A mysterious stranger approaches you on the internet.
“Click this link”, he says. “Trust me, you’ll like it.”
Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’re probably not going to click that (although if I’m wrong you might want to look at getting some robust antivirus software...).Why? Well it’s someone you don’t recognize and have no prior relationship with, offering you a product you know nothing about.
Unfortunately for the mysterious stranger, he’s paid money to put that advert in front of you on a social media site. And you’ve just scrolled straight past it. Unfortunately for many artists, this is exactly what happens when they take their first foray into digital advertising. Why?
Because they don’t know how to stop being a stranger.
The warmth of the audience predicts what they're likely to do when we prompt them to buy, share, watch or listen to our product
In marketing, we use the terms warm and cold to categorize our audience, depending on how familiar they are with us. The warmth of the audience predicts what they're likely to do when we prompt them to buy, share, watch or listen to our product:
Your Warm Audience has got the hots for your product and would like to cosy up to you. In the context of social media, these will be people who:
A Cold Audience is more likely to give you the cold shoulder and a frosty reception. These will be people who match your target demographic, but are not yet aware of you:
Generally speaking, the warm audience are going to be much more worthwhile (and cost-effective) advertising your product to.
While you can still advertise your product to a cold audience, it’s normally worth warming them up before asking them to part with their money or time! You really don't want to be introducing yourself by asking them to buy something.
You'll want to move as many people as possible from your cold audience into your warm audience. This gives you a bigger base to advertise to when you have a new release, show, t-shirt etc. to promote.
If you're using the Beatchain Fan Builder to run social media adverts, we'll automatically do the targeting for your cold audience campaigns, but you'll still need to make sure the content and copy you enter is appropriate for people who aren't familiar with you yet.
What you should do ✅ :
What you shouldn't do ❌ :
Here's a great example of a cold audience advert from Eliza Shaddad:
It's one of the best-performing ads we've seen on Fan Builder so far. But aside from Eliza being a very talented artist, why did this video do so well in front of cold audiences?
The Video
✅ Interesting location
✅ Music starts immediately
✅ Good sound quality
The Text
✅ Stated her genre
✅ Told the audience what they can expect from her page
✅ Asked the audience to perform an action that doesn't require them to leave Instagram.
For more tips on what sort of content works best, check out this blog.
Of course, warmth is a continuum and some members of your warm audience will be warmer than others! The quality and regularity of the organic content you put out on your feed will have a big effect on exactly how warm they are.
And remember your fans can get colder as well as warmer! Try to give your audience as much free (no-strings-attached) content as you can before you do a post asking them to stream or buy anything. A good rule of thumb is to make sure no more than one in three of your organic posts are trying to sell something.
