Time to lock in on branding. I just listened to the Defining Your Brand lesson and felt like John was speaking directly to me when he said that time and again he sees artists who don’t know who they’re targeting because they haven’t defined their brand.

So it’s a bit tough to define a brand based on the musical style of our songs, as the tunes are written by 3 different individuals and really cover a wide spectrum of styles (from heavy-handed sinister rock, to alt country, to indie pop). But the theme that underlies them all, and also speaks to our band’s personality, is the raw-edge, no-shits-given production. We’re true to the songs—no frills, no gloss. (Deep down it’s because we have no money for production. But even if we did, there’s no way we would go for a polished sound. Just better gear!). Another thing is that people often confuse “Barbudos” with “Barbados”, which is very far off target. Barbudos is Spanish for “the bearded ones” and is the name of Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries (and also the baseball team he put together as soon as he took power). While we occasionally make reference to the Castro history, we prefer to focus on the beardedness, since our songs are definitely bearded. I will try to address this in the squeeze page headline.

So I listed some descriptive words in this vein:

Raw

Gritty

Genuine

True, truthful

Unpolished

Open

Minimalist

Rough

Undressed

Unglossed

Bearded

Real-deal

No frills

Low-fi

Straight-up

Candid

Unfeigned

Unprocessed

Unschooled

Original

So here we go with Indie Rock experiment #4: new ad copy and squeeze page copy

on targeting. You'd be surprised. A target audience may make perfect sense but just never convert. Hard to know why sometimes. For example with MMM. You'd think I'd do really well with Music Connection Magazine. I do well with many other similar publications. And yet, whenever I run ads to that audience, they flop. No idea why. So even though Neil Young might feel right, it may turn out not to be the audience that converts for you. Having only tested two audiences so far (and two very different ones), it's hard to say.

I'm going to try going back to targeting a broader audience: US, 25+, interests=indie rock

On copy, I'm still really feeling that all of the copy, from the ads down, is feeling a bit canned. I see that work sometimes, but I'd really try to scrap my templates and imagine yourself just shouting across the room from your merch table, trying to pull in people passing by. What would you say? How would you hook them and pull them in? Try and distill that into a sentence and insert your own personality and brand into it. That usually helps a lot.

The branding exercise helped a lot with ideas for copy. I'm hoping this will sound a little more sincere:

Ad copy:

Headline: Indie Rock Fan?

Text: This ain’t no clean-cut indie rock. It’s gritty. It’s witty. It’s a free download. Try it!

Squeeze page: http://www.barbudosmusic.com/x.....ndie-rock/ 

Ok so I'll let that run and post the results. Thanks again for listening everybody, hope this isn't as painful for you as it is for me, hee hee.

Well folks, not much good news here. I have tried a couple more experiments (and a Hail Mary experiment you can read about below) but the results are abysmal. I’m not giving up—I can see that this whole strategy makes sense and I’ve read about the success of others in the forum. But I can’t keep pissing band money away on FB ads so I’m going to have to switch to the free traffic approach. I wish this thread could have provided more information than what NOT to do, but it is what it is.

For the sake of thoroughness, I’ve summarized my results here:

For the last experiment I posted (Indie Rock Expt 4):

Ad copy:

Headline: Indie Rock Fan?

Text: This ain’t your clean-cut indie rock. It’s gritty… it’s witty... it’s a free download. Try it!

Squeeze Page: http://www.barbudosmusic.com/x.....ndie-rock/

Results: reach = 6906, click through rate = 0.245%, Aweber displays = 17 displays, 0 conversions.

Indie Rock Expt 5: narrower targeting that I had some success with before… Suffice it to say 15 displays and 0 conversions.

Grand Totals and a Hail Mary Experiment:

Between the two campaigns:

Aweber displays: 240

Conversions: 5

Conversion rate: 2%

Total spent: $162.96 (that’s a very expensive 5 subscribers)

As a Hail Mary experiment (I work in a research lab and that's actually what we call it when we're on the last expt before giving up) I tried changing my squeeze page to read EXACTLY as John’s (Kick off your boots… etc) and set up my FB ad EXACTLY as he did in the FB case study lesson (except our band’s image). Something was definitely different in the targeting, since my potential reach was 1 780 000 whereas his was around 11 000 if I recall.

Results: reach=9612, click through rate=0.148%, Aweber displays=19, 0 conversions.

In truth, the Barbudos campaign was a pilot—I’m actually part of a new band now and we have no album yet to sell. But I learned a lot through this exercise. As my experimentation funds are exhausted, it’s on to generating web content to drive free traffic for the new project. This won’t be the last you hear from me… just hopefully it won’t be as depressing in the future…

Hey John, ya I totally get what you're saying with the branding. As I explained when I tried to get more defined with the Barbudos branding, it's difficult to brand based on musical style. If you want to see what I mean, check out the samples for "Hard Times" (indie rock targeted), and "Riverside" (alt country targeted) here:

http://www.barbudosmusic.com/b.....but-album/

For this reason, I tried to think about the branding in terms of our band's personality, which really does come through in all the songs regardless of their style. That's what I was getting at here:

So it’s a bit tough to define a brand based on the musical style of our songs, as the tunes are written by 3 different individuals and really cover a wide spectrum of styles (from heavy-handed sinister rock, to alt country, to indie pop). But the theme that underlies them all, and also speaks to our band’s personality, is the raw-edge, no-shits-given production. We’re true to the songs—no frills, no gloss. (Deep down it’s because we have no money for production. But even if we did, there’s no way we would go for a polished sound. Just better gear!). Another thing is that people often confuse “Barbudos” with “Barbados”, which is very far off target. Barbudos is Spanish for “the bearded ones” and is the name of Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries (and also the baseball team he put together as soon as he took power). While we occasionally make reference to the Castro history, we prefer to focus on the beardedness, since our songs are definitely bearded. I will try to address this in the squeeze page headline.

So to answer your questions:

did you make any changes to the squeeze page copy? It looks to be the same. If you're getting clicks but no conversions it's either targeting or squeeze page copy. Did you narrow down from indie rock like suggested?

I changed the headline and subheader copy to read: 

Take a Break from the Fake. Forget the Glossy, Polished Indie Rock You’ve Been Told to Like and Bite Into the Witty Lyrics and Gritty, Minimalist Sound of Barbudos—aka “The Bearded Ones”

and

Download their groove-driven, swaggering track, “Hard Times” and have a listen for yourself. It’s rough, it’s raw, and it’s the real deal.

I didn't change the body copy because I felt like it really captured the branding message I was going for. As for narrowing the target, I did a half-assed job of it in "Indie Rock expt 5" but by that point I had already decided to stop so it honestly isn't worth analyzing.

It's really important that you have a defined brand and a really defined ideal fan so yo can lazer in on that audience.As a result I think the copy is really feeling a bit canned. I'd like to see your own voice and personality popping off the page but as it stands I'm not really seeing that.

So to be honest I don't actually know what you mean by "canned"... I guess you're saying that it sounds insincere because it's not directly in line with the branding idea. I really thought it was in line with the "we've got the raw-edge, minimalist sound going on" branding, but the numbers don't lie. It could be that I finally figured out the branding story but ran out of ad money before I could get the targeting right (aka "really defined ideal fan").

I'm also not quite following the stats.

You mentioned each ad having less than 20 clicks to website (which is far too few to have any statistical significance), but then you mention 240 aweber displays so I'm not clear where those other clicks came from.

The 240 clicks is the total of all displays for all experiments. Each experiment had different parameters (and different problems), so it's not really fair to sum them all together except to illustrate the point that I managed to "get it wrong" across the board! I don't have my notebook here, but just by reading through my earlier posts, here's the breakdown (if you really want to know the parameters for each they are described throughout this thread):

Indie Rock expt 1: 13 displays, 0 conversions

Indie Rock expt 2: 20 displays, 0 conversions

Indie Rock expt 3: 21 displays, 1 conversion

Indie Rock expt 4: 17 displays, 0 conversions

Indie Rock expt 5: 15 displays, 0 conversions

Alt Country expt 1: 75 displays, 1 conversion

Alt Country expt 2: 18 displays, 1 conversion

Alt Country expt 3: 27 displays, 1 conversion

Alt Country expt 4 (the Hail Mary expt): 19 displays, 0 conversions

The grand total is 240 Aweber diplays and 5 subscribers (I'm missing some here since I don't have my notebook with me). I realize that per experiment the numbers are not high enough for statistical significance. But that's the trouble with paying $0.60/click--had I let the experiments run longer I may have seen a better response, but that has to be balanced against a budget (and the fact that my inexperience with targeting AND copywriting made me lean towards the "it's not working I should change something" approach).

I point all of this out only because if you are this far off with paid, you are still going to run into trouble with free traffic, and free traffic is a LOT of work by comparison. Even harder now after even more recent Google updates.

Well, I'm not gonna lie, that's pretty disheartening. But I as I explained, the Barbudos campaign was a pilot. It's a hobby band that plays 1 show every couple months. Because we had an actual album to sell, I simply used it to learn Wordpress and Aweber and all the principles of marketing. I'm not planning on putting any work into further defining the Barbudos brand, or driving free traffic to the Barbudos website. All that energy will go into the new project "Eli & the Straw Man", which doesn't even have a free download to give away yet.

Most of the successful campaigns I've seen have always had this in common.

1. A clear and defined artist identity and hook.

2. A very laser targeted audience. (Each ad should target a single interest in one market – IE US and Canada).

3. Engaging copy that really speaks to the pre-existing passions of that market.

Ok! Well that's what we'll do with Eli & the Straw Man. I've got a good marketing friend, Robyn James, on board to help me with it. She even bought MMM 3.0 and joined the insiders circle--you're welcome

I'd just hate to see you walk away from this experience feeling that it didn't work.

Not to worry--there's always something to be taken from each experience. I'm intimately familiar with troubleshooting experiments--I think I mentioned that I work in a research lab. We call it 99% "re" and 1% "search".

Thanks again for all your input John. I will implement these principles as I go forward with the new project.