Content is king. Of course, your music is going to be the biggest factor in attracting new fans, but the content that we put in front of people is how we grab their attention and get them to give your song the chance it deserves. The main takeaway we want you to have from this post is just to be open to trying out new content styles. Not every campaign is going to crush right out of the gate. Honestly, most times we do have to test multiple variables to get a campaign to where we want it to be. So all we ask is that you be willing to try different things out need be. It could change your life.
Content Is King
The importance of content
After running well over 1000 campaigns as an agency across nearly every genre you can think of, we've been able to hammer out a strong process that tends to lead to the best results for our clients. Without going into too much detail, there's really main 4 factors at play when it comes to having successful campaign. Those being: ad spend, song strength, video content, and audience choice. Ad spend is really it's own bucket as an independent variable, because obviously, if you double your total ad spend budget, we should see close to double the results right? So that leaves us with song strength, video content and audience choice as the 3 main variables we can play around with to maximize our results. While all 3 are very important, if you asked me to rank them in order from most important to least important, we'd easily say song > content > audience.
So let's start at #1, the song itself. Obviously once you release the song, it kinda is what it is. We can't change it after the fact, and at the end of the day, some songs are going to be better for advertising campaigns than others and that's just how it is. So the best way to attack this variable is just to test more songs over time. But when we're actually running a campaign for your song, we've already committed to it. So for the purposes of this article, we're going to focus on the next two variables. So after the song, at #2 we have video content, and that's really going to be the main focus of this article. As an agency, we've ran well into the 1000s of campaigns over the years and it seems every month we become more and more convinced in the absolute difference maker that content can be to a campaign. Finding the right piece of content can take a weak campaign and turn it into a smash hit, and it can take an already strong campaign and make it even stronger. So after you hire us, we start our campaign and you ask what you could be doing to improve your own results, hands down it's focusing on content. It's really not even close.
We know content creation is not every artists’ favorite thing to do and frankly, it's not ours either. Because of that, we can all admit it can be hard to even know where to begin and that makes it really easy to push off. So when you start working with us, we do take this into consideration and offer to make a few cover art videos to use in your campaign and of course, if you supply us with any additional content up front, we'll use that as well. Oftentimes this initial content is going to be enough to provide us with strong results. Other times, we may reach out to ask for additional content to test in order to strengthen your campaign. It's totally your decision if you'd like to spend the time or additional budget to create some more content for us to test, but if you want to give us the best opportunity to make your campaign pop off, we can't overstate just how valuable sending over more content can be. As an agency, we will always be limited based on the assets you provide us to promote your song when it comes down to it. So all we really ask is to be open to getting us over some more content when we believe that's what we need to take your campaign to the next level.
Now that we have the core concept out the way, we can now discuss different types of content you can create, and the effects that testing new content can have on a campaign’s performance with a few real life examples from our clients. The picture below shows the difference in cost before and after testing new content on one of our clients campaign just to show you off rip the difference it can make.
Content Style Options
When it comes to what types of content you could provide, there are virtually unlimited paths you can take. One of the most common types of content we receive from our clients is what we call "Performance Content". This style is mainly what you see artists posting to their Tik Tok's and Instagram pages and involves you or your band performing your song in a cool location. This style can allow the viewer to get a look into how you create your music, or what types of emotion or vibe you're trying to portray in your song. Performance based content tends to yield great results when it’s done right. But since this is likely the most common content style you see artists post, it can be hard to cut through the noise. In short, we've found when you get this style right, there's nothing better. But it's definitely one of the hardest styles to get right out the gate.
Another style of content we've been a lot of success with lately is utilizing anime, tv show & movie clips. This style has not only been very successful at cutting down costs and improving campaigns for a ton of our clients, it's also one of the easiest and least time consuming styles for you to make. Plus, it's kind of an engagement hack. Just think, if you're a huge Breaking Bad fan & you see a video of Walter White while you're scrolling on Instagram, there's a high chance you're going to give that clip at least 3 seconds of your time. And those first 3 seconds can be all you need to introduce someone to your song. If you're more of a DIYer, we suggest just finding some clips on YouTube, downloading them, putting different parts of your song over it, and optionally adding your lyrics to the middle of the screen for increased engagement. But if you have trouble finding good clips or you want something a bit more professional, then we'd recommend hiring an editor on Fiverr to create a video for you. Depending on the editor, they can be low cost and and turn out really great. So definitely don't be afraid to outsource this if you're not the editing type or don't have the time to put it together. This is probably simplest and easiest way for you to help us do a better job with your campaign. Not to mention, if you're going to be investing hundreds or thousands of dollars, don't you think it's worth it to maybe spend $10-50 to get really high quality content to use? It's a no brainer in our opinion.
While the two styles above are the most common and likely the best options to test out, as mentioned, there really is an unlimited amount of styles you can try out. You can try funny/meme videos, aesthetic/stock footage videos, music video clips, lyric videos, and the list goes on and on. Really, anything you see work well on Tik Tok usually has a high likelihood of performing well as an ad. It's not a 100% correlation, but it's still strong. The only real difference we've noticed is that for ads specifically, it's usually a good idea to start the clips off at a very strong point. AKA, don't have the first 5-10 seconds be the intro with no vocals. You have about 3 seconds to grab somebodies attention, so make sure you hook em in as much as you can.
Now that we've talked a bit about the different styles of content you can make, let's get to some examples of campaigns that vastly improved once we got some new content into the mix for them. The photo below is an snapshot from one of our high performing clients video. The whole video is a bunch of aesthetic pictures & videos complied together like the one shown, with their lyrics on the screen for increased engagement. This video increase our clients already great results by about 25%.
From Bad to Great
The first example we will look at is one of our long term clients most recent campaign we started in December 2023. We began the campaign with only being able to test the cover art content, as he was rather busy with work and the holidays. Over the first few days, we were averaging around $1.60 per result, which is most definitely NOT where we want our costs to be. Especially since for him in particular, we've seen songs as low as $0.15 cents on a global audience. Which is borderline hit song level. So we knew there was a lot of room to improve. So we reached out to him to let him know we probably needed to jump on getting new content into the mix sooner rather than later. He agreed, and since he was still busy, he ended up just hiring someone on Fiverr for about $30 to create a couple anime videos for his song. Then he added the lyrics and we took em live. Within hours of adding in those new videos we saw a MASSIVE improvement on his results. The average cost per result went down all the way to $0.24 on the same audience that was gettin $1.60 clicks the day before! That's a decrease in cost by over 80%, and an increase in clicks by over 6.667x. And we did all of that, just by testing out a few new pieces of content. In the end, the 15 minutes and $30 he spent hiring that editor is saving him over $1.36 per click. With a $500 ad spend budget, that means he'll go from getting 312 total clicks to 2083.. Talk about a good investment. Now, a week or two into optimizing with the new content, his campaign he's averaging about $0.18 cents a click and his song on Spotify is absolutely booming. Check out the photo below to see just how big of a difference it made in achieving the compounded growth effect we're after.
From Great to smash hit
Another fantastic, but slightly difference example of content massively improving a campaign, is from another one of our long-term clients. At the time, we had been running this campaign for him for about a month and a half, and his campaign was already doing really well with costs sitting around $0.25 per result on the world audience which both of us were pretty happy with. But he was thinking he'd probably want to go for a 3rd month, so we decided that it wouldn’t hurt to try out some new content. So he got to work and sent over some new videos to test. In this case, he decided to go with a video of him in the car vibing out to the song, and added text to the video that told the story about why he made the song. It was super personal, and it fit the overall vulnerable & open vibe the song had, and it probably only took him around 20 minutes to put it together. Just like in the last example, this video absolutely crushed it in a matter of hours. The world audience dropped down to $0.05 per result, again, an 80% decrease in costs! But this time, from already a REALLY good cost level. Once we get near or under $0.10 a click, that's when were taking "put the house on it" numbers. It's very rare to get a song to this point, but when it happens, you know you really got something special there. Costs really don’t get much better than this, especially when we are dealing with a world audience. We were able to effectively double his streams per day after making the change. Not to mention, we even decreased our total budget in the 3rd month since we were also running a new song he dropped. So really, with just one video, we doubled his streams per day and spent less money in order to do so. Talk about a win.
