Show ads to people who already know the artist
Show ads to people who already know the artist
How to create a content-based retargeting audience for music artists.
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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
Show ads to people who already know the artist
Creating a content-based retargeting audience to target an audience of 'low-hanging fruit'.
Why it matters
I'm critical of advertising; there are better ways for artists to spend their budget. But in some scenarios, programmatic advertising is an undefeated tactic.
Advertising for revenue-driven objectives, such as running ads to sell concert tickets, becomes most effective when targeting an audience already familiar with the artist. It lowers the costs per action, making the artist's budget go further.
It's valuable for artists to understand how to target this audience of 'low-hanging fruit'. Because artists are entertainers, leveraging their content to identify familiar audiences makes sense.
How it works
Familiarity or interest can be reflected in how long people pause while scrolling through their infinite social media feeds. For video content, this familiarity can be defined by the number of people who have watched at least a few seconds of the video.
Using Meta's Advertising platform, it’s easy to compose an audience of people who watched videos for three seconds or more:
Open Meta's Ad Manager and navigate to Audiences.
Select Create an Audience > Custom Audience.
A popup will appear with source options. Select Video and click Next.
Now, create the audience:
Under Engagement type, select People who have viewed at least 3 seconds of your video.
Click Select videos and choose the artist's Instagram page as the video source.
Manually select all videos from the past two years. Click Confirm.
Optional: Do the same for the artist's Facebook Page.
Set the audience retention period to a maximum of 365 days. Name and describe the audience.
Create the audience, it will begin processing. Depending on geographic targeting and budget, a minimum of 10.000 people in the audience is necessary for optimal impact.
I always follow this strategy when running ads for artists, as I described in my favourite social advertising strategy for artist campaigns. I also recommend it as one of the four steps to improving artist campaigns strategically on Meta.
Go deeper by creating a lookalike audience using the newly created retargeting audience as a source.
Yes, but..
Meta's AI-powered audience optimisation tools are becoming more sophisticated, and soon, creating content-based retargeting audiences manually may become obsolete as the platform’s automated audience-building improves.
Take action now
Artists can create a content-based retargeting audience for advertising or to track content performance over time. Consider setting up a monthly reminder to update the audience.
Your thoughts
Further reading
Don’t run ads: Better ways to spend a hundred euros (The Fanbase Builder)
Should artists run ads? (The Fanbase Builder)
How artists can lower the costs of their ads (The Fanbase Builder)
Sharing my favourite social advertising strategy for artist campaigns (The Fanbase Builder)
Four steps to strategically improve artist campaigns on Meta (The Fanbase Builder)
About Advantage+ audience (Meta Business Help Centre)