Paid advertising is the most powerful music marketing tool you can master.

Sure, there are surface-level benefits to running ads that are easy to see—more listeners and streams on streaming platforms, more engagement and followers on social media, more video views, etc.

But the true power of ads doesn’t lie in the vanity metrics (there’s nothing wrong with those) but in something more.

​Learning to run paid ads via Facebook and Instagram allows you to automate your marketing, save yourself time, and, ultimately, unlock additional promotional options that would otherwise remain closed to you without them.

So rather than spending our time trying to go viral on social media or pitching to playlists, let’s have a look at how we can build our artist brand the easy way.

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Your first 1,000 fans

Running an effective ad campaign is the most foolproof way to earn your first 1,000 fans on Spotify.

It’s also an incredible way to drive traffic to your work on other platforms in the process.

In short, you can check a lot of boxes with one ad campaign.

And what’s more is you can automate your marketing and save yourself a ton of time too.

I mean, think about it: all marketing starts by generating awareness, and you do that by getting your content in front of people.

So we can release music to Spotify and hope to be discovered (this doesn’t work), create a ton of social media content to find people (assuming the algorithm actually shows it to them), or we can essentially guarantee exposure by creating a handful of engaging ads and spending a set amount of money every day to ensure we reach our audience.

As someone who has tested all three of these options on multiple occasions, this decision is a no-brainer.

Ads win every time.

Releasing music to Spotify without a plan is a recipe for disappointment (and crickets).

Hoping to go viral on social media is like buying a lotto ticket—sure, you might win, but the odds are low, and if you do, good luck repeating it.

And pitching to user-generated playlists on Spotify is… well, don’t get me started.

Your most valuable asset is your time, and in addition to generating more reliable results, running ads allows you to save a ton of it.

Of all the options available to new artists, ads are the clear winner in my book.

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Creating opportunities

Ads don’t just allow you to automate your audience growth across platforms.

They also help to get you into a position where you can unlock additional campaign tools on Spotify, specifically.

Marketing options like Showcase and Marquee (both great for promoting new releases) aren’t available to artists until they reach a certain threshold of engagement on the platform.

That means that until you can create enough momentum for your music on your own, you’re stuck in zero-listener purgatory.

And we all know what that feels like.

Which takes us back to our original set of options: release without a plan, create content and hope something hits, pitch to… (you know what, never mind), or run ads.

Success begets success, which means the sooner you can build up that initial listener base on Spotify, the sooner you can access additional tools that can push your catalog to even greater heights.

And it all starts with implementing an effective ad strategy.

Once that first domino falls, life gets easier.

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Retargeting for leads

The single biggest advantage of using paid ads for music, though, is not for streams.

It’s for leads (read: collecting email addresses).

Leads are the lifeblood of any business, and your artist business is no different.

Now, this method works regardless of whether or not you’re a fan of using ads as your top-of-funnel strategy to send listeners to Spotify.

Even if you’re using organic content to build your fanbase, this final piece of the puzzle still applies, so don’t sleep on it.

The system → Awareness (traffic) funnels into consideration (leads), and consideration funnels into sales (money).

Basically, it’s this: by using ads (or organic content, if that’s your thing) to generate awareness for your music, you can capture that attention in the form of custom audiences, which you can then retarget with an offer to earn email addresses from your fans.

Once you’ve earned someone’s email address, you can use an automated email sequence to give more value to that person and, ultimately (hopefully), incentivize them to purchase something from you.

This purchase gives value to the customer by giving them something they want, and it gives value to you, the artist, in the form of revenue that you can then use to support yourself or reinvest back into your business to grow even faster.

This really is the whole game, and yes, it really is that simple.

Make sure people know you exist.

Earn their trust by giving them something they want.

Incentivize their loyalty by further delivering on that promise and guiding them into a place where they are keen to financially support what you’re doing.

All of this can be done with ads.

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