 So how many of you are using Facebook and Instagram ads to grow yourself? How many of you are not using Facebook ads and Instagram ads to grow yourself because you're afraid that you're messing something up and you feel like you don't know what you're doing? Okay, okay, that's cool, that's fine too. Well today, I'm gonna go over a couple of Facebook and Instagram ad mistakes that I know you're making. Like I know you're making these mistakes. Hopefully you fix them and hopefully it makes you a lot better. Let's get into it. It's the mat work. What's going on? My name is Corey. I am a music marketer and co-founder of Countryman Agency. And today I want to talk about some Facebook and Instagram ad mistakes that I know that you're probably making as a music artist. And the reason that I know that you're making these mistakes is because I get a lot of DMs. I get a lot of questions and they all tend to fall along the spectrum of these next few things I'm going to talk about. Like it seems like most of you guys probably will ask tend to fall within some of the similar spaces. So before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Links will be in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all that good stuff. Now with that being said, let's go ahead and get into it. So mistake number one, right? Mistake number one is you're not using the Facebook ad manager. Now this is an issue that I usually see among people who like just learned about Facebook and Instagram ads. You know, with the newbies, the ones that are pretty green, you're probably using the boost function on Instagram. And that's cool, you know, like it has its place. It teaches you a lot about ads if you've never gotten into the advertisement space. But I'm here to tell you, you're not really running ads into your random from the backend of the Facebook ad manager. And the reason that you want to set your ads up on the ad manager is that it gives you so much more control than what you have when it comes to just boosting posts. Like boosting posts as well, you get to set up a keyword, a couple of demographics like the agent stuff, maybe a location and that's it, you know? That's all you have the ability to do. With the Facebook ad manager, you have access to things like custom audiences, look-alike audiences, pixels, which we'll get into, you have the ability to choose the way that your ads test out and you have so much more flexibility over your ad process as a whole. So, you know, I look at like the boosted post feature on Facebook and Instagram as like ad light, you know what I'm saying? It's the diet version. It's the version that you dip your toe into the shallow window of the pool before you think about diving into the six feet. But at some point, man, if you're gonna swim, you gotta jump in the deep end and the Facebook ad manager is the deep end. So, that's the first mistake you're probably making, get out of that boosted post and go make a Facebook ad account and start using the Facebook ad manager. The second mistake you're making is you're not taking enough time out to learn about different ad types, right? So, when you're running ads, there are three different levels to add. There's the campaign level, there is the ad set level and then there's the ad level. The campaign level is where you choose the objective of the campaign, you know? So, what you want the ad to do, the ad set level is where you choose who the ad is targeting. So, like location, demographics, keywords and things like that. And then the ad level is where you choose the creative. So, what is the video content that you're going to be running as the ad? What's the caption? What is the link out to all that stuff? The campaign level is where you choose the type of ad that you want it to be. So, as of now, you know, the main ones that you'll probably need to stick to, because there's a lot, but the main ones that you probably would stick to would be brand awareness ads, there's traffic ads, there's reach ads, there's conversion ads, there's video view ads. And then there's a couple of other ad types like lead ads and stuff that you may not need to get into at this moment. Now, all of those different ad types have their own place, you know? And then some people like to mix those ad types up to get their ad strategy together. Like me personally, I am a video view conversion ad and reach ad type of guy. Those are my three go to ad types. But I know a lot of people who get a lot of value out of traffic ads, you know what I'm saying? I know a lot of people who like to run lead ads for certain scenarios in certain situations. So, the more that you understand the different ad types and what exactly they are meant to do for your ad and what they're meant to optimize for, the better that you're able to pick these ad types for specific situations. You know, I've seen people running brand awareness campaigns using traffic ads and wondering why they aren't hitting a lot of people. It's like, well, that ad type isn't meant to optimize out to hit a lot of people, you may need to pick one that does. You know, so just one of the parts of saving yourself a lot of headache when it comes to Facebook and Instagram ads, it's just taking the time out to understand like what does this ad objective do? What is the purpose of this ad objective and what scenario would I use it for? Some of it will come out of experience, some of it will come out of research, but the faster you figure it out, the better your ads will be, trust me. The next mistake that you're making is you're not testing your ads enough. Now, one big issue that I see with new ad runners is they pick a piece of content, write snippet 103 to 118. They feel like this is the clip that's going to be the one that really runs off. They put all their money into this one ad around this one clip. It doesn't work, they're sad, their butt hurt, and then they're on Instagram talking about how Facebook and Instagram ads don't work. Now, the hugest thing that probably ever changed my ad strategy was learning how to test at a very granular level. Now, when my agency is running Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns for artists, we start out with a minimum of like 10 different ads in the test phase. Usually what we'll do is we'll have at least three different pieces of content. We'll target those who like three or four different keywords and that's for one market, you know? So that means we could have nine to 12 test ads running for just one market. If we have three or four different markets that we're testing within, I mean, you can do the math, you know what I'm saying? That scales up. So it's not uncommon for you to be in the testing phase and you have 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 different ads. We once had a campaign, we had 70 different ads running at one time and we had to condense that down into the one best ad that was performing well and it helped a lot, you know? Because with ads what I tend to think is that you think what you think, but you don't know until you put it in front of people. So it's very easy to think like, yo, I know that this part of the video is the one and it may not be. So the more test ads that you put out, the more swings of bad that you give yourself, the better chance that you have of getting that one best optimized ad, you know what I'm saying? That ad is getting you 10 cents a cost per click. That ad is getting you a 60% conversion on your Tondon link. That ad is really getting you fans, but it's not going to come if you just gas up the one ad that you think is the right one in the beginning, you know? So that's the next piece of advice I would give you is test heavy. Test super, super heavy. And I know that that part is when it starts to eat into the budget a little bit, but I would rather you spend a lot of your money in the testing phase, getting down to that one ad that really works, then you just wasting your money on something out the gate because you thought that was going to work. Like you don't know, man. Like you don't know until you put it in front of people, you know? So start testing your ads a lot more. The next mistake that I see a lot of new ad users make is they're not pixeling the stuff that they're running an ad to. You're not putting pixels on your smart links. You're not putting pixels on your websites. You're just not pixeling. And if you don't know what a Facebook pixel is, it's pretty much this bit of code that you can put on a website or a landing page or whatever you're running traffic to. And it gives Facebook the ability to track the people that have made it to that platform within Facebook itself. So now you're able to see how much money is costing you to get certain conversions on other sites. So once again, I use smart links for our clients when we're pushing them music. We pixel the smart links. Then we're able to see like, oh, cool. It's 60 cents cost per click, but it's costing us 85 cents to get someone to click out to a streaming platform because of the data that we're getting from that pixel. So having that pixel data allows you to do much deeper conversion tracking and allows you to optimize for other things other than just like cost per clicks and cost per views. It allows you to optimize for things that really matter. Purchases, conversions on streaming platforms, all that type of stuff. It also allows you to build up data around the people that you should be the most interested in, which are the people that make it to the bottom of the funnel, AKA the people that make it to the smart link, the people that make it to your ad to cart or make it to your website or make it to whatever it is that you're pixling. But these are the people you're going to want to build customer audiences around for your retargeting ads. These are the people you're going to want to build, look at like audiences around, or these are the people that you're going to want to study their data the most to figure out how can I get more people like you who may be interested in this type of thing that I'm selling. So by not pixling your advertising campaigns out the gate, you know what I'm saying? You should really set the pixel up before you have the ad set up. You're just doing yourself a greater service because you're not allowing yourself to see all of the data that is there for you. And this is data that really matters. At the bottom of it, at the bottom of the bottom, top of the top, pixel data matters the most in my opinion. Like it's cool to see your views. It's cool to see the baseline clicks, but I'm trying to see who converted, bro. I'm trying to see who hit that pixel. So start using pixels if you don't know about Facebook pixels, if you're not super familiar with it. Look it up, Google it, YouTube it, it's out there, but it's something that you need to start doing a lot more of. And the last mistake that I see coming amongst artists who are running Facebook ads and running Instagram ads is you're not running retargeting ads. You're starting out, you start all your campaigns out by targeting completely cold traffic, right? So when it comes to the advertising world, you have a cold audience and you have a warm audience. Cold audience is basically people who have never seen you before. This moment they saw your ad. And then warm audience is people who have seen you at some point in time before. Maybe they follow you. Maybe they've seen your past ads before. Maybe they came from another platform. They know who you are, right? So in the advertisement world, cold traffic is typically much more expensive than warm traffic. Why? Because you're trying to convince someone that has never seen you before to do something versus trying to convince someone that is already familiar with you to do something. You know, I equate it to it's like, it's like inviting people into your house. Like who's gonna be the first person to come into your house if you ask them? The stranger that you just met on the street 30 seconds ago or your longtime friend that you've known for the past couple of years or so, right? Probably the friend. And it's the same way when it comes to conversions with ads, when it comes to getting certain people to click over, your warm audience and the people that you have marketed yourself to before are way more likely to click through on your ad and go check certain things out. So if you have a pretty sizable retargeting audience, you know, if you've been running ads for a minute, I recommend you start all of your advertising campaigns as a retargeting campaign. Wash your ad through all of the people who have seen you at some point in time before you start trying to push yourself to completely new people. And this is especially true for those of you who have small ad budgets. If you have a small ad budget, focus on building up a big retargeting audience over time rather than always trying to bring new people into the fold. Because, you know, chances are that if you've ran an ad campaign, you've probably gotten a couple thousand people to see you but you probably didn't get a couple thousand followers or a couple thousand clicks, you know what I'm saying? Or a couple thousand conversions or whatever. So there are still people within this audience set of people who have seen you that can be converted into fans, you know? So with the fact that that traffic just tends to be a lot more cheaper, it's a great place to start when you're trying to warm up a pixel, when you're trying to just get some vanity metrics or get some social proofing on a piece of content before you start to push it out to your co-audience, right? If the people that already like you and are familiar with you don't like a piece of content, then it may be safe to say that people outside of your base won't like it as well. You don't really know, you know what I'm saying? You gotta test it out, go back to that step. But it's a great place to start when you're doing your advertising campaigns with these ads. So one piece of advice I would just recommend is that once again, when you're in the stages of warming up your pixel, when you're in the early stages of running ads, but you do have a pretty good size audience built and you can check this in your Facebook ad manager, you know what I'm saying? You can see how big certain audience sets are. Then it starts to make a lot more sense to start out doing retargeting ads amongst your fans or people who could, could be fans that they've seen before, then necessarily trying to chase that completely cold traffic that person that doesn't know who you are, right? So it's a case by case situation. I'm not always saying it's the best thing to do, you know what I'm saying? Or not to target cold traffic, you know what I'm saying? It's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just saying in a lot of scenarios it makes a lot more sense to do retargeting and to hit their audience first and enough of you aren't doing it, you know what I'm saying? So it's just something to think about. So there it is guys. Those are the Facebook and Instagram ad mistakes that you're probably making. I'm sure you violated one of these rules, you're making one of these faux pas, you know what I'm saying? You're messing up in one of these categories. But these are all things that I can genuinely say have made me become a better advertiser over the last couple of years that I've been running Facebook and Instagram ads. And I'm here to tell you that, you know, don't get discouraged with the ad process. At the end of the day, it is experience. The more that you do it, the more that you learn, the better that you get. You know, I remember running ads, you know what I'm saying? A couple of years ago, I was spending a couple of dollars on it and a lot of those things that I learned in that process helped me today. Now we're running tens of thousands of dollars on ads and you know what I'm saying? We're running these huge ad budgets. That experience adds up. It makes you better. You will get better if you run these enough. But the thing that you have to do is just make sure not to violate those things I talked about and just stay the course, practice and get better, put your money into it when you can and you'll be okay. Now with that being said, if you feel like you're learning anything today, please like and share this video, hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.