Facebook Ads for Musicians
– 10 Types of Audiences to Target –

There’s no shortage of websites and YouTube tutorials teaching you how to create Facebook ads, but the biggest hurdle you will face is achieving sustainable and increased results. It’s hard knowing how to build out strong social funnels and what to look for and optimise when managing social ads – after all, that’s why there are social specialists like us at Pink Lemonade who have been doing this for nearly a decade.

But if you’re a musician or performing artist and are considering social media advertising or trying to understand whatyou can do with it and who are the types of audiences you can target– this article is specifically for you.

With nearly a decade of experience in Facebook advertising across almost every type of industry, I can confidently say Facebook advertising is one of the most effective avenues to reach an audience and get them to engage with your brand/business and convert. Whether that is a purchase, sign up or complete another action you want them to do, it can be done successfully without costing an arm and leg.

Below are the ten types of audiences you can target with Facebook ads, suited to musicians and performing artists, using ads to entertain and engage, making it a strong option for promotion and engagement.

Contents

1 Who Can I Target With Facebook Ads? 10 Facebook Audiences for Musicians & Performing Artists
2 Final Thoughts
- 2.1 Related Posts

Who Can I Target With Facebook Ads? 10 Facebook Audiences for Musicians & Performing Artists

#1. Target & Reach Facebook Fans & People Who Have Liked Your Page

Now you might be assuming that of course your current fans or people who have ‘liked’ your page will see your content posted on your page, but sadly this is a thing of the past. Organic content (this is content you’re posting on your page without paying costs for boosting or advertising) is shown only to a tiny percentage of the people that actually like or follow your page. Usually, it is seen by under 10%, but more often than not around 1-3%, leaving a large percentage of your fans and followers not seeing your content.

When posting content to your page, yes you can pay to boost this content, and there are several goals or objectives you can optimise towards, including engagement, contacts etc (see below). The downside to boosting content compared to Facebook advertising through ads manager is the limited targeting and ability to ensure your money is not wasted through specific targeting that will get your results. If you choose to boost posts, best practice is to select people who have shown an interest already via engagement.

#2. Target & Reach Your Engaged Social Audience

As well as reaching people that like and follow your page, using Facebook Ads Manager you also have the ability to create a custom audience of people who have engaged with your Facebook and Instagram account. Having a business or creator Instagram account, as well as your Facebook page, allows you to create a custom audience including everyone who has engaged with your accounts, who has engaged with (comments, likes etc.) or saved posts, those that have sent messages or visited your profile. The maximum date range is 365 days, and creating different custom audiences using these options creates a strong social audience to promote your content to. This custom audience can be a powerful middle and bottom of funnel audience – have you ever liked or commented on posts but don’t follow the actual pages or Instagram accounts?

#3. Target & Reach People Who’ve Liked Other Pages and Artists

As a musician or performing artist, you know your sound and art is unique and will be enjoyed by an audience that also likes acts such as… Fans of other select Facebook pages make a great way to target a broader, colder audience who will most likely interact with your ads and convert. Managing ads through Facebook’s Business Manager, in the detailed targeting section, you can target people by interest, demographic and behaviours – and fans of other pages fit into the interest category. Don’t get your hopes too high, as not every page or account is available for targeting; see examples below. Yay, I can target fans of Rufus (who rock), but I can’t target those who follow or like Delta Goodrem – strange.

This limitation isn’t just to the music industry. Managing clients across all industries, I witness the inability to target large retailers or online brands and then sometimes strike it lucky finding smaller niche options that work well. If using this audience type for one of your advertising strategies, my advice is to write a long list of bands, musicians, acts and other interests you think or know your ideal audience will be interested in. You will most likely find two or three out of ten are available to target. As with all Facebook advertising, large, broad audiences aren’t great; you want to narrow your audience down to a smaller, manageable audience size for your budget to ensure you get the results you’re hoping for.

#4. Target & Reach Spotify Users

Using the detailed targeting option in Ads Manager, you can target those interested in Spotify (which are most likely users). As an example, targeting the Spotify interest for 18-35-year old’s in Australia leaves you with an audience size of 1.8 million people. While Spotify doesn’t disclose their subscriber numbers, it’s estimated they have around 7.7 million Aussie users, so the numbers look good.

Using Spotify in interest targeting is also a great way to narrow down your audience, especially if you are running ads aiming to get people to swipe up or click through and stream on Spotify.

#5. Reach Your Website Visitors

If you haven’t installed a pixel on your site yet, stop what you are doing and do that right now. You are losing precious data. A Facebook pixel tracks all your website visitors’ actions and is MANDATORY if doing Facebook ads. The longer you have this installed, the more significant data Facebook accumulates, helping your ads perform.

Back to number five and halfway through the list, is a great time to ask how many people have visited your website in the last 30 days? If you are not using your Facebook Pixel or looking at Google Analytics to check up on your website, then make sure you start from today.

Out of all your website visitors, how many have clicked through to stream music, purchase merch or booked tickets to your gigs?

Understanding what visitors do on your website and how they interact is essential, as you want it to be a smooth, seamless experience for them.

With a Facebook pixel on your site, using Facebook ads, you can get your social ads in front of every Facebook user who has visited your website over the time period you specify (maximum is 180 days), whether they have engaged with your site or not. You can also create custom conversion events (e.g. contacts, booked tickets, purchased) and exclude them so that you don’t annoy your audience if they have already completed the actions you are aiming for.

But targeting website visitors gets even better!

When creating your custom audience, you can separate the audience into multiple categories of people who have visited specific pages on your website.

Here are a few ideas on how you can use these separate audiences:

Those who have looked at your gigs/tour/calendar page might be interested to see you live – advertise upcoming dates to this audience
Those that visited your music page might be interested in listening – promote your new single, album or playlist and get those Spotify streams up
Those that visited your merch page but failed to shop? Use dynamic remarketing or offer them a discount to get those sales.

Do you have a Facebook account? Well, then chances are my pixel has added you to the list of people reading my blog pages. If I wanted to create Facebook ads, I could serve ads to you to read further blogs, to get in touch if you need assistance with paid social media (I wouldn’t, it’s too creepy and not my style), or I could even use the data accumulated by Facebook to create a lookalike audience of blog readers and then promote ads to try and increase my blog readers.

#6. Reach Your Email Subscribers

You already have an email list of fans and followers, and you know how to hit them in their inboxes – why would you spend money to advertise to them on Facebook?

Here’s a few good reasons:

Check your past email open and click rates – they might not have opened, read, or clicked through to your site. They might have also gone to spam or junk.
Multiple customer touchpoints are an important part of marketing – people receiving multiple impressions via different methods are more likely to engage and convert.
Use your email database to create a lookalike audience to find people who are closely aligned with your current subscribers. You need a minimum of 100 subscribers, and the more emails you have, the more powerful your lookalike audience will be.

#7. Target & Reach Lookalike Audiences

One of the best features of Facebook advertising is the ability to create lookalike audiences based on a custom audience. Whether it’s those that have engaged with your Facebook page or Instagram Account, Email list, Website visitors, creating a lookalike audience will produce an audience of around 180,000 people (at 1%) that Facebook deems similar to the original data you based your list off.

In saying this, it doesn’t mean all 180,00 people are exactly like your data source, and one of the reasons again to hire a social specialist is that month on month, and over time, you want to refine the quality of your custom and lookalike audiences, building out full-funnel audiences. If you use wide/large lookalike audiences, again, you can narrow these down by interest or behaviours to make your audience size smaller but also more niche.

Lookalike audiences, on average, perform better than colder, broad audiences such as interest targeting. In the example below, with a client new to Facebook advertising in the online learning industry, we started Facebook ads with limited targeting options (only interests and demographics) and, after 30 days of accumulating data, created a lookalike audience of website visitors to target ongoing. As lookalikes are more closely related than broad interest targeting, and as expected in general, the cost per result will be cheaper for lookalike audiences.

#8. Target & Reach a Local Audience

Have gigs or a tour coming up? Targeting a local audience via location (where you can choose a radius around a location), age and interests is a great way to get your ads in front of a local audience. Promote your upcoming gigs to increase ticket sales and attendance.

#9. Target & Reach Event Audiences & Lookalikes

Creating an event listing on your Facebook page for your upcoming shows can not only be used by your Facebook fans and followers, but it can also be used as an ad. Instead of creating a new ad with a banner or video and a link to your tour page, you can also use your event Facebook posts to increase people interested in going to your event – with all your details in your event listing.

Event listings can also be used to retarget people – want to promote your merch to people attending your events, or album sales to those that attended your event? Event listing data is a great option for remarketing, as well as creating lookalikes for future ads.

#10. Retargeting Audiences

One of the most important audiences in social advertising is your retargeting audience. People visited your tour page but failed to book tickets? People added your albums to cart but didn’t complete their purchase? Although 90% of your budget will be spent on cold and warm audiences, it’s important to remember not to waste the hard-earned audiences you have already brought into your customer flows.

Even if you don’t have anything to sell, there are still ways to use a retargeting audience, including:

Visited or interested in a gig/event – stream music online now
Visited your site or streamed your music – follow on Facebook/Instagram, sign up to email database

Remember, though you can get your ads in front of a vast range of audiences, not all of them are going to engage, interact or convert with you. The average conversion rate is around 1 – 5%; it doesn’t mean you ignore the 95% who don’t. They might just need a little nudge or are interested but not ready to convert yet. Keep all your audience types and the stage they are at in mind when planning on your social media campaigns.

Final Thoughts

As a musician or performing artist, whether you’re interested in increasing your Spotify streams to crack the algorithms, increase awareness of your new music, drive gig books or get that merch selling – it all comes down to the right audiences, the right types of campaigns and the right ads that are mobile optimised and speak to the audience.

Boosting a post every now and then is good, but with social ads, it’s all about improving results month on month. One thing not covered in this article is timing – if you have a new album coming out on September 2nd^, don’t wait till September 1st to start advertising. By September 2nd, you want to have had campaigns running for over a month, accumulating a lot of data to create strong custom audiences, so that come September 2nd, you can target a range of audiences, with a range of ad types to achieve your objective.

Musicians and performing artists understandably can’t sustain ongoing social media advertising 365 days a year like eCommerce businesses, but planning for a 2-3 month paid social campaign strategy that covers objectives across the pre-, during, and post- stages of your promotion will help you achieve the best possible results for you and your art!

Let me know your thoughts, questions or your experience with Facebook ads in the comments section below 👇🏻, and thanks for reading!

X Marc

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Facebook Ads for Musicians
– 10 Types of Audiences to Target –

Who Can I Target With Facebook Ads? 10 Facebook Audiences for Musicians & Performing Artists

#1. Target & Reach Facebook Fans & People Who Have Liked Your Page

#2. Target & Reach Your Engaged Social Audience