How to OWN Your Audience as a Music Artist (Grow Your Email List with Meta Ads)

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can use Meta Ads to grow your email list. Even if you don't have a website and some type of form or opt-in page, you can run this campaign just using the tools in Meta Ads to grow your email list. The purpose of having email list and SMS list is is kind of to decouple your success or your life from these platforms.

And you still rely on these platforms like essentially the platforms are how you get people to find you in the first place. But how do you hold on to them? That's through an email or an SMS list.

Now, there are a bunch of other benefits such as once you have them there, they're usually like your dieh hard audience. So, these are the people that you can actually uh sell your merch to or sell your Patreon subscription to or try to get to come out to shows. And so, there's other ancillary benefits, but to me, like owning your audience should be the biggest thing.

The second one is is monetizing your audience or or developing a super fan base of a smaller subset of your audience. Now, to grow your email list or your SMS list, you can do it with ads, which we're going to show you how to run a campaign in this video. But I want to talk briefly about how you would do this organically, right?

If you have all these followers on social media, how do you get them to actually join your list? And the answer is, no matter what, for the ads or the organic, you need an offer. You need a reason for people to give you their contact information.

You can't just say, "Join our newsletter for updates. " You can, but no one's going to want to join because you haven't given them a reason to. Whereas, if the reason is, and I'll give you a super common one, join our list and we'll give you a free download of this song, that doesn't hold as much weight nowadays because no one really has files and cares about downloading music.

And I don't want to say no one because there's still millions of people that do, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions that do. But what can be an even better offer is I'll give you access to unreleased music. So maybe you have all this content about like different songs you're working on for example and like ideally most of your content would be about released music but occasionally you're going to post about stuff you're working on and maybe some of it's done or maybe it's a cover song you did but you're not going to release it you just did it for funsies and so you're telling people join my list and I'll send you the whole song you can download it you can stream it in this private Drpbox link or Soundcloud link or whatever it is and you can go hear it or maybe it's both maybe there's downloads and there's this right but you come up with thing, a free digital thing that people can get.

Uh, another thing I've done in the past is I did like kind of this, I called it my studio pass, and it was, I think, 10 days long. And essentially, when they joined, the first thing they got was a 10-minute long introduction video with me, me just introducing myself and my music. The next day, they got like a 10-minute long studio tour where I I like walked them around my home studio explaining all my music gear and my songwriting process.

They got all these like exclusive performance videos. They got these behind the scenes thing, this like lyric breakdown of a couple songs. Uh, basically I made this whole content experience and and that was the draw.

Um, what you don't want to do, well, again, all this applies for ads or organic is you don't want to make it like a cash thing like join my list and you will enter to win a $500 Amazon gift card or join my list and you can win an Apple Vision Pro or MacBook or something like that doesn't work. It it does work from the perspective it gives you more people on your list, but it gives you the wrong people on your list. What you want to make your offer is something that the wrong person would have no interest in.

So that's why it should be free download of a song, unre uh access to unreleased music, behind the scenes content, unreleased videos. It shouldn't be anything that's like resellable or something that someone can financially benefit from because you're just going to get random people that don't care about your music. So that should give you some ideas for like you come up with this offer and then you need to portray this offer to the world and you could do it organically just by talking about it in content you're posting on platforms then putting in that link in your your link in bio or in your description on your your platforms but that's where we get to running ads.

So I'm going to walk you through how to build a campaign like this one. You want a free download? Click download to get the MP3 of our song fear.

You can see that this campaign has gotten us over a thousand new people on our email list. And I've ran this in a few different markets because I wanted to see what the cost spread would be like. But doing tier one countries, I got a $155 per lead.

Doing local, which was like the state we're in. I wanted to see what that would be. That was $6 a lead.

So way more expensive. But doing the whole country was $155. India was 51 cents.

And then cheaper markets like Brazil and Mexico is 99. This isn't the best you can get. I've run campaigns where just um US only was like 90 cents.

Okay, so you can get this better than this. And that you by the way that 90 cents was for email and phone number. I don't remember if this one is just email or if it's email and phone number.

But I think it's both actually. So this is email and SMS number. So these are some just kind of give you some expectations of cost like what what are you looking at?

If you're running USA only, your your goal should be under $2, but really as low as possible. If you're running it locally, it might be more. Maybe like two to three.

In this case, six is really bad, which is why it's off. Uh, and then like other countries, like, you know, UK will probably similar to US and Australia probably similar to US. But if you're doing like Brazil and Mexico, it's going to be way cheaper, like under a dollar for sure.

So, that's kind of what to expect. But this actually worked, right? And it's I would call this probably the laziest offer we could have possibly chosen.

Get a free download of a song. a song that's out on all streaming platforms. So, you know, if we did unreleased music, if we gave away a whole album as a download, if we did like unreleased music and a download, like all this stuff is digital, right?

So, like we could make the offer as beefy as we want. We could throw in download all of our music for free and get this exclusive content and that would make it better, right? So, you have to think about for you what is the offer that makes the most sense.

Uh, and this is what to expect. So, now let's build this campaign because it's actually quite simple and you don't need a website or a landing page or anything to make this happen because Facebook has some built-in tools to do that for you. So, we're in Ads Manager here and I'm going to click this create button and we want to make what is known as a leads campaign.

Okay, we want a manual leads campaign so we can customize all the settings in it. And then we're going to call this uh I'm just going to call this like email list test or something, right? You would call this some name that's actually relevant for you like this is my free download of this song thing, right?

Or this is my studio pass email list campaign. We want to turn on campaign budget optimization. And we're going to set this to something.

Ideally, do 10 plus. That's kind of the only guidance I'll give here. Now, if this is your first ad ever, I would just stick with 10.

Don't go higher. Um, in fact, maybe even consider going lower. But I would say 10 is a good starting point where it's enough to like get the ball rolling, but it's small enough where you're not super stressed about how everything is going every day.

So, we got $10 a day. And then we can click next in the bottom right here. And now we're into what what is called the ad set.

So, we were just editing the campaign level. Now, we're in the ad set level. And in here, this is where we specify a bunch of things, but like typically think of adsets as your audiences, but we do have to configure where are people going to be converting or giving us their their contact information.

The default for me at least is website and instant forms. You just want to use instant forms, which you'll notice there isn't an option here. There's instant forms and messenger.

Oh, that's because they have this new multiple thing. So, one thing you'll learn about MetaT is they're always changing their platform and this is an example of it. I am in here every day and I've never seen this multiple vers single thing.

So, in this case, single instant forms. So, we want to send people to an instant form. What is an instant form, you might ask?

Well, it's that thing I was showing you earlier. is basically instead of needing like a website and a funnel and a and a form that people can fill out, you can do that all in meta and it loads instantly and it defaults the contact information with the stuff that's on people's profile and basically has everything you need to get started. And that's kind of one big takeaway here that I want to mention.

It it it is better long term to have some type of more sophisticated setup where where everything happens automatically and it's this nicel looking branded experience. But the reality is if you wait till that happens, you're just never going to get started. I've seen so many people saying like, "We're trying to do this, this, this, and there's nothing that exists to do this, so we're just not going to do it until we're ready.

" It's like, no, just do something to get started and then figure it out as you go, right? Right? Because otherwise you're just never going to get started or you're going to get started in like a year and by the time that happens the whole industry is going to change again.

Right? So this that's my take on this. Right?

If you want to grow your email list, this is a way to just get started. Uh you need to choose your Facebook page here for some ungodly reason. I'm just going to quickly switch to my bands page here.

They may ask you to agree to some terms and conditions for this. So if that happens, just agree to them. And then we get to go and do the rest of this page.

And so the first next thing you want to do is this audience control section. So if you've seen my other videos on streaming promotion, you'll notice you'll know that I'm like very anti- against this this this advantage plus audience thing. I'm very against it for running like the streaming campaigns.

But you may know that I've mentioned that for lead genen and sales campaigns, I do sometimes use these advantage plus features. So if you're more like advanced, I would say feel free to mess with this stuff. Now, if this is your first campaign ever, I don't want to be misinterpreted.

So if this is your first campaign, switch to original audience options and do further limit the reach of your ads. Okay? And the reason why I'm having you do this is because I'd rather have you run all your campaigns consistently than have multiple rules for different types of objectives.

Okay? So, if you're more advanced, feel free to keep that stuff on. If this you're new, just turn it off.

Okay? And what that does is it makes actually respect your targeting options. When you keep the advantage plus audience stuff on, it kind of ignores whatever you tell it.

So, if you say, "I only want to target people who are 18 to to 47," it's going to be like, "Yeah, yeah, whatever. we're going to spend all your money in people who are over 60 because we think we'll get better results with people who are over 60 which can be a problem as you might imagine. Uh in some cases for leads and sales campaigns it actually helps a lot with the end result but it can also cause problems and I don't want to make this even harder for you if you're new to running these ads.

So we turn that off and now they will actually respect our age range. So if I go down here to 18 to 65 plus I can turn this to 18 to 50 for example. Obviously, set this to whatever makes sense for your music and set the countries to whatever makes sense for you.

Uh, I tend to only run lead campaigns in either US only or like what I call tier one countries, which is kind of like US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, did I say Canada already? Uh, other European countries, maybe Japan. It depends, right?

It depends on the exact situation and application. Like, am I running this ad because it's in preparation of a US tour, or am I running this ad because the band is about to launch their vinyl and CD um physical items and merch associated with it and they're in Australia and shipping outside of Australia is insane. So, we're going to get all of their email lists in Australia.

So, that kind of depends, right? Or or is it just like they don't care where people are from. They're not doing anything physical.

They're not touring. They just want to own their audience. Then, it kind of doesn't matter.

So think about for you what makes sense for you and your goals over the next year. Like where would it be best for you to have all your people? Sometimes it makes sense to get more.

Sometimes it makes sense to not. Now keep in mind whatever email platform you're using, if you're using like Drp or ConvertKit and a lot of other platforms, they charge you per subscriber. So it does you like if you have a 100,000 users, you're paying way more per month for your email sending platform than if you have 10,000 users.

So there is also a cost to having an email list if you have like a email sending platform. So keep that in mind. That's another factor here as well.

But that's our countries and our ages. Uh the next thing we want to set is our targeting. And so this is basically just target whatever bands or genres make sense for you.

My band in question here is kind of an alternative metal band. So I'm going to do metal core. And then I'm going to come down and do heavy metal.

And then we'll do hard rock if I can find it. Horn is a band that's in here. And these aren't the best bands for me to choose.

And nor are these the best genres for me to choose. A couple months ago, Meta purged like more than half of all the targets in their catalog. I used to be able to target Lincoln Park and alternative metal and like all these other like perfect things.

Um, and they got rid of most of them. So, these are the genres that make the most sense for me. And the bands don't doesn't have to be perfect.

If you listen to my band, you're going to be like, "That doesn't remind me of Korn. " Doesn't matter. It's in the right genre.

So, think of that. Think of what's reasonably close. Could someone who likes that reasonably like what you do.

It doesn't It doesn't mean you're trying to find bands that actually sound identical to you by any means. That's kind of what it used to be a little bit, but it's definitely not that way anymore. So, now we have our targeting.

And next thing we got to do is our placements. Now, when it comes to the whole lead versus streaming campaigns, uh, if you're more advanced and you've done this before, consider leaving on advantage plus placements. I found that with lead or sales campaigns, advantage plus placements are fine.

But if you're new to this stuff, here's what I want you to do again, cuz I don't want you to have one set of rules for this and one set of rules for that. That's confusing as heck when you're trying to learn this stuff. So, you're going to want to go to manual placements, and you're going to want to do Instagram only.

Okay? Specifically, you're going to do Instagram feed, explore, stories, and reels. Or these four things that I just chose, Instagram feed, explore, stories, and reels.

Okay? If you know what you're doing, you're more comfortable with this stuff, feel free to do advantage plus placements for for leads. Um, I treat these campaigns differently for my streaming ones, but that's the setup here.

Now, that concludes the ad set. And what I would normally do at this point is name it. So, this is a USA only campaign for me.

I'm doing Instagram only and I'm doing kind of like a broad target across different genres and artists. So, let's type in broad. And then we can click next.

And you have to set your Facebook and Instagram page here if they're not already set. And the first thing you got to do after that is set your instant form. So, this is what I was showing you earlier.

Um, I'll go down and I'll walk you through what this instant form looks like. So basically when people click on the ad they're going to get this want a free download a song fear for free email you an MP3 so you can listen whatever you want and then if they click continue it takes them to this page where they can confirm their contact information or if it's not automatically in there they type it in and then they click continue and it's like our final review page and a privacy policy notice and then after that the the funnel is done and then it just says check your email for a download. Or what you can do is put a download button here.

So, let's go build one of these so you can see how easy it actually is. So, I'm going to go up and I'm going to do create form. And I'm just going to call this test.

You want to name this something relevant, of course. But the first option you get is what is our form type? Well, I I am an advocate for do higher intent.

This will add, you remember how you had to fill the information and then they had a step to review? I always do that because I'd rather pay more for like the correct contact information than pay less for the wrong contact information. So, um I don't do the require leads to verify their phone number, but I do the higher intent option.

Now, under that, we get this flexible form delivery. Um this is like let meta edit your form based on what people want to say. I I personally don't like this.

I'd rather control what people do and and manually configure different things based on my own tests. So, I'm going to do manual. Now, the intro, this was where it was like uh this page where kind of explained um get a free download of our song fear something like that.

Now, again, this is depending on your offer. might be unreleased song or studio pass or whatever, right? This is your offer page.

We're just kind of your ad is going to show them what the offer is. This is kind of like confirmation of what you're going to get. So, we're going click next.

And this is where you determine what questions you want to ask people, right? You can actually customize this a lot. In my case, I'm doing like email, usually first name, and phone number.

So, I could actually delete the full name. Go to add category, contact or user information, first name because I don't actually need their last name. I just kind of want their first name.

The reason why I want their first name, by the way, is because in my email platform, I have my email start by saying like, "Hey, Jonathan," or "Hey, Michelle," or whatever. Like, it's addresses them by name, which I feel like is just a little more personal in email. You've you've seen this before, I'm guessing.

If you have email, you're getting all these like marketing emails sent with your name in them. That it just adds a nice touch in my opinion. So, I collect first name.

So, we have email, first name, phone number, and you can decide if you want to make the phone number optional or not. If you make it optional, some people might not fill it out. If you make it mandatory, some people might just leave your form because they don't want to give you their phone number.

So, it'll be more expensive to make it mandatory essentially. So, another factor to consider about if you're going to do phone number two is are you ever actually going to use the phone number? Um, SMS marketing is great, but it's also very expensive.

Email marketing is pretty cheap. Um, depending on what platform you're using, it's like pennies per email or actually under a penny per email rather. Usually, uh, you can send I think emails are like a tenth of a penny.

Now, depending on what platform you're using, you might pay more or less for that depending on how much you send. But typically, SMS is going to be over a penny, one penny plus per per text message per person. So, if you're a,000 people on a texting list, it's going to cost you 10 times more than a,000 people on an email list typically.

And if you're touring or you're using it or whatever, it's it can be worth it. It's just you need to factor in is it going to make sense for you? We're going to click next.

Um, you have to give them a privacy policy. So, this is where like you're supposed to have a website and you would have a privacy policy on your website. You can actually just turn this off and you're it basically just uses um Facebook's default policy essentially.

But if you have a privacy policy of your own on your website, you can include it. But I'm assuming you don't. So, I'm going to click off.

And then there's the review screen and then the ending. Now, in my case, what I did is I did um when I showed you my other form, it said like listen now. And what I did is I in in my description, I said, "Thanks so much for for signing up.

Check your email in one minute and you'll have an email from us. " So, in the back end, what I did is you can configure Facebook to integrate with your email platform. So, where people when people fill out this form, they get automatically added to a third party tool, which is awesome.

But again, I want to go back to having a simple setup that you can get started with now and then figuring that stuff out later. And in this case, like you're not going to have that integration unless you use a certain email platform that you're paying for, yada yada yada. So the what what you're probably going to want to do is you're going to want to say something like uh click the link below to download to or to get your free download free download.

And then this button is actually going to be download. And this link is going to be well actually it says here the link you use in completion messages can't go directly to a PDF file, JPEG file, image or download which is new to me actually. By the way, if you're looking for an all-in-one platform to have your websites and sales funnels and email and maybe even SMS depending on what it is.

Um, I have two platforms for you to check out. I have this platform called FanFunnels which is built off of something called High Level that does kind of everything. It does sales funnels and websites and workflows and email and SMS.

And I also have this other platform called MusicFunnels, which is built off a different platform that's a little simpler to use, but it's better at like stores. So, each of these platforms have their own advantages advantages and differences in complexity. Um, they're kind of good for different types of people.

So, I'll have links for both in the description. They both have free trials, so you can test out both, see what makes sense for you. But I think both are going to be your cheapest option to get started with this whole world of owning your audience and having your own websites and sales and stuff like that.

So anyways, back to the video. So this is what I meant earlier about Facebook always changing stuff. You used to be able to just be like, I'm going to throw a Drpbox link here.

And I suspect you could still do this. So you could just say download and throw your Drpbox link here or Google Drve or whatever it is. They're saying you can't go directly to a certain file or download.

But if the I don't know if it counts if the file will automatically download or not. So like if you set the file to not automatically download, is it then fine? Maybe.

But I have another workaround for you because again meta is always changing. And this is just one annoyance of how sometimes you have to adapt with their changes. They do have this view file option.

And the way that this can work, you can't give them a audio file. I I I checked. Um, now keep in mind if you're doing an unreleased song, this could go to a private SoundCloud link.

That's not a download, right? So if you're doing the unreleased music thing, YouTube, SoundCloud, cool, right? But if you're trying to do a download, one way is to just do it anyways at your own risk.

Two is to do view file and give people a PDF with a link in it or or similar, right? So they can download a PDF file which you can generate in a myriad of softwares. I think even like Canva can generate PDFs, but you can have clickable links.

So, you could have they download that and then it says like click here to download the song and then they click that link and they get it. So, it's a little it's a little whatever, right? But it is what it is.

You we work around the constraints that we're given to accomplish the goals we want to accomplish. So, that's one way to do it. If you're doing the unreleased music thing, it's actually much simpler because you can just use a private streaming link that's not a download platform.

again like SoundCloud or YouTube or probably like Disco or something like that would be fine. And so I'm going to close this form because I don't actually want this one. I already have a bunch of forms like this.

And then we get to the ads that you run. And and this can kind of be anything. Um but obviously what you should probably do is make it be for the song in question, right?

So, if if I'm giving away a free download of our song, Fear, and I want to go into video here to our media library and and find I don't know if I titled them correctly. I didn't, but I would want to go find the performance videos for my song, Fear. I don't know if this is the right video or not, but you would know, right?

So, you would choose some engaging content that you have. And then your text and stuff here is where you actually explain your offer. So, your primary text is going to be like um you know down get a free download get a free download of our song fear or maybe it's um want to hear the whole song.

Get your unreleased streaming link now. That's probably not as good of a hook. Maybe something like this song isn't coming out for two months, but you can hear it now.

Maybe that's a little bit better. So, that's kind of one example of what you might do for unreleased. Uh, and then maybe look at Meta AI stuff here and see if any of it is good.

A lot of times it's not, but exclusive access, get a two-month head start on everyone else. Listen to a brand new song now before its official release. I wouldn't use that exact wording, but that's not a bad angle to consider.

Your headline could be something like uh early access or something like that or exclusive access here two months early, you know. And then what I do for the call to action is oftent time I'll do learn more because it's kind of vague. You could do download if it's a download and you could do sign up, but I often do learn more because it's just a little less like direct and saying like you're going to have to sign up for something, right?

That kind of has negative connotations. So often if I'm selling something or I'm trying to get leads, I just do learn more because like buy now too sounds very salesy. Buy now, get offer, but if it's learn more, it's it's a little, you know, it's a little less salesy in that way.

And so here we have an actual ad, right? And and this isn't the final video and I'm actually not even running this campaign, but this is essentially how that other campaign I ran was running. And so the way that this works, if I back out and go into that other campaign I was running, as it's running, you get the leads put into these little downloads.

So I can go into each one of these adsets. So in your case, you you already you only have that one ad set here. So as leads come in, you can click download.

and it's going to give you a date range and then you can choose file type CSV or XLS and you can just straight up download your email list there and then import it into your your software and and that's it. Right? So, so that campaign we just made is ready for you to publish.

So, you just come in here and then publish it. Now, I highly recommend you don't just do one video. Like you you could come up here and duplicate it and start doing multiple videos, like maybe like four or something.

So, you could have video one and then video two and then video three and then video four. And the purpose of that is to test different parts of the song, maybe different songs, maybe different offers, and then see what gets you the best result. But once you have that all structured, you can go publish this campaign and people are going to be able to download their files and you're going to be able to download your email list.

And if you're paying for an email software like ConvertKit or Drp, some of them will let you integrate your Facebook ads directly with your email platform. So, I'm using something called Drp, which I just go into the backend integrations and I basically log in with Facebook and I link the two together and then I could automatically like do email marketing on the fly. Some platforms do that, some don't.

So, you might need to use a third party tool called Zapier or some people call it Zapier. And that is like a middle tool that connects like Facebook ads and your email platform, but that's a whole another topic. So, I'm not going to get into that here.

But that's how you can get started actually like running ads to grow your email list and start trying to own your audience or sell your audience specific things and retarget your people or target strangers. That kind of the world's your oyster here. And this is just the first your first entry point into it.

Now, if you want to see other music marketing content than this channel, such as how to promote your music uh on streaming platforms with Facebook ads, check out this playlist right here to see a whole bunch of content on that as well. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video right here. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

Bye.