Marketing 101 Ep. 7: Advertising
When it comes to paid advertising, it’s easy to put the cart way before the horse.
Advertising isn’t something you should do right away. It’s an advanced technique, and difficult to do well even with tons of resources. Personally, I wouldn’t think much about paid advertising until you have many other items set up in your business, are already well established, and have regular work coming in.
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Even if your business is ready for paid adverts, it’s not always a relevant technique for many small businesses. Particularly those who are selling a small, niche product directly to their fans, i.e. most indie musicians.
This is because most indie music fans will just click right by those adverts. Aren’t you much more likely to check out a music recommendation from a friend? When was the last time a social media paid advert got you listening to new music you liked? If so, how often does this happen to you?
Paid advertising and social media
When it comes to social media, it’s important to understand that people don’t come to places like Instagram to buy stuff, they come to connect with other people.
Hint: this is one reason (of several) why running a business exclusively on social media with no website is not a good idea.
The main advantage of social media adverts is they’re easy and theoretically highly targeted. But, all the focused targeting in the world doesn’t really matter if ppl aren’t on the platform looking to buy stuff.
For most small artists, your time is much better spent writing a post that really adds value to someone else’s life, than it is paying for likes.
Advertising at scale
Now, all this changes real fast when we’re talking large, mainstream artist numbers. Or even large indie numbers:
Taylor Swift has 145mil followers. If .5% of them buy something because of a post, that’s 725K customers. If she charges $5, that’s $3.625 million in sales.
This is how mainstream, Super Bowl type adverts make $ for large companies.
You are not a large company, so don’t play their games. It’s great to be small! Here’s how this might work for a small-mid sized band:
Indie Band A has 20K followers. If 1% buy something because of a paid advertisement, that’s 200 people. If you’re selling a $5 item, that’s $1,000 in sales. Easy to see how a paid ad might make money in this situation, too. But it’s all a numbers game, and it doesn’t make sense to play it much, if at all, without at least 5k followers and some really well done ads to show, IMO.
And, you’re only going to get to those kind of audience numbers after a lot of time spent releasing lots of amazing content. So just focus on the content, for now, and leave the paid adverts for later.
