How does your "Promote It" program work?

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James,

I totally appreciate your questions. I would have the same as you if I were in your shoes. Let me see what I can do to help you better understand the Beta version of our "Promote It!" product. This may be more than you wanted, so please forgive me if its too detailed.

First, its important to understand our relationship with Facebook. We are an advertising API partner with Facebook. What this means is that we have been given special access to programatically create and manage ads on Facebook's network, and to do so on behalf of our customers (Artists, Labels, Venues, etc).

Next, let's talk about the product itself.

Promote It! is a complete end-to-end promotion system, not just a re-selling of facebook's ad inventory. The system is designed to expose your music to new fans who are most likely to respond, drive valuable interactions/engagement with those potential fans, and promote Fan-to-Fan recommendations of your music (word of mouth). We call it a 'system' because it has 4 equally important parts that work together to achieve those outcomes.

The system:

1. Ad Creation/Optimization
When you activate Promote It! for a song, we create literally dozens of unique facebook ads automatically. We create the headlines and body copy largely from the content and information you provide, but we optimize them based on the most recent data we have from across all campaigns we are running for Artists. The result is that we release into facebook a bevvy of ads that are likely to perform well. After that, the ads are managed based on how well they drive the outcomes we've designed the system to achieve (not just impressions or clicks, but interactions and shares).

2. Fan Targeting
We allow you to select the types of fans you want to go after (Local, National, or Global), and we handle the actual geo-taregting in facebook to accomplish that goal. From there, we combine the information you provide us about 'similar artists' with what we have observed about fans who interact with your content on reverbnation.com (our widgets, our apps, etc). i.e. we know that fans who like Band X, Y or Z also seem to dig your music - so we may also target those fans on facebook via their likes and interests combined with their geography. We also do some unique and proprietary targeting of fans based on some more general observations we make, and tests we run that prove fruitful.

3. Landing Pages
One of the biggest problems every Artist faces with online advertising is creating an effective landing page at which to receive all of those expensive clicks you are buying. Let's face it, paying for advertising that sends people to a page that doesn't achieve the outcomes you want is tantamount to throwing money away. But making an effective landing page requires expertise and many iterations to get it right = expensive and time consuming. When you launch a Promote It! campaign, dozens of variations of landing pages are created and continuously tested against each other to see which ones will drive the desired outcomes best for each advertisement that is sending traffic to it. We continually test the best ways to present the page, the call to action, and the sequence of events that occur when someone wants to download your song (should they be asked or required to share the content first, or to 'like' your page, or to join your email list?). In other words, with Promote It! you automatically get landing pages that are built with the latest available data around driving fan interactions and word-of-mouth promotion.

4. Measurement/Benchmarking
Because we control the process end-to-end, we can provide insights into how the program is working for any given Artist - in terms that go beyond impressions and clicks. With this data in hand, you can make an informed decision about the value of the product to you, and you can determine which levers you might want to 'pull' to improve the performance of the product. The levers you have include the song you choose, the photo you use for the advertisement, the similar artists you select, the geography of the fan base you are trying to grow, and how much you want to spend.

I have included a few illustrations below that should help better describe what we are doing (the actual artist name and artist picture are removed to protect their identity). I can't stress enough here that individual results may vary, so these particular results are not to be taken as 'average' nor 'expected'. We have actually had campaigns that perform about 10x better than this, but some that have performed worse as well.

1. Here is an example of the report we provide on all campaigns that have started running or have completed (this one, and all that follow, are for a $50 campaign):



2. Here is that same report with some comments about the things we focus on driving for the Artist on these campaigns:



3. Finally, here is a look at the second campaign that this same Artist ran with a different song and different similar Artists:



As for the question about 'what do I get for the money I spend'... Because we are not optimizing on impressions or clicks, but rather on fan interactions and recommendations to their friends, and also because each artist is different (different genres, different song quality, different 'similar artists', and different targeted fan geographies), we are not able to guarantee a price per impression, or per click, or per outcome. As a result, we encourage artists to try the program one time at the $25 price and see if it delivers value for them. If it does, we expect artists will continue to use the product. If it doesn't, we expect that artists might modify their inputs and try again, or simply not use the product going forward.

You also basically asked 'how long will my campaign run for $25'. Our system is currently designed to get you more fans and recommendations as fast as we can, while still delivering the maximum impact in those areas. So the answer for how long it takes to run is 'it depends'. Our philosophy is that getting more fans is something that you want as soon as possible, so we try to deliver the campaign outcomes as soon as possible, within some constraints about how it performs. In the future, we will provide the option for you to dictate how much you want to spend per week or per month in addition to the 'one-time amount' option that we currently provide. I expect that option to come online in the next 30 days or so.

This brings me to my final point (I know, this turned into a long response). We employ a team of experts on our staff whose only job is to continuously improve the outcomes that artists get for each dollar spent on our system. Ultimately, what we are offering is a simple and powerful way to outsource promotional advertising to a team that is focused on it 24/7, and has the benefit of observing large numbers of campaigns across a wide range of artists. We build that expertise into the price of every campaign, spreading out the cost to any individual Artist so that more can win from the best strategies and tactics that we can deliver. i.e. for only $25, you get a complete, highly optimized, end-to-end campaign (ads, targeting, landing pages, metrics you can understand) that is based on the latest available data, and might cost you, potentially, thousands of dollars to do yourself. Sounds a bit like a sales pitch, but I'm a believer based on the results I have seen so far.

If you have any more questions about the product, or suggestions to improve it, by all means let us know. We are all ears when it comes to customer suggestions. In the meantime, I encourage you to try it out and see how it works for you.

Best,
Jed Carlson
Co-Founder, COO, ReverbNation.com