Tips for advertising your music on Instagram
Instagram, at first glance, might not seem like a natural platform to promote music. After all, it’s a visual platform by nature.
However, now with more than a billion active users every month, Instagram has turned to be one of the best platforms to build your brand as a musician, showcase your personality, and of course, let your music gets heard.
Here, we will show you how you can use Instagram advertising to promote your music.
1. Connect Instagram with Spotify
Fairly obvious, but also the most important. Spotify is now where people can discover our music, and the idea is to connect this music discovery platform with your socials (not only Instagram) to build a community.
Quite recently, Spotify allows us to add social media links to our Spotify profile. This way, people who discovered your track on Spotify can easily find out our social media profiles, connect with you, and probably engage with you.
2. Define Your Target Audience
The main issue of online advertising is cost: the better you can target your ideal audience, the more cost-efficient your ad campaigns will be.
So, conduct market research to find more insights into your ideal audience: how old are your ideal listeners? Their locations? Gender? What are their hobbies, etc. If you already have existing fans, you can use the data to get more information.
In practice, you can play around with the different targeting options in your Instagram Ad manager, and this might need trial and error. You can see—in real-time—on how the targeting changes will affect your costs and estimated reach.
3. Define Instagram Ad Goals
What is the goal of your Instagram ad? It’s part of the digital marketing strategy and it helps increase awareness about yourself/your band as a musician. Are you targeting a local audience? Is it to increase business traffic? And so on.
Define a specific KPI, and assign a proper timeline. The more concrete and detailed you can define your goals, the better.
Here are the available objectives for Instagram ads:
Awareness:
Brand awareness:
Local Awareness
Reach
Consideration:
Traffic
Engagement (or post-engagement)
Increase likes
Video views
Generate leads
Conversion:
Improve conversion rate
Music track sales
Spotify (or other platforms) visit
<2>4. Determine a Proper Budget
Instagram advertising—much like Facebook Ads—is a very versatile platform regarding budget: you can either set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. A ‘lifetime’ budget means we set a total budget that we allocate for the ad campaign’s running period (lifetime). The day-to-day costs might vary, but you won’t exceed this assigned budget.
Instagram Ads (also similar to Facebook and Google Ads) costs are based on bidding or auction system. So, the cost is determined by how popular your targeted audience is, and how stiff the competition. Depending on the objective/goal you’ve set up, you can choose to pay by CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per mile/thousand impression).
5. Developing Your Instagram Ad
Again, we have several different options to design our Instagram ad: using a single image/photo, video ad, carousel (swipeable images), and Stories.
For promoting your music, generally, a video ad (to promote your music video) is preferred, but a photo ad can also work, depending on your objectives. Here are the important principles in designing and implementing Instagram Ad:
- Again, focus on reaching your target audience: the more targeted your ad campaign is, the higher the ROI you can generate.
- Remember that Instagram is a visual platform by nature, and a captivating image or video is the most important key to success. Again, put yourself in the shoes of a potential fan: what kinds of images or videos would make you—as a fan— stop and check out the ad? Check out other musicians on Instagram, especially those with a similar style as yours for inspiration.
- Make sure it’s authentic and genuine (don’t hard sell)
- As with any Instagram posts, optimize your caption. In general, shorter captions are better, but it will depend on the purpose of your ad.
- Use an optimized call to action (CTA) according to the ad’s objective. Give them a reason to click on your CTA by ensuring your image/video and caption can deliver the right message.
When you develop your ads on Instagram Ads manager, the ad builder will guide you step by step from defining your target audience, defining the budget, scheduling your ads, and placing your ads (Facebook or Instagram, etc.).
6. Monitor and Evaluate Ad Performance
Your job isn’t done after the Instagram ad is published and active, we still need to track how it performs, whether it’s cost-effective, and whether we can further maximize its ROI. Fortunately, Instagram provides a really powerful analytics platform in its Ads Manager.
Here are some of the important metrics to monitor:
- Awareness, mainly Reach (the number of people who saw your ad) and Impression (total number of times people saw your content, including when the same person viewed it more than once).
- Engagement: number of likes, comments, etc.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR), the number of people who clicked on your ads (and the CTA)
- The number of social media referrals—for example the number of people who came to your Spotify after viewing the Instagram Ad.
- Bounce rate, the number of people who clicked the ad and then exit right away—and indicator of bad targeting—.
- Conversion rate, will depend on your ad’s objective, for example, it can be the number of people who follow your Spotify after coming from the ad
- Cost per conversion, will mainly help you to judge whether your investment is justified and whether you should lower/increase your budget
- ROI, pretty self-explanatory.
End Words
As the most popular social media platforms especially for younger audiences, Instagram is the perfect place to promote your music: it is very feature-rich and versatile, allowing us to engage with the audience in various ways and build a community effectively.
Instagram advertising is also a fairly cost-effective platform to promote our music. The key, however, is to target the right audience to maximize cost per conversion and your ROI.
Mike Khorev
Mike Khorev is an SEO expert and digital marketing consultant who helps small and mid-size businesses generate more leads, sales and grow revenue online. He offers expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO digital marketing, web design, social media, search engine marketing and many other online practices. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Author’s bio
Mike Khorev
Mike Khorev is an SEO expert and digital marketing consultant who helps small and mid-size businesses generate more leads, sales and grow revenue online. He offers expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO digital marketing, web design, social media, search engine marketing and many other online practices. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter