ReverbNation Launches Facebook Marketing Tool “Promote It For Shows”
ReverbNation has launched "Promote It For Shows", a Facebook promotion tool design to help music venues drive attendance. Promote It is currently in open beta, but an earlier version that I test drove impressed me enough that we're suggesting it to the thousands of venues that Hypebot's sister company Skyline Music works with.
There's no questioning the power of Facebook to connect with fans. Studies by Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Ticketfly and others, put the value of a Facebook "Like" to drive tickets sales at between $2 and $9. Our own experiments with Facebook ads have convinced us that small investments of $25-$100 can jumpstart viral chat and sales weeks prior to show date.
Facebook has its own self-service ad placement system, but ReverbNation's Promote It For Shows both simplifies and expands upon that offering. ReverbNation generated campaigns take minutes to set up, reach local fans and encourages them to invite friends to buy tickets and join them. Promote It For Shows also “learns” what works for venues from previous campaigns.
Major venues like The Roxy in LA, and NYC's Knitting Factory and Brooklyn Bowl are already using the system. I addition to selling tickets, Promote It For Shows is driving "Likes" for these venues and encouraging subscribers to join mailing lists.
The system also has an optional incentive element that venues can activate to offer free tickets for early responders. “The free ticket incentive is really helpful,” explains to Tonya Cooke, Social Media Manager for The Roxy. “But it’s also the landing page that takes this to a whole new level. Once they click, in addition to seeing who else is going to the show, they can listen to the band, see show details and claim their free ticket.”
Is It A Band Marketing Tool Too?
ReverbNation has already launched Promote It platforms for Songs and Facebook Pages, and while the new Promote It For Shows is built for venues, bands may want to experiment with using it to promote their own shows, as well. Try it out here and tell us what you think.
How is this any different than the standard Facebook ads?
Can’t we all agree that Facebook event invites are becoming much less useful and spammy?
Hey Ron – Promote It is a platform that helps artists and venues run effective Facebook ads. When an you run a Promote It campaign, we write the title/body for the Facebook ads and optimize the ads, based on the 50,000 campaigns we’ve run to-date, to attract the most fans.
You also get a custom landing page we designed to get fans listening to the music, liking the artist’s/venue’s Facebook Page, sharing with their friends, and buying tickets to the shows.
And, our reporting system ties it all together by telling you not just how the ad campaign did (like impressions and clicks) but also how many fans listened to your music, shared with their friends, etc.
So, we take the power of Facebook Ads and all that provides, and build music-specific technology on top of it to empower artists and venues to effectively promote their music and shows.
-Nick Sehn, product manager for Promote It, ReverbNation
“we write the title/body for the Facebook ads and optimize the ads, based on the 50,000 campaigns we’ve run to-date, to attract the most fans.”
What does that mean? I can write the title/body of the ad and adjust all the parameters within Facebook. Not sure how this is any different?
wow this seems kind of pointless
The difference with the ads is we create dozens of ads for each Promote It campaign and test those ads to see which ones are the best. The test is based on the past data of the 50,000 Promote It campaigns that we’ve run. The output of the test is a set of ads that are optimized for your campaign.
While you could technically do this in Facebook (i.e. create dozens of ads with different ad copy and different ad images, run a test to see which ads are clicked on the most, and pick the winners), it would be expensive, takes time, and only tell you which ads people click on, not which ones lead to a conversion.
The power of Promote It is that it provides the artist/venue this optimization as part of each campaign and focuses on picking winning ads that drive the most fan interactions (not just the most clicks). And, artists/venues don’t have to waste the time and money trying to write better performing ads.
It’s actually a pretty powerful tool if you know how to build your ads effectively. Source: I use it.
To Nick and Melissa,
As someone who has used both FB Ads and ReverbNation’s Promote It (as well as other music marketing tools on other websites), I can say that experimenting & creating your own ads is WAY MORE EFFECTIVE than using ReverbNation’s Promote It.
As Melissa said, “It’s actually a pretty powerful tool if you know how to build your ads effectively…” In other words, if you know how to build your FB Ads effectively, the results can be better. The problem with using ReverbNation’s “Promote It” is that you have no control over what they write as the title or body. Also, you’re only limited to the options that ReverbNation gives you to target your potential listeners. Therefore, Melissa’s comment concerning “Promote It” is contradictory considering that, if you want to build your ads ‘effectively’ you should have total control over it.
I know that Nick says that they’ve got 50,000 Promote It campaigns to show that they know what they’re doing. However, that’s not the case. All that proves is that you’ve had that many campaigns. It doesn’t prove that a majority of them were successful ones. That’s like a major record label saying that they’ve signed 50,000 bands. All that proves is that they did that–they don’t mention that they’re likely to screw most of them over.
And sure–it is cool that using “Promote It” gives you a cool FB landing page, but how is that any different from making a cool-looking default tab on your FB Page? There’s really not much to ReverbNation’s landing page anyway.
And as I said originally, creating the FB ad yourself is much more effective than having ReverbNation do it for you. I get better results doing it myself and spend much less money than when I have ReverbNation do it.
Just THINK before you use this and any service, guys. If a service or website flaunts how much campaigns they’ve ran, but don’t provide how successful they were, then I wouldn’t put my money on it. If they actually do have a high success rate, then you need to question how they get those results. Because if it’s shady or dumb, then I wouldn’t put my money on it either.
(An example of that are those services that promise you 1000 Twitter followers for a fee–only to find out that you have to give them access to your account and they end up having you follow 10,000 other Twitter profiles just for your to reach that 1000 followers.)
And one last thing: the great thing about doing it yourself is that you can tailor your ad specific to you. The statistics and data from 50,000 campaigns is only worth the few set of successful campaigns that can be referred to that can be applied to you. For example, if only 100 of those campaigns were successful (in that there were high click-thru rates and a lot of emails and Likes acquired) and all 100 of those successful campaigns were “boy bands”, then that very much doesn’t do me any good, since I’m a solo singer/songwriter/producer with an awesome & unique voice & production style, but one who doesn’t have the looks to back it up.
@Lawrence,
I can appreciate your position, and I take no umbrage with it at all (except for the implication that it is some sort of ‘snake oil’).
You CAN, in fact, write your own ad and have it served along with the ones we write. If yours is better, that’s the one that is shown. If ours perform better, those ads are shown. It does whatever is in the best interest of the Artist.
However, as you have rightly pointed out, Promote It may not be the best option for people like yourself who are both an expert social marketer and can write computer code for a custom landing page. It was designed for the Artist that wants to spend more time making music and developing their fan relationships than marketing.
I also took a look at the 4 campaigns you have run on Promote It between June and October, and think that there may be a bug in the results we reported to you. Expect a note from Nick about our findings soon.
Overall, our data suggests that Promote It outperforms the vast majority of direct facebook campaigns against which Artists compare it. However, the outcomes seem to vary the most based on the genre of the music and the quality of the music being promoted by the Artist. You can learn more about our facebook music promotion findings at the end of this blog post:
http://blog.reverbnation.com/2011/11/18/social-marketing-2-0-%E2%80%94-how-to-seed-the-social-graph/
Jed Carlson
COO, Co-Fonder, ReverbNation.com
Facebook is the primary marketing tool that use for branding sales and products and you can also use it to increase your online visibility.