With a multitude of music marketing tools available to artist teams, it can sometimes be difficult to decide which ones to prioritise, especially when most of them are eating into your monthly budget.
It’s therefore great to see how ToneDen has been further developing its offering since we last covered the platform in 2017, adding sophisticated live-focused tools and ad platform integrations to its existing offering for social and streaming marketing.
To recap, some of ToneDen’s early features include audience growth tools like Lasso, social unlocks, contests/ giveaways, pre-saves and smart links paired with engagement tools like automated Facebook advertising (including Instagram) and Facebook Messenger marketing. Here’s a run-down of some of the platform’s most recent and most significant updates.
Viral Contesting
Sandbox readers familiar with the platform will already probably know ToneDen’s contest pages, enabling fans to increase their chances of winning with each action they take – such as saving a track or following on Spotify, sharing on Facebook or subscribing on YouTube.
This feature is now taken to the next level. Viral Contesting is not only pointbased (demonstrating the value of each action to the fans), but it also comes with a unique link when fans share the contest on social channels. As soon as someone else participates in a contest, the fan who initially shared the link will get extra points. This referral system therefore has the potential to make these contests more viral.
Dynamic event ads
The first big update for ToneDen is the launch of dynamic event ads, which are designed to help those marketing live events run advanced ad campaigns without needing the experience in setting this up manually.
As a promoter, you link your ticketing platform to your ToneDen account and the platform will auto-create one ad campaign for all of your currently active events with a $1 daily spend. This ad campaign will constantly show ads to everyone who has clicked on an event without buying, with the frequency automatically set at a pace where it shouldn’t annoy the user but will hit them enough times so they’ll hopefully buy.
Henry “Parker” Reyes, customer success manager at ToneDen, highlights the advantages this brings to promoters. “Before you would have had to create a campaign for each event which can be very time-consuming for promoters who have, let’s say, 50 events,” he says. “Now you only have to create one – and ToneDen automatically takes all the data and photos in. It’s what people do in e-com with clothing – and we’ve wrapped that around events and making sure each event gets promoted. Since launching the feature, ROI has been up by 500x or 1000x for our clients.”
After having linked your ticketing platform once, ToneDen will auto-load all on-sale events so that there’s always a campaign running for these events.
RSVP campaigns
In another big update for the platform, ToneDen has created a new specific campaign objective for Facebook that users are able to optimise for inside the platform, which are RSVPs (clicking “interested” or “going”) on Facebook events.
Besides increasing the organic reach of your events on Facebook, music:)ally also appreciates how this can social proof your event, creating demand in a way that a repeated “buy now” ad might not be able to.
Currently, the platform suggests three-to-four audiences based on your highest-performing previous audiences so that users who have no experience in creating ads and how to target people can run highly effective ads that are autogenerated and are yielding RSVPs.
ToneDen is also looking into creating an automated system so that when someone announces a show, an event page gets launched, with the team only needing to tell the platform how much they want to spend and ToneDen spitting out a campaign to make sure it’s promoted.
The plan is that the platform will then automatically target the best-performing audience. Parker Reyes says that anything between $0.40-0.80 per RSVP is good, with the company aiming for $0.50- 0.60 per RSVP.
Reyes adds, “What’s cool about this is that a lot of managers who control the marketing budgets on the tour marketing ads, they’re not able to see how effective their marketing is because their pixel is not installed on the ticketing page and it’s the promoter’s data. So, using these RSVP campaigns, if someone is pushing to an event on Ticketmaster or Eventbrite because of their integration within Facebook, you can see if someone has actually purchased through the event page. It’s still not the full picture, but you’re able to get some of the picture and you’re still able to make proper business decisions.”
Google Ads integration (beta)
In addition to Facebook’s ad platform, ToneDen is also working on integrating Google Ads as they’ve seen even advanced marketers having issues with navigating the platform. For now, this will mainly be for events on search. A user puts in the URL, selects a Google account, enters location, demographics, name of artist and venue as well as a budget; ToneDen then spits out all possible terms people would search for and auto-populates that.
This plays into ToneDen’s overall goal of eventually creating a dashboard where music marketers can control and run campaigns on social platforms, YouTube, Google search and essentially every platform that they would want to do a campaign on – all from within one easyto-use back-end.
Playbooks
Finally, ToneDen offers a dedicated section on its platform called Playbooks which are pre-built campaign setups. The idea behind the Playbooks is to allow users to easily create a campaign that merges two or three different strategies – i.e. combining a pre-save campaign with a Facebook Messenger activation reminding the fans of the release. This not only builds the artist’s Messenger subscriber list but also helps in ensuring fans actually go and find the pre-saved track once it’s out which sometimes seems overlooked after a presave campaign.
If you flip this to ticket sales, artists can, for instance, launch a campaign where everyone who has engaged with the initial tour/show announcement will get a Messenger notification on the day tickets go on sale.
In times when it is harder than ever to reach an artist’s existing fanbase and we get overloaded with information online, strategies like these can help to increase awareness and moving fans down the buying funnel. Interestingly, ToneDen now also offers tools for podcasters – a side note for anyone in the industry currently active in this space.
Surprisingly, having added a series of new features, the pricing hasn’t increased since 2017 – with a free tier, a $50 tier and a $100 tier all available.
Regarding ToneDen’s vision for its platform, Reyes says that the big goal for the team is “to create a system that will automate entire marketing campaigns”.
He adds, “All a user has to do is upload their creative, decide on their budget and everything else will be automated. It’s about creating a system where people who don’t know how to market can just press a button and automate and do what people who have been doing this for years would do within five minutes.”
He also hints at plans to create an automated system to create fans through content on a funnel basis using the platform – something which promises to be very exciting for labels, promoters, artists and managers.
Special offer: ToneDen is offering Music Ally subscribers 30% off any new monthly subscription with all new signups up until 2nd December. Click here and quote the code CYBERDEN.
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