How to promote a band for the cost of two 12 packs.

by JOSHUA HAMBY

I try to help my friend’s bands as much as possible here in Greenville, South Carolina. One of these bands is A Momen0t Electric (AME). They only started really focusing on their social presence in late December during their album release show.

After a few days, their singer Justin had asked what Facebook ads they should run. I suggested he create an ad at $5 a day targeting locally within a 50 mile radius in the genres he felt they best fit in with and experiment until they found the engagement they were looking for. They fell for what many who are new to Facebook ads do: They went with boosting their post.

What happened proved a real life example of why not to use Facebook’s Boost function for promoting a post.

From the above example, you can see the band promoted this post using “Boost Post”. From the 24.7k people reached only 10 people chose to like the post and 1 person shared it. Only 30 users even chose to click  through the post.

Sure, you get a lot of impressions, at the cost of relevancy- This does you no good in the long run. Because of the lack of targeting options that boost provides more people from NYC and LA were served this post than locally in the bands home town where they promote their shows.

After a few days of realizing no real gain in their ad spend they went with using the “Get More Page Likes” function and going with what I had suggested originally for the ads.

Within a week their page likes went from less than 200 to over 480 and still climbing today.

There was a spike between the 29^th and January 1^st from paid likes. The ad stopped running on January 2nd and we see an influx of organic activity from shares and comments from user activity on the page.

At peak, the ad was seen by 15.7k people right as the new year rung in. This soon resulted in more people at shows and more interest on the bands bandcamp. Previously AME had an average of 30 concert goers but on January 10^th they had a reported turnout of 100 people.

There’s a large correlation between the dates that the Facebook ad ran and the increased views and listens on their Bandcamp account.

The band also saw a small increase in album download sales (which was virtually nonexistent before).

The lesson to be learned here is that for less the cost of two twelve packs of beer ($25), you can increase your presence locally and make an impact to drive more views to your material. Doing so will gain more real life supporters of your band, attracting more fans to buy your music and come to your shows.