Karen Grace said
P.S. I promise I'm not going to forward every single email I get from subscribers, lol ! But honestly this is so heartening I wanted to share it. It's the first bit of feedback I've got regarding my actual album, and I suddenly feel like I must be doing something right somewhere along the line. So far it's all been leaps of faith with this approach, really, and trusting from my little desert island that my messages in bottles will get to the right people. And from his message I feel like there must be lots of people out there also hoping to find new music they love on their own desert islands ... 

I responded to the guy encouraging him to throw his message in a bottle out, and saying I hoped he enjoyed the album. This was his response:

I really, really like it. I go through long periods of struggling to be moved by new music so it's always a real treat to discover someone new that I really feel a connection to. The last couple of times that happened recently were with Lucy Rose, and Iron & Wine last year.

Straight off my favourites are Tired Heart, Raised Our Glasses, Sapling, This Fear and She Never Asked - but I'm sure I'll grow to love it all. 

 

Do you have links to the lyrics?

 

I might follow your advice - fingers crossed!

 

Three cheers for MMM !   

That's really great to read Karen. All we can really ask for as musicians is to find an audience for the art we create. Whether that audience grows to be 50 people, or 50,000 people, it's absolutely a win to find any audience at all. It looks like you're doing that. So congrats. Here's to many more emails like that.

Karen Grace said
Yes here's to that :). 

I also asked some questions on the previous page- I know you've been travelling etc, so I just wanted to make sure you saw the questions? Here are my most important questions again:

I did miss the questions. My apologies.

So yes I have done 3 ad sets each using dynamic creative as you described. I put in £10 ($13) for Laura Marling’s audience, (really small audience) and £15 ($20) a day for Regina and Amelie. But I didn’t go for conversions, because I didn’t think I’d get enough subs for facebook to optimise. My understanding is that going for conversions can backfire if you’re not nearing enough conversions, and suddenly become expensive? But Regina Spektor, got me 18 conversions over 5 days paying £15 a day in a previous test. Is that enough to consider going for conversions ?

Once my budget is $10/day or more I go for conversions. You are correct that it can sometimes make things worse if you are just not getting approximately 25 conversions per week or so. But usually it will work out. And optimization tends to work much better. I only ever go with traffic when my budget is restrictively low.

This is all kind of mind bending, but my hunch is to start again with Regina Spektor going for conversions- sticking with dynamic creative for text to give fb a chance to give me some really good data, and then eventually switch off the under performing text. I’ll also think about other audiences to try targeting with. Laura Marling’s audience always seems to get lots of clicks, but because it’s a small audience, after I have honed in on the age group, the audience size is so small (18,000 or so) that I don’t think I could put the budget big enough to go for conversions, but maybe I could try, because last time I got 10 subs for $2.55 each putting in $12 dollars a day for 5 days. Is that enough to attempt going for conversions?

That all sounds reasonable and my feeling is to always try it. It wont take much to know whether or not you are on the right track. You probably won't get a long lived campaign out of that audience. But at least you might be able to hone in on a winning ad.

I realise LM’s audience won’t be very sustainable. I kind of decided to keep experimenting with Laura Marling’s audience to grow my list a bit. Also because her music is really akin to mine and she’s really big here in the UK so I wanted to at least experiment with her audience as a reference point for other audiences I might try later on that seem a little further from me musically. 

Any thoughts are welcome- do your hunches match mine?

Thank you.

Karen  

Everything you have laid out sounds good. I'd go for it if i was in your shoes and just see what happens.

Sounds good. Keep us posted.

That's great to hear Karen. Sounds like the conversion objective was the key.

And thanks for spreading the word about MMM. I definitely know what you mean. It's not just music marketing. Most people glaze over anytime you tell them that they need to embrace something new and do a bit of work.

I hate to trash my peers, but my impression has always been that about 20% of musicians are really interested in doing whatever they can to succeed, but the large large majority think themselves so brilliant that they shouldn't have to do any work and that everyone should just recognize their talent. I wish them good luck with that 🙂

You, are squarely in the 20% that are willing to work 🙂

Yes, yes. Niettzche. Funny guy.

Really glad to hear it.

If I say something is a game changer, it sounds like I'm trying to pitch myself. But this stuff really is a game changer. And the more you have success. The simpler it starts to look. 

I once hear that if you are trying to get a stubborn bull to go where you want him to go, pulling him by he horns will get you no where. Instead, you just need to box him in from three sides so the logical direction is the one you want the bull to take. 

This stuff is not that different fundamentally...

Be great at what you do, then box in your audience so the logical conclusion is to take the action you want them to take.

Even more simply put without the metaphors. Be great, build a mailing. Entertain your mailing list. Ask them to buy stuff from time to time. Can't fail 🙂

Building the mailing list at a price you can afford is what seems mammoth right now. But in time it will be super easy and intuitive.

Sorry to hear that building the actual tech side was hard for you. It's the kind of thing I can do in an afternoon and I forget how confusing it is to people. Soon the agency will be offering done-for-you funnels for people who want to do the marketing but not the building. But you won't need it 🙂

Karen Grace said
P.S.

Regarding increasing the budget to collect more data, I have the usual dilemma on my hands of audience size. 

The current size of Regina Spektor's audience after putting in those top 4 countries, and ages 25-55, is 200,000. So I am putting in $20 a day at the moment- $1 for every 10,000. So I'm thinking it's probably best not to scale up the budget to collect more data- perhaps just leave it running long enough to see clear winners for demographics and text etc?

I agree. That is what I would do. Just leave it.

Once I hone in on what it looks like the demographics are going to be, the audience size looks like it's going to be around 60,000. Which leaves me thinking maybe I will need to actually decrease my budget significantly in order to keep this working? Is that the case do you think? 

You could probably get away with the larger budget, it will probably just run it's course faster. I think sticking with $1 per 10,000 is the best approach, but if you need to go a bit bigger to insure that you get your 5 subs a day for the algorithm (as an approximate goal) then bumping up a little would be ok.

Either way I can see now that an audience like RS will be a slow burn in terms of growing my list. I've starting experimenting with bigger audiences too (been running Florence and the Machine which is currently twice as expensive as RS.)

I'm starting another thread brainstorming tactics moving forward ...

Thank you.

Karen  

Switching off elements does actually effect the algorithm (as far as I know), but it doesn't seem to be as damaging as some changes, and I typically do what you are describing. My logic is that I'm going to turn it off anyway, lets see what happens if I start turning off under performers while it's live. Usually there are no adverse impact, but I've seen it a few times.

That's odd about the relevancy score. I've never experienced that. This is a dumb question, but are you looking in the daily view or the lifetime view? Sometimes it's not in the daily view, but it is in the lifetime view. Also make sure you're looking at the ad level.

Re: likes but no subscribes. One thing you can do is exclude warm traffic from all of your ads by creating a custom audience of people that have been on any page of your web site. Then create a small budget ad that ONLY goes to people who have been on your website but not subscribed. I cover this in the most recent IC lesson.

And sure, you could try creating custom language just for those people.

I took it down mostly because I needed to mess with an aweber integration issue I was having, but also because I would like to make some changes to it and possibly release a new version at some point. It's not strictly off the market, it's just not in the nav anymore. But I don't think you need it at this stage. Much of what is in it is covered between MMM and the IC.

Hi Karen,

There are a couple of ways you can fix that. You'll need to play with it and see what looks best.

Go to the customizer >>> backgrounds >>> header >>> then you can select either "totally transparent" or a solid colour to match. I think transparent will be the way to go, but play with it and see.

Let me know if that doesn't get you there.