldn't be walking, but you get what I mean. It's a lot closer. Now, on a similar note, keep in mind the ruralness of where you're running this. Boston, things are very dense. So, doing something like this is is like, I don't know, probably millions of people, right? Because it's Boston. Or if you New York and LA, it's going to be the same thing. So, you can get away with doing pretty small and still having 7 million people, right? I want to turn this off. Actually, this reach more people likely to respond. This gets people who are interested in the city, which means they probably don't live there. Um, so, you know, this gives us 3.7 million people, 16 mile radius. If you're playing in, you know, I don't know, who who do I want to pick on right now? If I zoom out and you're playing in like the middle of nowhere, Kentucky, which you know, I'm sorry if you live in Hazard, Kentucky, but you were my example for middle of nowhere. And I'm sure it's a lovely place if you live there, but um you know, in terms of population density, I've never heard of it. So like maybe it's sprawling city, but look at the map, it's it's probably a more rural area. So, if you're playing here, you're going to make the mile radius a lot bigger because people here are used to driving out to see shows, right? If you could imagine, if you're playing a show in Texas, pe people drive, they're used to driving multiple hours to to go to certain things, right? Because Texas is huge. You can drive like eight hours and not leave Texas. So, people are used to driving further. Um, so the more rural, make it bigger. The more city, you can get away with smaller. So, keep that in mind. And this is one of the biggest differences between the streaming campaigns. The streaming campaigns are usually a much more global thing. Uh these tour ones are obviously going to be geo locked to where you're playing your show. And another last little pro tip is you're like, I don't want to increase the mile radius, but I want to like include this sliver of people um in Gloucester, which if you're not from Massachusetts, you might be, what's that? That's pronounced Gloucester. Um and you want to include those people. So I can do drop pin and just go boop. And now I'm covering that area without having to just extend this and include all the people out in Worcester. So that's how you can kind of paint a touring area if you want to be very specific with where you're targeting. Next, we get to ages. And this you're going to have to rely on what your audience is. But you know, if you're playing a 21 plus venue, then make it 21. Um, don't trust meta in their use as a suggestion thing. I found this is not helpful. Um, and then similarly, you know, if if you're playing, if this is like a rap show, don't, you know, probably lighten it a little bit. You don't want like you're have to be target people who are 65 plus for that, right? Um, if you're doing like a classic rock jazz show, you're going to need it to be older, but keep that in mind. Um, you can go broader than you think. So, 21 to 44 would be a pretty reasonable thing for for like a young crowd. Like, if you're like, "My audience is under 35, do 44." If you're like doing hard rock, you might be like, "Let's do 54." Even though you think your audience might be only go up to 45. So, kind of make a little bigger than you think you you actually should do. And then we get to our targeting, which there's two big options here. If you have a decentsized fan base, and when I say that, it's very hard to quantify what this means, but let's say you have, you know, tens of thousands of followers on social media. Let's say you have hundreds of thousands or millions of views on your posts on Instagram and Facebook in the last year. Um, so you have like a good like couple like hundred thousand plus people in a retargeting audience and and even that might not be enough depending then you can do custom audiences and rely on retargeting because as you might imagine the most likely candidates to come to a show of yours are people who already know your music. So, you know, some people will ask when I talk about running ads to promote your music and streaming, like why would I run a campaign like this if I don't care about promoting my music and streaming services? And one of the reasons is like most people don't go to a show of a band they don't know and like. And streaming is how people discover music. So getting people to fall in love with your music through streaming is increasing the amount of people that may come to a show, right? So that that can be one thing. Even if you're like, I don't care about streaming platforms whatsoever, but you care a lot about touring. Um there's a lot of valid and nonvalid reasons why why promoting your music on streaming can actually help your touring. So that that is one reason. Just having more fans is going to help. But if if you're in that camp, um custom audiences is where where you do it. Um I'm going to stop my screen share just because I don't know if there's any audiences in here I can't show. But essentially in um in here I'm going to make a new one actually. I can do create new custom and I can make Instagram profile and um I can make audiences of people who follow me, people who have visited my Instagram profile, people who have watched videos and I can do the same thing people who watch specific videos for certain lengths of time, people who have visited my website. I can upload my email list. I did a video on custom audiences sometime in the last year. I'll link here. it hasn't changed in a while, so that it should be up quite up to date. Um, but there's a lot of different audiences you can make and basically just throw all of them in here, right? Because keep in mind, even if you have a million people in your custom retargeting audiences and let me let me go actually grab one here. So, I'm going to grab an audience that has um this is our Instagram engagement audience. It has 145,000 people in it. But when we look at people who live within um 60 miles of Boston, it's less than a thousand. So if this is the case, then I might come up and say, well, let me extend this to 50 miles around Boston. We still have under a th00and. So keep that in mind, right? You don't want this to be below a th00and. And you probably might be wondering, well, what what's the right number to have here? And there's not necessarily a magic number, per se, but if I had to put a number, I would say make sure it's at least tens of thousands. um ideally hundreds of thousands if possible. So with a retargeting audience, chances are you're going to have tens of thousands. You have to be fairly sizable to have hundreds of thousands. So retargeting ideally tens of thousands. Cold audiences, hundreds of thousands. So keep that in mind. In this case, I'm going to remove this custom audience. We're going to target something cold. Now, you could add the custom audience to use as a suggestion, which could be a valid audience in this case, but let's just do the cold. So, I'm going to go to detail targeting. And this is one way you could do it. So, I could be like I'm going to target heavy metal. That's the genre. They don't have like alternative metal and new metal anymore. Um, and then I'm going to do define further people who like live music. And they have a few different things that fit this bill. They have music festivals and then they have concerts. And then they do generally have some other specific ones. And so I could probably do ticket master cuz if someone is identified as like ticket master, they probably have bought tickets on ticket master. And um you know there's still more in there. And I could also broaden this up. I could maybe add hard rock in our case. So it's like people that like the general genre of music you're in and people who generally like going out to shows. And that gives us 829,000 people. Um, which is great, right? That's what I was talking about. Hundreds of thousands of people. And I could actually probably tighten this, right? Because this is a cold audience. This is not people who know my band. So, we would have to come in and rein this in because um, people aren't going to drive very long for band they don't know. All right. So, now even still, we have 400,000. We could probably tighten that up a bit. I'll bring it down to 10. And I will delete this. Now, we just have Boston. We still have 400,000. So pretty good, right? That's that's totally enough in this case and that's actually plenty. Now if if you're again in Hazard, Kentucky, is that what it was before you you might have a bad time, right? So this is going to be very region specific for you. Um the last thing on here, this page is the placements. And if you know anything about me, you know I'm a big fan of doing Instagram only placements. So we are going to do the same thing here. We're just going to run this ad uh Instagram feed explore stories reels and that's it. And turn off this BS allow limited spending to excluded placements. And then I probably name this stuff. I haven't been naming anything over here, but you might call this something like uh cold audience because sometimes what I'll do is I'll make multiple adsets, one that's cold and one that's warm, and then split the budget and be like, I'm going to do 100 to warm and 150 to cold or vice versa depending on the artist. And the last thing you have is ads. And this I I don't have specific ads I can show you. Um, but you know, one kind of big thing, you're you're going to want to put your your feature FM link in your ad. And then you're going to want to, um, add text, which it won't show up until I add a video. So, I'm just going to choose a random video just for the sake of that. So, um, let's do these couple videos. My band doesn't play live. I've run a bunch of ads for bands who do play live. My band does not. I haven't played live in 16 years because I got into recording and studio stuff and I realized that it was everything I loved about making music without the stuff I don't love and I have no interest in playing shows ever since. But promoting shows and going to shows still good. Um, so this is an ad for something completely different that's not even for my band. So ignore what these actual ads are. Some of these are for it, but some of these are just for random other things. Um, and you know, you will make your ads ideally if you have it cool videos of you on stage performing with text on it that might be like August 15th, Boston, Massachusetts, and then it slides through and it's like so and so band live. And then it's just the the the video is just basically like you you looking like you're awesome on stage performing so that people can imagine how much fun they're going to have at your show. That's really like the dream scenario. Um if you don't have that, then you could use music video clips and social media footage and whatever. But then once you play your next show, go get that footage because that footage generally works. For retargeting ads, you can get away with talking ads like, "Hey, it's so and so and I'm coming to your city on this date and it's going to be a great time. can't wait to see you there. That can work if you have a fan base already, but um it's just harder. It's good to have that performance footage if you have it, but music video clips and social media clips can work great. Facebook's kind of glitching out here with the preview, but the last thing is just describing your show in the text. So, usually I do something here like Friday or whatever day of the week this is. Friday, August 15th in Boston, Mass. were playing live at the Wister Paladium, which is not in Boston, but but you you get my point. Um, you know, come come and hang out or whatever. And obviously, this going to be very language dependent on you and your brand, but that's it's a pretty good starting point for what the text ends up being most of the time and get as many videos as you can. If you have five, great. If you have 10, great. If you have more than 10, great. Test different songs. Test different parts of the song. Test different footage of shows you have. um and see what works best and then evolve over time. So, this is a social media clip. I probably wouldn't run this exact one because obviously the text is nothing to do with the show, but keep in mind lip sync performance video with with some stuff about the show might be cool. This would be a very bad ad, but I don't have any tour footage for my band and the artists that I work with, um I wouldn't feel comfortable showing you their exact clips without asking them first. Now, at this point, you can go ahead and publish that campaign, but you can't see how many sales are actually happening, right? You can see how many people have landed on the page and then clicked to go to the ticketing platform. We don't know how many have actually purchased. And the only way to know that for sure is if you're added to the reporting emails or whatever automations that the the venue and promoter have. Um, and that will tell you when you're getting ticket sales. So what you want to do in that situation is use the analytics on the platform you have the landing page and your ads and you're going to make a spreadsheet where you track um individual conversions from either here or meta or ad spend over time and then get the ticket data that you have from that vendor and also grab it over the same time periods. And what that's going to let you do is graph over time your ticket your your ad spend and conversions and your ticket sales over time. And what you will hopefully see if things are working is that oh I was running I wasn't running ads here and we're getting like two sales a day. I start running ads we're getting like four to five sales a day. And then you're going to see that slope of that line of ticket sales increase right when your ad campaign started. And that allows you to kind of guesstimate like I started the campaign here. We're getting this many extra sales per day since then. And then I could do the math saying, well, this is how much I'm spending per day or for the time period. This is how many tickets we sold in addition to what we were regularly selling. And come up with an estimated cost per ticket sold to let you know if it's worth it, right? Are you paying $10 per ticket sale or are you paying $100 per ticket sale? And then what is a ticket sale actually worth to you? Like what are you getting paid? And then what is your average merch sales per head? to add it to like what are you getting paid on average per person that comes which might not be an easy equation depending on how you're getting paid and then what is your average kind of return per head on merch um and how does that all the economics work. You might be willing to lose money on a show to make the show really really good and increase future show opportunities. Um but you're not going to do that every time. Some shows you're going to have to actually make money on and some shows you're going to have to lose money on eventually. So that's really it. Now, if you want to learn how you can run the Spotify equivalent of this, which I think is kind of a good prerequisite for learning how to run campaigns like this anyways, check out this video right here to see that entire process from start to finish. And if you want to see that pixel video that I mentioned, you can click that right there as well. Thanks for watching. And if you rather just outsource this entire thing, you can hire my agency, Southworth Media, in the description below. We do campaigns like this all the time. So, yeah, thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.