Wavo Blog: This series shares information that’s most relevant to music marketers around the globe.

Context

In today’s digital advertising sphere, it’s increasingly difficult to generate the desired attention and awareness around key moments for an artist. That task becomes practically impossible when relying on organic posts alone. 

According to recent research on Meta platforms, organic reach has dropped as low as 5.2% of a given audience on average. This means that only 1 in 19 followers of an artists’ page are seeing non-promoted content.  That’s why operating with a “Hybrid” model, using a mixture of organic and paid media strategies, is key to today’s climate in digital advertising. 

As algorithms change, it’s important that paid digital advertising remains an integral part of digital marketing strategies. This will ensure that the largest audience is reached for the maximum engagement, and means fewer missed opportunities for artists.

Strategy

Paid advertising has a few key advantages to reaching the market versus organic advertising. These advantages include, but are not limited to:

• Maximizing initial investment - Boosted posts on paid media allow for the initial effort and investment of the organic post to have the moment it deserves by maximizing the amount of users it can reach, thereby justifying the time and effort invested into creating organic content.

• Speed - Paid media increases visibility and awareness faster to a larger audience than organic posts. Organic social media traffic can take days to build due to the algorithms at work behind the scenes of the most popular social media sites. If you’re running a short campaign, that ramp up time can cost you visibility and share of voice.

• Location - Paid media enables you to target specific audiences in specific geographical locations.

• Increased leads - Paid media increases qualified leads faster for merch or ticketing campaigns.

• Ensuring Reach and Frequency - With paid media, you can select for what percentage of your audience your message is delivered to and at what frequency.

• Keywords - Paid media boosts keyword rankings faster.

With this in mind, it’s important to understand how much of your release’s budget needs to be attributed to paid digital advertising. It can be daunting to consider how much to allocate and where to begin spending on social media advertising. 

One common mistake is that often, marketers are not investing the enough of their budget into advertising to drive meaningful results. Let’s remember: if you’re not spending enough on advertising, you won’t be getting the returns you’re looking for. Therefore, advertisers should embrace the premise of “Spending More to Earn More”; research estimates that increasing advertising spend to a more optimal amount of money could further increase the overall return on investment by an additional 50%.

In order to stay competitive, Nielsen estimates that brands should spend upwards of 9% of their revenue on advertising (depending primarily on the size and awareness of the brand), but brands are only spending on average 3.8%. 

Furthermore, Nielsen proposes that the solution to being successful in advertising isn’t to slash your budget when campaigns don’t go as planned, but rather to optimize the channel mix where ads are run. Learning where your key or most important audiences are living, and expanding into new platforms that make sense given the demographics, could be an important step in growing overall brand awareness. For example, if you are finding that younger demographics are increasingly engaged with your ads on TikTok, it might be beneficial to expand to a platform such as Snapchat that typically reports a similar user base demographically. 

Of course, when creating organic or paid media content, there are some attributes to keep in mind for creating the best possible posts to promote. While we encourage you to check out our Wavo Creative Best Practices guidelines, we also suggest the following strategies:

• Increase overall content quality - Always use video ads when possible (compared to static images), use emojis in ad copy when possible (and where it makes sense) to grab the eye of the user.

• A/B test when possible - Using different creatives is one way to A/B test, however A/B testing using subtle changes (for example, the same ad but different copy) will really allow you to hone in on what your specific audience desires in advertising.

• Design posts for mobile - Ensure that videos and text fit the confines of mobile specs, as a large portion of users will be viewing the ads on their mobile devices.

Key Takeaway

Overall, a strong promotional strategy consisting of both paid and organic advertising is key for an artist’s success. This will not only maximize your return on investment, but ensure that important moments make it in front of the audiences who matter the most.

Written by Lauren Manley, Account Manager at Wavo

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