 What's going on it's your man Kory, welcome to The Digital Dash where I'll be giving you tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. Now today, what I want to talk about is international traffic versus domestic traffic. Now this video topic pretty much came from a conversation that I was having with one of my clients. We've been running YouTube ads for his music videos and of course I've been running one ad domestic, so I mean US and Canadian traffic, and then one ad that's international meaning countries that are outside the US and outside of Canada. Now the question that he asked me or the problem that he kind of brought to my attention was hey man, I see all of these new fans coming in from Germany and Russia and Mexico and all of these places that I am not at. How does this benefit me as an artist and is it something that we really need to be doing? Now this is a question that I get from a lot of artists, mostly those who are not informed enough to realize the benefits of targeting your music to countries that are not US or Canadian based. So I want to get into some of those things, pretty much give you something to think about on international traffic versus domestic traffic. If you're one of those artists that feels that way, hopefully you come out of this video with a change, perception, and you start to push your music to people who are not just where you are. But before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram. I'll make sure to put my ad name on the screen. Come talk to me. Come engage with me. Come give me some video ideas, all of that good stuff. Now with that being said, let's get right into it. Now keep in mind as I go through this video that when I say domestic traffic, I am talking about traffic in the US and Canada. I tend to just lump those two together. And when I say international traffic, I'm talking about traffic from countries that are outside the US and Canada. So if you are an artist who does not live in the US, then unfortunately this entire video may not apply to you. Same concepts that apply, I would still recommend that you watch it just in case you live in another country that kind of fits some of these things that I'm talking about. But I am talking about US and Canadian traffic when I say domestic and like I said, everything else when I say international. So the first reason that you as the artist should be looking at targeting yourself to international countries is that it is exponentially cheaper. And the reason I say this is because the US and Canada are such hotbeds for advertisements. Not just for music artists, but also for major corporations and businesses who are trying to sell products. And they are also using Facebook ads. They are also using YouTube ads. They are also using some of the similar things that you are using to put your music out there. And if you know anything about marketing in general, you know that the more people that are in a space, the harder it is to occupy that space. And the more expensive it is to not only get into that space, but to also push us up to the top of that space. And if I could put this into something more practical, let's look at like a YouTube ad for example, right? Now I can run ads to countries that are US based and get on average about a half of penny to a penny per view costs on a YouTube ad. If I'm not targeting, if I'm targeting solely international countries. Now that same ad running to the US and running to Canada, if it's optimized right, would do on average two to four cents a view. A cent of view if it's really good, but on average two to four cents a view. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but as you scale up, that literally becomes the difference between hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and then hundreds of thousands of dollars, just that little fraction alone. So I say this to say, if you're an artist with a small budget and you're in the phase of your career where you're more so data gathering, right? You're trying to just see who likes it and collect as much data on the people that do like it so you can make better decisions. Then it doesn't always make sense to go with domestic traffic because you're going to get less data at a more expensive cost. And it's going to have less of an impact than if you had ran into somewhere that was not the US or Canada based. Now keep in mind as I go through this video that when I say domestic traffic, I am talking about traffic in the US and Canada. I tend to just lump those two together. And when I say international traffic, I'm talking about traffic from countries that are outside the US and Canada. So if you are an artist who does not live in the US, then unfortunately this entire video may not apply to you. Same concept of the plot, I would still recommend that you watch it just in case you live in another country that kind of fits some of these things that I'm talking about. But I am talking about US and Canadian traffic when I say domestic and like I said, everything else when I say international. So the first reason that you as the artist should be looking at targeting yourself to international countries is that it is exponentially cheaper. And the reason I say this is because the US and Canada are such hotbeds for advertisements, not just for music artists, but also for major corporations and businesses who are trying to sell products. And they are also using Facebook ads. They are also using YouTube ads. They are also using some of the similar things that you are using to put your music out there. And if you know anything about marketing in general, you know that the more people that are in a space, the harder it is to occupy that space and the more expensive it is to not only get into that space, but to also push yourself to the top of that space. And if I could put this into something more practical, let's look at like a YouTube ad for example, right? Now I can run ads to countries that are in US based and get on average about a half as penny to a penny per view costs on a YouTube ad. If I'm not targeting, if I'm targeting solely international countries. Now that same ad running to the US and running to Canada, if it's optimized right, would do on average two to four cents of view. A cent of view if it's really good, but on average two to four cents of view. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but as you scale up, that literally becomes the difference between hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars and then hundreds of thousands of dollars, just that little fraction alone. So I say this to say, if you're an artist with a small budget and you're in the phase of your career where you're more so data gathering, right? You're trying to just see who likes it and collect as much data on the people that do like it so you can make better decisions. Then it doesn't always make sense to go with domestic traffic because you're going to get less data at a more expensive cost. And it's going to have less of an impact than if you had ran into somewhere that was not the US or Canada based. Now the second reason that I would say go after international traffic is one that I can't like definitively prove. Like I don't have too much hard, hard data to say, like this is for sure, but I've seen it enough through the things I've done to like be able to run with it. And that is that for the most part, it seems like international fans tend to engage with the content and the music a lot more frequently. Now this may be because they're not here. They feel like, oh, this artist is in another country. I don't really get to see them or, you know, they may never come here. So let me show them how much I love them so that hopefully one day they will consider coming to this country on their tours or try to make their way out here. I see it all the time. Like my ass that get ran to international countries for the most part on average tends to get higher engagements than the ads that I run to the US. Now I think a lot of this also has to do with the music culture of the US. Like, you know, keeping 100 where our music snobs here. We're pretty particular with who we give our engagement and our comments and our likes to, especially on the music front, right? Like you're not just handing out subscribes and likes to just any artist, right? Like you have to really, really love the artist. Well, on the other hand, when you hit some of these countries that are not, you know, kind of so, so overconfident in their engagement ability, as we are, they tend to just throw around likes and comments and be very open and under some of the content and let you know what they think. I've seen it a lot. Like I said, there's no, I don't have any, like hard data or special reports to show you. It's just something I've noticed from the campaigns I've run US based and international based. And it's even to the point where I tend to expect a higher conversion rates from my international ads on average, like I said, on average, then from my US and Canadian based ads. It's just, like I said, can't explain it, but I see it and it does happen. Now the third reason that I think that you should target international traffic is that at the end of the day, these are real people who spend real money going back to the story of the client that I was working on with the YouTube ads who, you know, made me think of this video. That was one of the points he made. He was like, Cory, if I have a fan in Mexico, how can I make money from that fan? If I can't get to him? And I'm like, man, you have merch, right? You have a store. He or she can steal, buy a t-shirt and get a ship to them. And you can still make money from that person. Now, what I've noticed a lot from, like I said, clients who are US based that get into the whole thing of running ass of these different countries, it seems like they always look at it from a standpoint as if these people aren't real, like they look at the numbers and they assume they're, oh, just because a hundred people from Mexico come in it, it must be fake. As if Mexico does not have a thriving economic system, just like we have here in the US. It's crazy. It blows my mind. So when you're looking at this data, when you're looking at these fancies of the countries, like I said, at the end of the day, they have the same amount of buying power. They have the same amount of, you know, potential clout on the internet. They have the same amount of potential to spread your music as any fan that is sitting around you. And like I said, going back to point two about how much harder it seems like your international fans go for you, I would even argue that their buying power and their online clout power is a little bit stronger than your US base. You know, I can think of several artists who went out and they built themselves up in international markets. Thanks to the work that their teams put in to build them out in these markets, they took that money. Cause like I said, it's all green at the end of the day. They took that money, brought it back to the US and then used it to build themselves up domestically. I can think of, like I said, a lot of artists from six nine to earth game, to JID, to baby Rose, lots of artists in their teams are taking that approach going international first, making some bread, then coming back here and spending all of that money. They don't have to spend to pop themselves out domestically. Now there are countries that you should stay away from in certain situations. For instance, if you're running a Facebook ad, you want to stay away from India and Indonesia and Brazil and even some African countries because those places are notorious for having click farms, which is a whole separate video in itself. Just know you don't want to target those places with YouTube. It's a little bit different. There are places that you may want to stay away from not necessarily because they're doing like sketchy things, but because you have to consider the buying power of the people that you're targeting. Meaning if you're targeting something like a third world country, then yes, you may get a lot of cheap views per whatever your cost is, but then you have to consider the quality of the people that you're targeting. Are these people, people that are going to buy your music, stream your music, buy a hoodie, buy a ticket to your show. You have to think about all this stuff when targeting international countries. Now luckily for you guys, I have a list of good countries to target and you can check it out in the link below for $1.99. Actually now I'm just playing. I got you. I'm going to read the list off to you. Now these countries are high quality countries because they're pretty much countries that are like the top music consumers out of every other country. So United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Japan, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, South Korea and Canada. But Canada goes back to domestic. Don't say I've never done anything for you. So those are high quality countries that you can target with your Facebook ads, with your YouTube ads and just in your overall marketing strategy. And you can go into it knowing that you're safely targeting the space that if you actually build up a substantial fan base there, you can actually do something with it and start to make a viable career out of everything. Now I would love to hear what you guys think in the comment section below. Have you ran certain ads or promotions to international countries? How did it work out for you? How has it worked out for you against running those same promotions to here in the US or in Canada? Like I said, drop that in the comment section below. Let everybody see what's up. Let them know I'm not tripping here. Right? Like I'm not, I'm not losing my mind when I think this stuff. Outside of that, if you feel like you learn 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 Corey and I'll see y'all next time.