4 Do's and Don'ts of Music Video Marketing

What makes people stop to watch a video ad, instead of scrolling past it? Within the world of music marketing, there are several factors: color choice, content, and video quality are among them.

After running many video ad campaigns across social media, we’ve put together our best practices for creative that drives high engagement with music audiences. We also included the practices to avoid or save for organic posts. Let’s dive in. 

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1. Do Use HD & High Contrast Videos of the Artist

It’s an obvious point, but one worth repeating: low-quality visuals struggle to cut through the noise of digital marketplaces. For paid ads, music consumers want to see HD & high contrast videos of the artist, whether from a live performance or a music video. These attributes consistently drive the highest engagement.

Your videos will get even more attention if they contain bright colors. This allows them to stand out from the dimly-lit selfies, black-and-white text, and blurry YouTube thumbnails that make up many Facebook and Instagram feeds.

2. Do Keep Human Faces as the Main Focus

Keeping an artist’s face a consistent feature in a video ad encourages people to interact with it. Human faces add a personalized and relatable feel to ads, while more abstract visuals (more on that soon) do not.

Furthermore, the audience you are targeting may have already seen the artist’s face on another social platform, in a music video, or on Spotify. Seeing them again will trigger that memory and make the artist seem more familiar, allowing for a quicker connection.

Like it or not, we make many judgments about people’s character based on their face. Including them in ads is crucial for building and reinforcing an artist’s unique identity.

3. Do Encourage Artists to Talk to the Camera and Make DIY Videos

You can push this human connection even further with self-shot videos where artists speak directly to the camera. Why does this work? People don’t like looking at videos that resemble ads on social media.

On Snapchat and Instagram, where selfies are very much part of the landscape, a casual style of content feels organic. When brainstorming video ideas, consider DIY clips from inside artists’ studios that provide a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process. We found they can perform 2x as well as traditional content.

4. Don’t Use Animated Creatives and Visualizers for Paid Campaigns

While recent music videos from Lil Dicky and Childish Gambino have proved the viral power of cartoon music videos, animated media does not work as well for paid content.

Animated versions of album artwork consistently underperform as video ads, even if they follow other best practices, like having bright colors or displaying the artist’s face. So put this content aside for paid marketing campaigns. Live-action clips from music videos can improve CTR 3 to 4x in comparison.