 Pow! This is everybody wants to get his brand man, Shawn. And I'm back with another episode of AXE Brand Man where I answer questions that you ask in the comment section below. So make sure you keep those questions coming. Just make sure you remember the golden rule that the quality of the answers that you receive are dictated by the quality of the questions that you ask. It's the mat work. We're gonna do these things every single Wednesday. And of course, I might be back with my daddy cap because I got kids. And let's go ahead and hop into question numero uno. Eddie Augustine says, great video. Appreciate it. Here is my question. Is it worth promoting to cheaper countries to get cheaper marketing and then go perform in these markets? I want to make sure I answer this correctly. Are you saying, hey, if I'm in somewhere in the United States, is it worth performing in Italy for a sake, right? For example, we've seen people build audiences in my agency or in Brand Man Network in Italy and get cheaper ads, right? So that's what you mean by cheaper ads? I mean, cheaper marketing and then go performing those countries? I think the answer is yes, right? If that's what you're saying, should I build a fan base cheaply and then go performing to that fan base which means you're probably going to make money from it? Now, how feasible is that for you? That's the real thing, right? How hard is it for you to go get over there and start to curate that fan base? Quick story, I met Russ before he was Russ. He didn't even, if I think of the timeline correctly, he was not on SoundCloud yet, right? Dope performance, it was two dudes that night really dope performances. And I was like doing interviews with artists. I walk up to him and I'm like, yo, can I catch an interview with you sometime? Man, let me get your number with you. Whoa, would love to talk to you. And he was like, yeah, that actually never happened though. We actually never had to interview. But he was like, yeah, man, yeah, I appreciate the feedback and everything. I'm actually going to go over to Paris to perform, right? And like this weekend or something, I'm like, whoa, for me, that was mind blowing at the time. First of all, he was already, he was at the show that maybe 10, 20 people were at. Nah, I'll give you 20, 30 people at, but it wasn't really about the artists because there was like multiple artists there. And the fact that he was going to Paris early on, it was interesting, right? But what I found out later on that became a big part of his strategy where he really hit Europe first. He saw his music was popping in Europe, right? And he got over there to nurture that fan base. Do shows actually got paid for shows. And that was him early on. He built up that way. If you look at somebody like six, nine, he built up in Russia really early on. He was on pages like, fuck them. And he did a tour in Russia, popping before he really hit in the U.S. He didn't have a movement like they had a movement on social media in the U.S. His music and touring was all happening in like Russia, Eastern Europe. So you can go, you can go check. I did video about that early on before he really, really blew up. So it's very much so worth it. I also interviewed Ryan Leslie. He went over back in the days before heavily using social media and he built his audience in Europe cheaply, right? And part of the cheaply was not, I'm just running ads. He was, it was just cheaper because people didn't get as much attention from U.S. artists at that time. And that's still a thing, right? And the fact that he gave just a little extra real person effort and stayed with people at the shows to talk to him, allowed him to build a fan base quicker than so many other people, all right? So the answer is yes, man. I wanted to give you context and answers, but I'll say this to end it. There's a lot of record labels. Whose strategy is to simply start building some artists out over in Europe, right? Until they can get the bigger budgets, but you have to validate one, the product and the artist. Two, as long as you have a base, you're good. Doesn't matter how cheaply you built the base, right? You can figure out how to monetize it later. And oftentimes you can use that to, as a springboard to go to the U.S. or whatever the major market that you're trying to get attention to, but you'll be better off, right? Than the artist who's just trying to perform in that major market and doesn't have an audience, right? And you might not be popping. They're superficially popping in the major market. You're not popping in that market, you got a real audience. You'll be good, bro. Like you will be happy. We go through the exact same thing because we have artists all over the world where there's marketers who are only moving and shaking in whatever their city is and they're trying to climb that ladder. Meanwhile, oh, we got a client. We got a client. We got a client. We got a client, right? Use the world. It's out there. So number two, Kaiel, I'm hoping I'm saying that, right? Correct me with pronunciation below, man, but he says finally someone is saying this, don't understand people who want you to post five picks of artwork before the song is released. It's actually a comment, but I wanted to add context to this. I talked about in the video that especially when you're early on, nobody's checking for all this stuff that you do pre-release. They really aren't. So get to it, release the song and then do things after you release the song. So every ounce of attention that you do create whether it's a new post or a new ad and all or whatever it is, it goes back to your funnel which eventually goes to your song. Like it doesn't, it doesn't make sense to get somebody's attention. I'm spending $100, $200 on an Instagram ad teasing this song that nobody knows about and the song's not even out. And then when the song finally comes out, I have to hope that I get their attention again, which means I'm probably gonna have to pay for it. All right, go ahead and have it there and available. So when you have people's attention, you can squeeze every little bit of it out there. There is and maximize it. That's it, right? So those people who say, do this amount of posts before and they're not considering your audience, right? Your level of fan base. If you don't have a fan base to actually organically post and create any type of suspense, it's not gonna do too much for you. A lot of these people are just giving you something to do, right, and making you feel like you did something. So they maybe, you know, get paid for giving you those answers. So I would actually avoid a lot of that advice who says you have to do X, Y and Z before you post without consideration. Next question. Can YouTube promotions help? Are they reliable? Yes, yes, yes. David. Yes. I'm just gonna put YouTube like this though. All right, you have your funnel. YouTube promotion is usually the tip top of the phone in most cases. You're not gonna see great action in terms of driving an amazing amount of engagement in a lot of cases. You can't see, you can't see it happen, but you're not gonna drive a lot of people over to another platform and to stick to your fan base. The best that you'll get a lot of times from YouTube ads is achieving an industry average comment and a like ratio. And then on top of that, you will receive subscribers and you have to do enough of them to know how the ad is performing in terms of, I got this many subscribers on this song and I got that many subscribers on another song. We've taken people from zero to a thousand subscribers off of like eight, no, $1,000. About $1,000, right? We've seen that happen, but we also spent $3,000, $4,000 and only seen somebody's subscribers go up like 300 people. You get what I'm saying? So that's something that you can gauge and that helps, right? Then move down to funnel, but for most part it's gonna be a top of the funnel thing, which means you're just looking for a little bit of views and awareness. They might not even click into your video. They just see the ad. They see the ad and that's it. So they just get used to hearing the song. Maybe they hear it three times and then go click over or maybe they just hear it there, but then they see a Facebook ad because you're targeting something similar on that platform and now I'm starting to make connections. But don't expect much out of a YouTube ad promotion. In most cases, I wouldn't look to start there, right? Unless you have a music video and then you're running a campaign that includes other platforms. But when anybody says, hey, I got a video and if I have to just put it on one thing and I have to run some ads, I'm just gonna run YouTube ads, which were Google ads and then do nothing else. I'd say good luck to you because it's almost as good as a playlist campaign, right? You're gonna get these surface level views, surface level listens, but you're not gonna see much happen after that. All right, so that's my answer to that, David Dot. Last question slash conversation to engage because Corey actually answered this guy at the profit. He said, how would I create a pixel if I'm driving people to a link for my single Spotify? Corey says the right answer, right? You can either have that intermediary link atoned in smart URL or you can create a landing page that pixels it and make it look like a smart URL or even do a quick little redirect. You can do all those things. But here's the truth, right? The profit says, look, I might lose people because I have to click again. That's the reality because you had somebody go, all right? You had somebody who could have went, all right, to the song from your ad, but now you added this extra barrier in between. Yes, that's the reality. However, if you can get people through this, the quality of the data is going to be so much higher. Number one, and if you're spending money, it's worth having that quality data. If I spend $1,000, right, I might have gotten short-term 200 more listens from just going straight from the ad to the song. Adding that intermediary link, I might have lost 200 people, but having that quality of data from people who are willing to go through those hurdles, right, is going to be better. I'm having that quality of data just from a standpoint of being able to pixel it, period, because what am I thinking? You're running an ad straight to Spotify with the fact that you can't collect that at all, but it's just not even worth it, right? Last tip, though, a lot of these smart URLs, Tondins, Hypedits, and those, that category of type of links that they have, what you'll find is at first, right, they have to click into their link, but a lot of them are starting to have a capability where once you get that data and they've ran through that link before, the next time somebody clicks on your ad, they'll go straight to Spotify. That was what they chose when they clicked your link earlier, right? Or they'll go straight to Apple Music. So now you're not even receiving any of that friction of that click-through. You get what I'm saying? So even doing that one time again, it's far better to invest in doing the right action short-term because it's going to create better action long-term. You're going to save money long-term and eventually you'll start going on, you know, when you see the graphs, matter of fact, let me just erase this. This is getting messy. When you have the graph, right? Long-term, it might look like this, but you're collecting the data, you're making the right actions, and now everything hits that curve, right? Where these other people are doing like this, right? I go straight up. Ooh, but guess what? I got to start from scratch next time, and I got to go straight up, and I got to go straight up so nothing builds on top of each other. And you're just starting at the same point again and again and again, right? No strategy, none of the right actions, not getting real data, nothing that can help you inform and become sharper, cheaper, and create more fans, right? So yes, you need to do the pixel situation if you're running ads. Otherwise, honestly, you're wasting your money, all right? That's it for this episode of Ads Brand Man. Again, make sure you ask any questions in the comment section below, and we're doing these every Wednesday. If you have any feedback, any comments, make sure y'all add those things as well. And oh, my bad, my bad, my bad. The question of the day is drunk beats saying, just one question, what shall I do with the subscribe button? I think you know. I think you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button.