Effective Advertising Strategies in Music

There's an underrated type of content that you can use to run ads and get better results for less work. It's so underused, but maybe because it's so simple. In this video, I'm going to break down what a lot of people are doing wrong and putting a lot of money behind content that's never actually going to work for them like they think it will. And then you end up getting results that you don't really like. And then I'm going to show you exactly what type of content you should be creating and even some of the tools that I use to get it done. And if you're wondering where my advertising and my content experience comes from, I have a music marketing agency. We've helped many artists blow up. We've gotten platinum plaques. We've literally spent over two million dollars in advertising for music specifically alone. I'm talking about running ads on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. So here's just a small bit of the stuff that I've learned along the way. Now, what's the big mistake that many people make? Organic content. You always hear people say. hey, if you want to run some ads, all you need to do is post content, post content, post content. And then if a piece of content performs well, is doing better than everything else, is going viral organically, of course I should run ads to that content. Here is the issue. Organic content is great, but when you put money behind it, you have to consider your goal. And this is where the gap happens. A lot of times people say, oh, this content is doing well. Great, let me run an ad and then push people over to Spotify with it and Apple Music and Deezer and all the other platforms. No, it doesn't work like that. Exactly. The piece of content that goes viral may be amazing for people. It might be entertaining for people, but it doesn't necessarily mean when people see it, they want to know. what song it is it might be going viral for a completely different reason than the song specifically or even if the song is a legitimate part of the video the actual piece of content still might be going viral in a context that that doesn't necessarily encourage them to want to hear the song immediately so when they click through the link if they do happen to click through the link they might actually get discouraged if they don't see that there's a full video or there's a better version or another video because they're just looking to see more of that that they saw in the video, right? And then sometimes you'll just see increased engagement because this piece of content is great to get people to engage or follow you or be more curious about you in particular. So this is where the big gap happens. Most artists think viral content, I run ad, now I push them over to the DSPs, right? Spotify, Apple, Deezer, Amazon Music, et cetera. No, when it comes to pushing people over to listen to your music, right? Now you're getting rid of the video it depends what do we find performs well you might have a music video and you might take two to three pieces of content short form from that long form music video and then see what performs best out of that or you might just create two or three short form videos and then see how that performs those could perform well but here's the underrated piece of content that most people skip over an album cover literally you a picture of the single cover the album cover that you post on spotify you know that you see when you go onto the platform and people are listening to the music that simple picture with the music playing in the background i can't tell you how many times we've created whole videos done all this production and people click way more on those photos with the music in the background And then we get more stream from that and we get more followers or better conversions if we're running conversions ads from that, which is still what we do encourage in most cases. Why is this? Well, of course, you can never know exactly for sure because you're not interviewing every single person asking them why. But the assumption is, well, when I see an album cover, a single cover, I know it's music, right? It's very clear that this is what it is. And then I hear the song. I'm not being entertained by anything else. So when I click through. I am specifically clicking through to listen to the music. That simple, right? There's no other reason for me to click through. There is no assumption that, oh, it's a video. Maybe there's a longer version of the video. There's no assumption that. If I click this video, I might be going to the person's page to then follow them. Like none of that stuff ever crosses somebody's mind in that case. So you have somebody who's clearly taking an action and engaging for the outcome that you want. So how do you use that to your advantage? Well, when we talk about cover art, there's a couple of ways to approach this. There's a couple of forms. And also there's a couple of easy tools that we love to use. Now, the first one you want to think about is literally the still simple cover that picture works nothing going on and then you have a moving photo cover so you might you know have the picture of you with a background let's just pretend that's your album cover and then maybe you're moving a little bit or maybe it's just an album cover but then there's some graphics some clouds floating by or it's literally just that same footage moving in like a circle something weird right There's a lot of different ways to make stuff like that happen. And we'll talk about a couple of tools again that we use in a second. But I want to be clear, you don't need a moving cover to get results. I know it seems like, oh, there's more going on. It's more entertaining. I haven't seen a drastic increase of conversions when we do a single cover versus a moving cover. Now, there's some styles of covers that... It might look a little cooler or might be more entertaining if you have some type of moving cover. Sure, those cases tend to happen, but that's a case by case basis. But there is no specific just because it's moving is going to be performing better. I want to make that clear. So always get a nice test before you even pay for a moving cover, unless you just like it from an artistic standpoint and whatever you're doing. Like you could just test a regular steel cover before you even invest in a moving cover if you want to or put in that work in time. One other thing I want to add is a lyric video, a very simple, the album covers there, you add the lyrics. That also helps and that also works well. So those three things are the three that we love to use that are extremely low effort. You can pay to get them done or you can do them yourself a little bit. I'll talk about that in a second. None of these things, by the way, that I'm going to talk about are something that we're necessarily promoting. Like I'm not going to give you an affiliate link at the end of this video or anything like that. I just want to let you know what we use. One more time before I get into these three options. You have a still cover, a moving cover, and a lyric video. The still cover is really what popped it off for us. We started to realize we got great results and then we played around every once in a while. Or we went to some graphic designers and played with some of these websites and realized those were other options that we could play around with. And all those performed well and kept us from having to create a bunch of... you know music videos or short form pieces of content when we're running our ads we even have done things like mmm actually I'm awake I'm a tease that and leave that there you'll see in a few minutes the first thing I want to show you I'm actually just gonna share on the screen a little bit of it happening it's Photoshop I know this sounds crazy and this is actually gonna be the more difficult version of the three options that I'm gonna give you in this video the Photoshop AI feature that they have now is amazing. It's what I've been waiting for for so long, not just to be able to prompt and type something in, but to literally be able to provide a photo as a reference and then them tweak and provide photo recommendations that you can use for your album cover just like that. So let's just pretend if you had Kanye's graduation cover, all right, you give Photoshop that reference and they're able to create. a photo that has that vibe, right? Or you wanted to have cars at midnight with black and yellow, you know, hues. Okay, they'll create multiple photos with that vibe. And you can use, again, a style if you have like a favorite artist. I don't just mean a favorite artist in terms of musician, but a favorite artist, period, right? And then take that, give it to Photoshop, and now you have the aesthetic that you want. To me... that is a game changer that's the biggest thing i've been waiting for when it comes to any ai to do references well and photoshop does it pretty well y'all know how to get to photoshop um again i'll put a link in the description below to someone else doing a tutorial of how you can make this happen it's so powerful but it is the most work it's not much work at all though it's not much work at all but it's the most work of these options the second option is cover art market you Now, cover art market, I've known about for over a year now, maybe a year and a half, I don't know. But what I love about cover art market, if you've never heard of it, is pre-made covers. And I was not familiar with the term or the idea of pre-made covers until I stumbled across cover art market. And here is what it looks like just to give you an example, right? Just to give you a quick demo. you go to the site all right they work with all these cool people uh pre-made covers bam and then also they have designers as well i'd never do the custom designers personally when i've done it um but the pre-made covers i work with many people who have used this type of feature so check this out you go all right do you like this style and it's like going shopping all right it's window shopping you can get some inspiration you can search by different vibes and and colors right i just clicked purple i just clicked pink right which ones are mostly green so there's so many different things that 3d rendering all right typo craft graphic there's so many different things and ways to search uh all right they even have genres edm and then you have the price ranges though but it's legitimately a store experience let me take off some of those filters you can add in your song where it says song title uh name etc etc I love this because it's so simple and two reasons, right? Again, inspiration sometimes, because sometimes you don't necessarily even know what you want right away, right? But then sometimes you already know exactly what you want and you can look for that. Man, this is so, I'd bet that's so, because this is hard. This is dope. Again, just look for yourself. I'm not gonna show every single design and scroll forever, but Cover Up Market is cool because you get to do that. You also get to do options. by the way, like a Spotify canvas, motion graphics, y'all could kind of, y'all could see right here that they could be affordable. And then there's also different prices, uh, ranges as cheap as let's see the cheapest $17. It looked like $17 is the cheapest, um, one on the site right now, just by basic search. Cool. All right. I interrupt this video for a quick announcement. We are looking for 10 artists, 10 artists to work with for a full year. Now, this is not just to work with on anything. We do a lot of marketing. We've helped a lot of people grow, blow up songs, all that cool stuff. And we also have helped a lot of artists make money. And these are the 10 artists that we want to focus on. People who are looking to make money, whether it's their first dollars or more money, more money specifically as an artist. And we want to work with you for a year, whether it's a label manager, the artist directly, either one can work. We've done it with many. Just go to www.contrabrand.agency and apply. Go through our form. And when you get to the call or you talk with one of us, then you tell us what you're looking for. If you're looking to work for a year, if you're focused specifically on building out your fan relationships and making money for those fans, that's what we're looking for. We want to help 10 artists make $10,000 more than they made last year. $100,000 more than they did last year and so on. So let's connect and grow. www.contrabrand.agency or just look at the link in the description. It's there as well. Talk soon. On the other side though, there's a middle option. So y'all check out Cover Art Market by the way, coverartmarket.com. I think people know where to go for Photoshop. And then the last one is another option that many of you may have heard of. But then I know there's still plenty of people who haven't heard of this site. And if they have, they just don't know that you can do this on the site. So check this out. So if you go to Canva, you can type in album covers. And then there's also some options on Canva as well. Well, the thing about these is they aren't unique. Like, let's say cover art market. Like you can use this and then I'd use it tomorrow as well. Right. So it's like a what's the word? not universal non-exclusive there we go that's the word i'm thinking about this is non-exclusive like a non-exclusive beat well you'll you'll have a billion people using these cover art market is if you buy it it's yours also there's again graphic designers who can make you some custom stuff etc but there are some cool options right there's some decent options on there wherever you want to go on again this is no affiliation to uh canva either but it's a a good option and we've used it for different things. And what'll happen with these is stuff like this, right? So it'll have words that you can change to make it relevant to you. All right. And that's pretty simple. All you gotta do is have a Canva account. Let's see what allows me to change on here. So I'm just changing it to say Sean, but that's how these covers work. You can make something as cool as you want, as simple as you want. Again, the big issue is you have very, very little to no control over who else uses it. And if you have limited abilities like me, then you can only do it so much. There's some people who can take these and then have a field day with them and come up with all kind of other cool designs, remix this stuff, etc. I'm personally not that guy. And many of the artists that I work with aren't that either. So that's when something like Cover Art Market. comes into play where you can actually give somebody else direction and they can take things to another level for you all right take tweaks and what you already have and add on to it or they can build something from scratch so those are my three options photoshop amazing just from the reference standpoint i love it and especially if you're doing simple covers that um don't necessarily need to have as much clarity of language like like let's see this text right here Then Photoshop works amazing unless because sometimes your album cover is just a picture. Right. These days. So that's cool. And we drop a lot of music. Maybe you don't necessarily want all of the songs to, you know, have your name, et cetera, et cetera. So Photoshop's great. Then you have cover art market. As I mentioned, you know, you can have the pre-made covers, designers. They have animated covers, custom covers, all these options. You can look more into it yourself. And last but not least. Canva, which is a nice in-between where you can find something and you can immediately edit and have that feedback yourself, right? So you don't have to necessarily wait like you would on cover art market for the graphic designer to do it. So if it's extra last minute, you might want to run here, but if you really want it to be something dope and find something, um, you know, maybe affordable, get some inspiration, then that's where I'm going to cover our market for. But if I want to just do something cool and use this. specific direct reference and I don't feel like I need it to be too custom, then I'm going to at least play around with the Photoshop feature. But for many of y'all, I know that also is a barrier of entry because, you know, it still requires some level of technical ability, but I promise it's super simple and it's cool and it will change your life if you start to use that reference feature. I'll tell you when you see how easy it is to use it. So 100% try it out. I love it and I hope you will too. Again, this is Brandman Sean, one of the founders of Contra Brand Agency. Hopefully this video has been helpful for you. Share this video with anybody who needs it.

And if you're wondering where my advertising and my content experience comes from, I have a music marketing agency. We've helped many artists blow up. We've gotten platinum plaques.

We've literally spent over two million dollars in advertising for music specifically alone. I'm talking about running ads on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. So here's just a small bit of the stuff that I've learned along the way. Now, what's the big mistake that many people make? Organic content.

You always hear people say. hey, if you want to run some ads, all you need to do is post content, post content, post content. And then if a piece of content performs well, is doing better than everything else, is going viral organically, of course I should run ads to that content.

Here is the issue. Organic content is great, but when you put money behind it, you have to consider your goal. And this is where the gap happens. A lot of times people say, oh, this content is doing well. Great, let me run an ad and then push people over to Spotify with it and Apple Music and Deezer and all the other platforms.

No, it doesn't work like that. Exactly. The piece of content that goes viral may be amazing for people.

It might be entertaining for people, but it doesn't necessarily mean when people see it, they want to know. what song it is it might be going viral for a completely different reason than the song specifically or even if the song is a legitimate part of the video the actual piece of content still might be going viral in a context that that doesn't necessarily encourage them to want to hear the song immediately so when they click through the link if they do happen to click through the link they might actually get discouraged if they don't see that there's a full video or there's a better version or another video because they're just looking to see more of that that they saw in the video, right? And then sometimes you'll just see increased engagement because this piece of content is great to get people to engage or follow you or be more curious about you in particular. So this is where the big gap happens. Most artists think viral content, I run ad, now I push them over to the DSPs, right?

Spotify, Apple, Deezer, Amazon Music, et cetera. No, when it comes to pushing people over to listen to your music, right? Now you're getting rid of the video it depends what do we find performs well you might have a music video and you might take two to three pieces of content short form from that long form music video and then see what performs best out of that or you might just create two or three short form videos and then see how that performs those could perform well but here's the underrated piece of content that most people skip over an album cover literally you a picture of the single cover the album cover that you post on spotify you know that you see when you go onto the platform and people are listening to the music that simple picture with the music playing in the background i can't tell you how many times we've created whole videos done all this production and people click way more on those photos with the music in the background And then we get more stream from that and we get more followers or better conversions if we're running conversions ads from that, which is still what we do encourage in most cases.

Why is this? Well, of course, you can never know exactly for sure because you're not interviewing every single person asking them why. But the assumption is, well, when I see an album cover, a single cover, I know it's music, right?

It's very clear that this is what it is. And then I hear the song. I'm not being entertained by anything else.

So when I click through. I am specifically clicking through to listen to the music. That simple, right?

There's no other reason for me to click through. There is no assumption that, oh, it's a video. Maybe there's a longer version of the video.

There's no assumption that. If I click this video, I might be going to the person's page to then follow them. Like none of that stuff ever crosses somebody's mind in that case. So you have somebody who's clearly taking an action and engaging for the outcome that you want. So how do you use that to your advantage?

Well, when we talk about cover art, there's a couple of ways to approach this. There's a couple of forms. And also there's a couple of easy tools that we love to use.

Now, the first one you want to think about is literally the still simple cover that picture works nothing going on and then you have a moving photo cover so you might you know have the picture of you with a background let's just pretend that's your album cover and then maybe you're moving a little bit or maybe it's just an album cover but then there's some graphics some clouds floating by or it's literally just that same footage moving in like a circle something weird right There's a lot of different ways to make stuff like that happen. And we'll talk about a couple of tools again that we use in a second. But I want to be clear, you don't need a moving cover to get results. I know it seems like, oh, there's more going on.

It's more entertaining. I haven't seen a drastic increase of conversions when we do a single cover versus a moving cover. Now, there's some styles of covers that... It might look a little cooler or might be more entertaining if you have some type of moving cover. Sure, those cases tend to happen, but that's a case by case basis.

But there is no specific just because it's moving is going to be performing better. I want to make that clear. So always get a nice test before you even pay for a moving cover, unless you just like it from an artistic standpoint and whatever you're doing.

Like you could just test a regular steel cover before you even invest in a moving cover if you want to or put in that work in time. One other thing I want to add is a lyric video, a very simple, the album covers there, you add the lyrics. That also helps and that also works well. So those three things are the three that we love to use that are extremely low effort.

You can pay to get them done or you can do them yourself a little bit. I'll talk about that in a second. None of these things, by the way, that I'm going to talk about are something that we're necessarily promoting. Like I'm not going to give you an affiliate link at the end of this video or anything like that. I just want to let you know what we use.

One more time before I get into these three options. You have a still cover, a moving cover, and a lyric video. The still cover is really what popped it off for us. We started to realize we got great results and then we played around every once in a while.

Or we went to some graphic designers and played with some of these websites and realized those were other options that we could play around with. And all those performed well and kept us from having to create a bunch of... you know music videos or short form pieces of content when we're running our ads we even have done things like mmm actually I'm awake I'm a tease that and leave that there you'll see in a few minutes the first thing I want to show you I'm actually just gonna share on the screen a little bit of it happening it's Photoshop I know this sounds crazy and this is actually gonna be the more difficult version of the three options that I'm gonna give you in this video the Photoshop AI feature that they have now is amazing.

It's what I've been waiting for for so long, not just to be able to prompt and type something in, but to literally be able to provide a photo as a reference and then them tweak and provide photo recommendations that you can use for your album cover just like that. So let's just pretend if you had Kanye's graduation cover, all right, you give Photoshop that reference and they're able to create. a photo that has that vibe, right?

Or you wanted to have cars at midnight with black and yellow, you know, hues. Okay, they'll create multiple photos with that vibe. And you can use, again, a style if you have like a favorite artist.

I don't just mean a favorite artist in terms of musician, but a favorite artist, period, right? And then take that, give it to Photoshop, and now you have the aesthetic that you want. To me... that is a game changer that's the biggest thing i've been waiting for when it comes to any ai to do references well and photoshop does it pretty well y'all know how to get to photoshop um again i'll put a link in the description below to someone else doing a tutorial of how you can make this happen it's so powerful but it is the most work it's not much work at all though it's not much work at all but it's the most work of these options the second option is cover art market you Now, cover art market, I've known about for over a year now, maybe a year and a half, I don't know.

But what I love about cover art market, if you've never heard of it, is pre-made covers. And I was not familiar with the term or the idea of pre-made covers until I stumbled across cover art market. And here is what it looks like just to give you an example, right?

Just to give you a quick demo. you go to the site all right they work with all these cool people uh pre-made covers bam and then also they have designers as well i'd never do the custom designers personally when i've done it um but the pre-made covers i work with many people who have used this type of feature so check this out you go all right do you like this style and it's like going shopping all right it's window shopping you can get some inspiration you can search by different vibes and and colors right i just clicked purple i just clicked pink right which ones are mostly green so there's so many different things that 3d rendering all right typo craft graphic there's so many different things and ways to search uh all right they even have genres edm and then you have the price ranges though but it's legitimately a store experience let me take off some of those filters you can add in your song where it says song title uh name etc etc I love this because it's so simple and two reasons, right? Again, inspiration sometimes, because sometimes you don't necessarily even know what you want right away, right? But then sometimes you already know exactly what you want and you can look for that. Man, this is so, I'd bet that's so, because this is hard.

This is dope. Again, just look for yourself. I'm not gonna show every single design and scroll forever, but Cover Up Market is cool because you get to do that.

You also get to do options. by the way, like a Spotify canvas, motion graphics, y'all could kind of, y'all could see right here that they could be affordable. And then there's also different prices, uh, ranges as cheap as let's see the cheapest $17. It looked like $17 is the cheapest, um, one on the site right now, just by basic search.

Cool. All right. I interrupt this video for a quick announcement. We are looking for 10 artists, 10 artists to work with for a full year. Now, this is not just to work with on anything.

We do a lot of marketing. We've helped a lot of people grow, blow up songs, all that cool stuff. And we also have helped a lot of artists make money. And these are the 10 artists that we want to focus on. People who are looking to make money, whether it's their first dollars or more money, more money specifically as an artist.

And we want to work with you for a year, whether it's a label manager, the artist directly, either one can work. We've done it with many. Just go to www.contrabrand.agency and apply. Go through our form. And when you get to the call or you talk with one of us, then you tell us what you're looking for.

If you're looking to work for a year, if you're focused specifically on building out your fan relationships and making money for those fans, that's what we're looking for. We want to help 10 artists make $10,000 more than they made last year. $100,000 more than they did last year and so on.

So let's connect and grow. www.contrabrand.agency or just look at the link in the description. It's there as well. Talk soon. On the other side though, there's a middle option.

So y'all check out Cover Art Market by the way, coverartmarket.com. I think people know where to go for Photoshop. And then the last one is another option that many of you may have heard of. But then I know there's still plenty of people who haven't heard of this site.

And if they have, they just don't know that you can do this on the site. So check this out. So if you go to Canva, you can type in album covers.

And then there's also some options on Canva as well. Well, the thing about these is they aren't unique. Like, let's say cover art market.

Like you can use this and then I'd use it tomorrow as well. Right. So it's like a what's the word? not universal non-exclusive there we go that's the word i'm thinking about this is non-exclusive like a non-exclusive beat well you'll you'll have a billion people using these cover art market is if you buy it it's yours also there's again graphic designers who can make you some custom stuff etc but there are some cool options right there's some decent options on there wherever you want to go on again this is no affiliation to uh canva either but it's a a good option and we've used it for different things.

And what'll happen with these is stuff like this, right? So it'll have words that you can change to make it relevant to you. All right.

And that's pretty simple. All you gotta do is have a Canva account. Let's see what allows me to change on here.

So I'm just changing it to say Sean, but that's how these covers work. You can make something as cool as you want, as simple as you want. Again, the big issue is you have very, very little to no control over who else uses it. And if you have limited abilities like me, then you can only do it so much.

There's some people who can take these and then have a field day with them and come up with all kind of other cool designs, remix this stuff, etc. I'm personally not that guy. And many of the artists that I work with aren't that either. So that's when something like Cover Art Market. comes into play where you can actually give somebody else direction and they can take things to another level for you all right take tweaks and what you already have and add on to it or they can build something from scratch so those are my three options photoshop amazing just from the reference standpoint i love it and especially if you're doing simple covers that um don't necessarily need to have as much clarity of language like like let's see this text right here Then Photoshop works amazing unless because sometimes your album cover is just a picture.

Right. These days. So that's cool. And we drop a lot of music. Maybe you don't necessarily want all of the songs to, you know, have your name, et cetera, et cetera.

So Photoshop's great. Then you have cover art market. As I mentioned, you know, you can have the pre-made covers, designers.

They have animated covers, custom covers, all these options. You can look more into it yourself. And last but not least. Canva, which is a nice in-between where you can find something and you can immediately edit and have that feedback yourself, right?

So you don't have to necessarily wait like you would on cover art market for the graphic designer to do it. So if it's extra last minute, you might want to run here, but if you really want it to be something dope and find something, um, you know, maybe affordable, get some inspiration, then that's where I'm going to cover our market for. But if I want to just do something cool and use this.

specific direct reference and I don't feel like I need it to be too custom, then I'm going to at least play around with the Photoshop feature. But for many of y'all, I know that also is a barrier of entry because, you know, it still requires some level of technical ability, but I promise it's super simple and it's cool and it will change your life if you start to use that reference feature. I'll tell you when you see how easy it is to use it. So 100% try it out. I love it and I hope you will too.

Again, this is Brandman Sean, one of the founders of Contra Brand Agency. Hopefully this video has been helpful for you. Share this video with anybody who needs it.

Transcript for:Effective Advertising Strategies in Music

Transcript for:
Effective Advertising Strategies in Music