21st Century Musician Episode 1: Facebook Ads
Hey everybody. It's Sweet Deat. That's right, I'm back again.
The artist of the day that you should know more about is Jonah Smith. I think Jonah has about eight records or so to date that he's put out under his own name, and every single one of them are great in their own way, two of my favorite albums that he's done over the years... One of them is called Lights On, and the other one is called Stay Close. So if you get a second, Google, Spotify, YouTube, whatever, Jonah Smith, he writes great music. And I think you'll dig it.
So about this new series. I thought it'd be a really good idea to do a series of videos on skills that everyone needs to learn for the 21st century, some of these will be music specific, some of them will just be creative, specific, today's is definitely more of a broader subject and could be applied to anyone in the creative field. So let's get down to it.
We're gonna talk about Facebook advertising.
Everyone should get on board and learn a little bit about Facebook advertising now, before you get on Facebook and you just... push the button that says Boost. You need to stop and learn a little bit more about how to run an ad, the boost feature is a very general way of advertising, it kinda takes a lot of the guess work out, but by not knowing how to run Facebook's ad manager platform, you're actually short changing yourself on what your money could be doing for you, the boost feature only has a few options for you to choose from, but the ad manager platform has tons of specifics, if you've never done anything like this before, I just wanna run over a couple of basic things.
So say you're a jazz guitar player and you're looking to grow your exposure to new people that could be interested in what you're doing inside of the ad manager platform, you can type in keywords like jazz guitar or West Montgomery or Joe Pass. You can narrow down by age, demographic, location, all the way down to zip codes if you really want to get specific, and you can list direct links to your website or your Facebook page if you're trying to bump your likes up. It's the best way, I think, currently, for someone who's not in the advertising game as a full time job to really get the word out about their product.
What I'd like to talk about in regards to Facebook advertising is what kind of content are you putting out and give you some tips about how to make your advertisement interesting to the eye so that someone clicks it.
So let's get down to it. Here are three helpful tips!
Number one, videos always outperform photos.
As you can see, I'm pretty close up in this video that we're having right now, that's the reason for that, if I was all the way back there, it wouldn't really translate that well, you'd be more focused on the things behind me rather than me in front of the camera also, if you're performing in a video, make sure somebody can see your head as well as whatever it is you're performing, the worst thing in the world is the watching video and somebody's hand goes out of frame like this, and you just wonder, what were they playing, remember, there always should be a call to action in your video telling people what to do, usually works, you'd be surprised how many videos that you click on because someone said, Hey, click on this and you just subconsciously did it. What if you don't have any videos? That's okay, you can still run ads with photos, they weren't great, just not usually as good as videos to... If it's quality content and the photo tells a story, people are gonna be more likely to click on it.
Alright, point number two. Tell a story in less than 15 seconds.
So think about the video that you're making, for example, does it have a beginning? Does it have an end? If it's you performing, try to think about telling a story from the beginning to the end to bring closure. So at the end of that 15 seconds, if somebody's still watching, they wanna click that Learn more button, also, lighting really matters, so make sure that you have good lighting when you do your... Same goes to your photo, if you're gonna do a photo, make sure you have great lighting, and finally, number three, you need compelling ad copy, think about what you're doing when you're scrolling down your phone, you're just looking for the next thing to interest you or catches your eye right. There's plenty of ways to do this. Think about using terms like don't miss or limited time offer, say if you're selling something, people also love to phrase how too... As a matter of fact, I'm using it in this video, figuring out how to say what you want to in a few words as possible, it goes a long way on running a Facebook ad, remember you're trying to compel someone that maybe doesn't know you to be interested in who you are, so think about these three points as you get into your beginning stages of running a Facebook ad, one, use awesome quality video or photos, but preferably videos to figure out how to tell a story in about 15 seconds.
Three, compelling ad copy.
Remember, after they look at the photo or the video and their eye catches it, they're going to read the ad copy to see whether they want to click on it or not, learning this 21st century skill is essential to the future of your business, whether you're a photographer, a musician or anywhere in between as a creative, you don't have to be a was at it. You just need to spend a little bit of time getting to know the platform. Big businesses paid millions of dollars for people to do this for them, and obviously we're not in that position as creatives most of the time, in the beginning, as you build your team, it's really important that you take the time to do this and learn this essential skill.