The $5/day music marketing budget (exactly how I would do it)

In this video I'm going to walk you through a $50 a day music marketing strategy that you can run with Meta Ads to promote your music on streaming services for as simple as possible. So in a nutshell the strategy involves running a Meta Ad conversion campaign driving people to a landing page and taking them to a playlist where your music is inside the playlist. And if you've seen any videos I typically talk about driving people directly to a song. But you're running this at $5 a day. So you don't really have enough of a budget to trigger a significant algorithmic traction and like a very spiky way to make a song pop off. So the reason why we're going with a playlist is because it allow you to just have a a regular influx of people for five bucks that are going to get sent to a targeted playlist that has your music and other artists music who are very similar and tight fit to lift up your whole catalog. The idea is that people will come to this playlist and listen to a significant chunk of it which will help Spotify's algorithm kind of learn about where you fit in their ecosystem and have people listen to a bunch of your songs in the meantime causing a small algorithmic lift across a bunch of songs instead of trying to make one song pop off in some significant way. So this is an example of a playlist you can do. And there's there's kind of two ways to do this. You could do this with a playlist that has other artists music on it like this one is Deftones core. Another example of like the stuff that's only your music would be this. The advantage of doing a playlist like this is you get that algorithmic association with other artists um because essentially I'm actually putting other artists music first in this because the play is people have to listen to that first song to get to our music. So I know that I'm only getting like the most qualified people. Not only do people have to see my ad, click on it, go on the landing page and jump through, they also have to get past that first song to get to my music. So I know they're like pretty damn into what I'm doing assuming that I get the playlist right. This is a quality play not a volume play. So assuming you're going with this recommendation, make that playlist, make it hyper targeted, hyper accurate, theme it well, give it some artwork. And that's step one. Then what are you going to do? You're going to grab the link to this playlist. Copy link to playlist. We're going to go to submithub.com and make a SubmitHub link. So, over on the left there's this links thing. We can do paste a Spotify URL. Playlist. Plop that sucker in there and now we have a link and there we go. One thing that's very important, you have to make sure that in the edit page you install your meta uh meta pixel. Now, if you're wondering like where do I get this pixel? What is going on? Well, you get this pixel inside of meta ads manager, which is where we're going to go next and I'll show you where to grab it as we get along this campaign. But, I'm going to walk through the campaign, but I'm going to gloss over some details because I've covered like the details very intricately many, many times. Um so, I'm going to link you to a video right here and at the end of the video I'll link you to it as well. It is a I'll link you to two videos actually. There's a 40-minute video on how Facebook pixels works and another 40-minute video on how to build more intricate campaigns like this from start to finish. Um I don't think you'll necessarily need it, but if you're going through this and you're like this is a lot, I want more context. Those videos will be great. That way I don't have to worry about you you having every little shred of context with this video. Those videos are great reference points and I update them every single year. All right, we're going back to ads manager. Now, we can actually start building our campaign. So, I'm going to go to to create and we want to make an engagement campaign. If Meta ever tries to get you to do any type of tailored, Advantage Plus, automatic, or recommended settings, don't do it. Always go manual. And now we have our campaign. So, this is what's known as or I call at least a campaign skeleton. Over in the top left you see we have the campaign, we have an ad set, and we have an ad, and that's also reflected up here. New engagement campaign, one ad set, and one ad. Um at the campaign level, I'll just call this test um playlist campaign. I guess you could name this whatever the name of your playlist is, or the name of your song perhaps, if you're working on a current song that you're doing this for. And then we want to turn on campaign budget. And this lets us specify a budget for this campaign. This is going to be $5, right? Now, if you have more than $5, you can do more than this, of course. Um but if you're doing a bigger budget, I would recommend watching that video that I'm linking at the end of this video because we're we're purposely doing this campaign like simpler and smaller because of the reduced budget. So, if you're if you have a bigger budget, I really recommend checking out that other video at the end of this video just to see the extra context of how more sophisticated these campaigns can get. But if you're in the $5 camp, like you want to keep this simple, you want to reduce variables, which is what we're going to set up for. So, I'm assuming, going forward, that um you're spending $5 a day. So, we set our $5 budget. Now we can click next. And now we're in our ad set. So, our ad set um is where we define a bunch of things, but namely our audience, where our ad runs, and also what is our conversion. Well, our conversion is happening on this landing page. People visit this page and they they click to go to our platform, and that fires a conversion event. The next area we need to focus on is the audience section. If I gloss over any feature, it's because you you don't need to worry about it. Like you can set start dates and end dates, and you can set minimum maximum budgets and and all this stuff. Uh you don't need to mess with that here, right? So, that's why I'm skipping over it. Um but the audience section, this is another example of Meta trying to destroy you. Um they're automatically turning on this thing called Advantage+ Audiences, which is a feature that works for certain types of campaigns. It is not something you want for this campaign. So, we want to further limit your audience and reach a limited audience. First thing, locations. I'm going to come in here and I have a preset saved. I'm going to go to save locations and do tier 1/2. And these are the countries that I'm using. Case you want to copy them. I will do a shameless self-promotion here. If you book a consultant call with me or buy my course, both linked down below, I you'll get access to this list um in a spreadsheet that you can copy and paste from. But, if you want to grab it all, you just saw the whole thing on screen. Um so, we have our countries in there. Ages. We're going to do, you know, this is very dependent on your audience. I'm just going to do 18 to 50. I like to keep it pretty wide. And for my band, we do like alternative metal music, 18 to 50 is like pretty pretty wide. Meta's going to hone in on what works best anyways, so it's better to go a little wider than you think than to tight. Like, you don't want to you would never do like 18 to 30. You'd be like, "Oh, my audience 18 to 30, let me do 18 to 40." Now, I don't want to do this use a suggestion thing, because if I do this, it's just going to it completely ignore what I typed in, which I this is another example of Meta trying to destroy you. So, now they'll actually respect the age limit. And the last thing in this section we need to do is our targeting. Think of the targeting less of like "What dock am I going to put my ship in?" It's more of like, "What direction am I aiming the ship at?" Right? It's not "What spot in the parking lot am I parking at?" It's "Which store am I parking at? Which parking lot am I driving to?" Okay? It's not "What town am I living in?" It's "What state I'm going to." And that's enough for metaphors. That's enough. So, this would be like a decent set of targeting for me. And again, this is not like, "Oh, target fans." You used to be able to target Deftones directly. So, this is not like target Deftones and target Bring Me the Horizon and Breaking Benjamin and Tool and A Perfect Circle, which you used to be able to do like 6 months ago, 7 months ago, maybe. Um they it changed very recently. This is like hard rock, metalcore, heavy metal, extreme metal. I'm just kind of pointing in that direction. So, keep that in mind. But, the last thing we need to do on this page is the placements, which is the way at the very bottom. This determines where ads run. And we don't want to use Advantage Plus. We want to go to show more settings, scroll down, and uh we're going to do Instagram only. So, I'm going to turn off everything except for Instagram. Another example of Meta trying to destroy you. Every time you click on something, the page jumps around and makes it hard to click on stuff too quick. So, this is the placements that I want. It's just these handful of Instagram places, basically feed, explore, stories, and reels. So, now we can go name this. This is basically tier 1 {slash} 2 IG genres, just to give myself kind of a reference for what I'm targeting. We're only doing one ad set in the simple campaign. And now we can click next, and now we now we get to the ads, which this might be the most common thing people get wrong. A lot of people think, "Well, I'll use the chorus of my music video." But, at the very least, a lot of people just use one ad. And you could kind of get away with that a little bit like 5 years ago using just a handful of ads, but honestly, um I would try to use like a minimum of five. So, um Facebook and Instagram, you can choose your profiles here. If they don't show up, you might have to link them, so keep that in mind. We're going to create an ad, manual upload, single image or video. And the website URL is just going to be that SubmitHub link that we have. And then now the fun part, the ads. So, I'm going to do set up ad creative, video ad. If they try to turn site links on, just click here and turn it off. This is a stupid feature that shouldn't exist at all for by default at least. Um I won't get into it, but turn it off, please. Now, media is where we upload the videos. What you didn't see here is is as I'm checking these videos, it's adding them to this queue thing at the bottom. Basically, the way it goes now is you can add up to 10 videos to one ad. So, instead of having to make 10 different ads, you're adding 10 videos to one ad and Meta goes and tests them all. But I don't just want to show you a couple of these ads because again, these ads are important. This is this is arguably like the most important part. So, um we have our lip sync category. And I did a video on I'm going to do another shameless plug here. I did a video up here that you can click on um on different types of ad creatives that work. And so, that video is just a whole video dedicated talking about videos. I'm I'm going to be doing more videos going forward on this because there's just so much to talk about lately. Um but but that's neither here nor there. So, going back to this, lip sync video, very simple. I just set up a camera and recorded me lip syncing along to the songs. Um I wish I added lyrics to these, but it is what it is. We have the playlist promotion thing. I just got the playlist artwork and put some fire effects on it. This is like a super boring ad, but it just worked well. Right? Nothing fancy. I made this in 5 minutes. I generated this cover art using Chat GPT. I threw it in Premiere Pro, but CapCut would work just as good. I downloaded a fire effect video with transparency on the internet and I put it on top of it, right? It took 5 minutes to make this. And then I chopped this up and I think I made five versions of this. I just chose two here, but they're exactly the same. Just different parts of the same song. Or they might actually be different songs, too. Um I have a lyric video here, which um my my agency actually makes these lyric videos. If you want one, there's a link in the description. Um, but it's it's a one of the various services we provide. Um, they like it additionally we also make ad creatives, but this is like a dedicated full like uh lyric video thing that we do. Then we chop that up into bits. This is an example of a Flow Stage ad. I'm going to be doing a Flow Stage video in the future. Um, it's Flow Stage and and similarly Kaashi are services that allow you to make videos with stock footage or footage that you found very simply and put lyrics on them. And um, I'll have links below for for both of these. They're both affiliate links, but I think they have discount codes if I recall. Um, I know for Flow Stage I think it gets you 20% off your first your first month. So, it's a pretty good thing. But it allows you to make ads like these. You just kind of get some vibey stock footage and put some lyrics on it. In this case I uploaded some video game footage um of Dark Souls um, and I guess also Call of Duty 4. Um, and then uh similarly I also have one using Halo Combat Evolved footage again talking about how like my music kind of fits with that 2000s era stuff at least the this song particular in this ad does. So, it's just video game footage for in both of those cases. In this case it's just straight up, but in the other case there's um lyrics that were transcribed by by Flow Stage and then animated in this brat style with with Flow Stage. Again, I'll have videos on these services more coming up. So, make sure you subscribe if if you want to see that. Um, and then going forward the the kind of the last step here is putting in some text. And once you do that, you're you're done, right? Like you you have your ad. So, you can just click publish and this is going to go through review and this is going to drive people to this page, track the conversions, and people are going to drive to that playlist and stream a bunch of your music. Now, this video has gone on way longer than I initially planned it to be, but it's worth noting that this is a learning curve. This is a process. And your first ad is unlikely to just be an instant slam dunk. Um what would be a great result for the tier one, two countries with this kind of setup? Um for your first try, if it's under 50 cents, I think you should be happy because this is your first try. Your first try is probably not going to be your best try. Just like making music, your first songs probably sucked. In fact, I'd be shocked if they didn't suck, right? It's because everyone's first song sucked. It's the same thing with your ad. This is a new thing you're learning. Um under 50 cents, basically 50 cents is the threshold where I start saying like that's bad. Um at least depending on your goals, but generally like over 50 cents is not good. 30 to 40 cents is good. 20 to 30 cents is great. Under 20 cents is phenomenal. Those are my metrics for success and most people I know have a similar range of success. Occasionally, I'll meet someone that's happy to get anything under 80 cents and then other times I'll meet someone who's completely unhappy if they get anything over 25 cents. So it's a little relative, but most of the time if you get 25 cents, you should be celebrating, in my opinion. Um but your first try under 50, massive win because then if it's not working, you can go and test other songs, test other ad creatives, and iterate on this process. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, but this is a nice skill to to learn. Um and especially with which the but if you have $5 a day, you don't have the budget to outsource this to an agency. Um now that being said, if you do have a larger budget like a thousand plus and you're looking to outsource this, our agency links are are down below and we do this as a service. We've worked with artists on, you know, campaigns in that $1,000 threshold. We've also worked on like $20,000 plus campaigns. So, any any kind of level here, we've worked with we've worked with label artists, we've worked with indie artists, we've worked on tour campaigns, email list campaigns, in addition to campaigns like this. So, we're we're happy to help, but we don't we don't do we don't do $150 monthly budgets like this. It's just not worth it for us. So, if you're trying to do this, learning the skill is great because then you can just kind of have this campaign that always runs in the background. If you're kind of in the middle where you're like, I have a little bit more money but not enough to justify outsourcing it or maybe you just don't want to outsource it because you want more control, tools like Hypeddit can be really good or Smart Noise. I have links in the description for both of those. They have these automated ad tools where you can create ads semi-automatically. And they're just following the template, right? They're following the template and they're going with it. They don't do as good as a human going in and like swapping out ad creatives and testing, but they're really good starting points for people who are who are in this this like sub like under $500 range where you can't outsource it, you don't have enough to invest in like education to learn about the stuff or you don't have money to burn to fail, right? Cuz if you fail, you're you're burning money, too. Um so, those are the different options you can consider. You can just kind of go forward with this. You can try some of those automated tools. If you have more money, you could hire someone like me or my agency to do it. Um but either way, this is a good strategy that I found that that is just kind of reliable you can run every day for the cost of like a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Honestly, it's less than the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Now, if you want to see those videos I mentioned before, like this one right here that shows the entire process of setting campaigns like this up from start to finish, check that out. And the one on the bottom there is that pixel video I was talking about to learn all the nitty-gritty details about the pixel wars. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.