I can’t believe a month and more has flown by! I hope this note finds you well. I have been busy creating ads out of bits and pieces of my last music video and I ran some ten day ads on Instagram – twice, TikTok (5 day max.), Twitter, and Pinterest twice. All in all I reached over 88,000 accounts in the past 2 months. My click through rate (CTR) is low. Promoters say you would be doing well with a 5% CTR. Instagram was the only platform I had over 1%. Pinterest, which I had to use a static picture to be able to go to my DistroKid page, showed the ad to over 55,000 accounts. Twitter hit over 12,000 accounts with the majority of them being in Canada. TikTok did over 8,000 accounts, but that audience was young…13-17 (my new followers of the future) and then the 55 and over showed up a bit. I used different footage in the two Instagram ads…the first one attracted slightly more women and the age range was 35-54. The second one attracted far more men with the age range of 18-24. I am fine with the results because I am a rookie and I am building brand awareness (me). Because I did not do any ad campaigns for my first two releases, I’m going to give them a little push as well. I am still trying to get my Facebook Ad account straightened out, since it is disabled and I never set one up. I would like to set up a Facebook Pixel and use Ad Manager. Time will tell…
If you go down this road, you will need to experiment with your ads and what works best for you. Of course, you could hire someone or a promotion company to do that exploration and creation. I am not a marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination, but with willingness, research, and another huge learning curve. I’ll get better.
I also did quite a bit of research on where to try to submit my songs for internet, satellite, and FM radio. I also researched radio promoters as I could be researching stations for years, it seems. The promoter that I wanted to work with (iplugger) didn’t accept my last release. I respect that. The song wasn’t what they were looking for. I don’t really want a company that accepts every song and just sends out an email blast to every contact they have. Because there is no way one song is going to fit the bill for every station. Each station has it’s own character and genre. You don’t send a pop song to a metal station.
So far I have submitted a song or multiple songs to 17 stations. Three of them are playing my songs. One of the bigger things to look for is whether a station is submitting their playlists to the appropriate entities so that you will eventually receive the royalties you are due. Don’t forget to embed the metadata for each song… ISRC, composer, lyricist, ISWC, artist, song title, etc. Two free pieces of software to get that done is ISRC Editor and Kid3 – Audio Tagger. Here are some links that enabled me to get going with the radio station submittals.
Good Luck and stay well! Sue
Sue Larsen, Singer-Songwriter 