In this episode, Jared Judge explores the power of Facebook Ads for generating traffic and bookings for private event musicians. He discusses the common problem of musicians not being widely known and how paid traffic sources can provide a scalable solution. Jared highlights the importance of having a profit margin built into gigs to finance marketing efforts and teases an upcoming episode where he will share the strategy behind running effective Facebook and Instagram ads. Tune in for a motivating episode on leveraging Facebook ads to enhance your music career.

"Congratulations, you basically have an infinite ad budget because it's always generating more profit than you're spending. It's like going to an ATM, putting in $1, and always getting back $2. That, to me, is a scalable business."

- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)​
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Weird (Almost Backward) Gigging Secret …That Is Currently Being Used By An Underground Group Of Musicians To Book And Play As Many Of Your Favorite Gigs You Want!

What's up gigging pros! It's Jared Judge welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

It's a beautiful Tuesday morning. And we are just recovering from about a week and a half of straight rain here, which has caused some flooding because Denver's easily a dry city, not dry in terms of alcohol.

But in terms of it doesn't get much rain, I think it's known for having over 300 days of sunshine. And I guess we got all the rest of the days out of the way the pets we can have.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you off a update on some of my marketing for my private event business, my electric violin act, get some pretty cool things have been happening lately.

In that we've finally cracked the code on how to make Facebook Ads work for getting private events. I've talked about Facebook ads a couple other times on this podcast, maybe like over a year ago.

And I had been dabbling a little bit in them. But recently, I decided, let's, let's go all in and figure this game out. And I think we finally done that, which is awesome. So the goal is to be able to use a scalable platform, a scalable traffic source to get private events.

And I know that those terms might not be familiar to some of you. But first off the goal. Let me talk about the big problem that solves. You know, I believe that the biggest problem that most musicians face when they're trying to make a living with their music, is simply that not enough people know about them.

Right, you've spent decades building a great musical product, you know, you've practiced he learned songs, you've probably even put out a lot of YouTube videos and uploaded your songs to Spotify.

But still not enough people are finding out about you, and engaging with your content. So that's the big problem is just not enough people know about you. And so instead of like, you know, just letting life happen.

I'm a big believer in taking action and solving those problems. And I do believe that that is a problem that can't be solved. But it requires taking action.

That could be a whole topic for another episode is just taking action, you know, when you figure out that you have a problem.

But so the problem I'm trying to solve is the one that people don't know about me, which from my study, as learning, learning marketing, is that that's a traffic problem, you're not generating enough traffic.

And so there are two ways to generate traffic. One is through free mediums, like, you know, posting on Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and Tiktok. That is all free traffic. You're paying for it with your time and effort, but you're not spending any money on it.

And that's where many musicians keep their traffic generation strategies, even if they don't really talk about them as traffic strategies they are.

But then there is the whole world of paid traffic, where instead of spending your time and effort on, on getting people to know that you exist, you could just literally pay platforms like Facebook, or meta and Google and even TikTok to get the word out about you by, you know, putting an ad for what you do on somebody's newsfeed.

And this is an unfamiliar territory for a lot of musicians. But it shouldn't be because it is scalable. What I mean by that is when you put your like, say you're trying to get weddings.

And if you put yourself out on a platform like Wedding Wire WeddingWire.com is a directory that future brides or grooms use to find vendors for their wedding.

And musicians can pay them a monthly subscription to be listed in their directory. And you can upgrade to get placed higher, and so forth. But the problem is that you have no control over how hard Wedding Wire works to get you more leads for your wedding performances.

And so it is not scalable, you will eventually reach a limit to how effective it is like you can only get a certain number of gigs from them. You literally can't pay WeddingWire any more money than the highest tier to give you more gigs.

Like trust me I've tried. So you reach a limit. And so that is a non scalable traffic source. You can't scale up. Hang on one second. All right, we're back. So the cool part about you know paying for ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google and TikTok is that they are scalable.

You essentially can start out by paying them a low budget to test and figure out what works. And then when things start to work you You can start to turn up how much money you spend on ads.

And there really is no upper limit to how much you can spend and all that you spend 1000s of dollars a day, if you want, I don't recommend starting there. I'm not there yet. I don't know if I will ever get there with the private events side of things, just because that would literally mean more gigs that I could play.

Alright, so the way that I found that Facebook works, is I mean, before, before we get into the how it works, I did want to talk a little bit about a mindset thing that you need to have going into this because I know I hear you, the objection starts to rise.

Why would I pay for something that's not going to make me money? Like, why would I pay for something in my music career? And so you have to instead, think about, where's this money going to come from?

And this money, you know, of course, you have to start with a little bit of seed money. But in the future, if you're saying I'm going to invest $10 a day on Facebook ads, which comes out to $300 a month, on average, where's that $300 going to come from?

And, of course, money from your bank account doesn't work unless it replenishes. So when I book a gig, every gig that I book has a built in profit margin. Like there's a number that I pay myself and the musicians and sound engineer if we hire one, and other expenses.

But then there is intentionally money left over, that is used to pay for, you know, other business things that are not a part of delivering the actual gig. And so one of those things is marketing.

So, getting back to the $300, a month in Facebook ads, where does that money come from? That money comes from your profit margin. So one way to think about this, is, how many gigs do I need to book from Facebook ads in a month in order to make that profit? So how many gigs a month do I need to book to make the profit.

And depending on how many how much you build into your profit margin, that number is going to be very different. If you are not building a profit margin into your gigs, then you know, you are essentially not financing your ads.

I mean, you literally can't afford the ads because of the way that you've structured your gigs finances. The other way of looking at it is like say you're a cover band that charges I don't know, let's say $3,000. And you build in $1,000 profit margin into a gig.

So let's say you're paying your musicians 3000. And then you take 25% for the business, which would be $4,000 total. That means in order to say you're running $300 a month in Facebook ads, if you book one gig, you have essentially spent $300 in that month, and then you have all of your musicians get paid, which is awesome.

And then you have $700 leftover, even after paying Facebook, to spend on other things like sound equipment, or whatever you might like paying a photographer.

So that is the way to look at profit margins. I wasn't attending this profit, this podcast episode to talk just about profit margin. But I think it's so critical to build any profit margin to your gigs so that you can afford to pay for traffic and other things.

And so that's kind of why I spent more time doing this. And we are getting to the end of this episode, I will continue this, because I think it's really valuable and interesting, especially once he figured out the game like I have.

And I'm excited to share with you guys the results of that. And so the idea here is that if you are booking more gigs and you're earning more profit margin per month than you're spending on ads per month, then it is a profitable endeavor.

Which congratulations, you basically have an infinite ad budget, because it's always generating more profit than you're spending. It's like going to an ATM, putting in $1 and always getting back to like you've doubled your money.

And that to me once you have that that is a scalable business, which that's why on Wedding Wire and the other platforms, you can't really scale it because you can't give them more more and more money. Like you know, if you go to a casino and you find a slot machine that always pays $2 out for every $1 you put in.

Then you basically will put in as much money as you possibly can, as fast as you can to make as much money as possible, but winning where they literally cap you. They say no, you can't put in more than a couple 100 bucks a month, and you're done.

They cut you off. They're like the bouncer at a casino. No more, no more gambling. So that is the big principle behind having a profit margin and why that's so important when you're running paid traffic, are you paying for anything in your van, that you know exactly where that's coming from, because that should not come from your own back pocket.

Sure, you might have to spend a little seed money to get that started. But once is, once the engine is running, that money should just come back from the gigs that you're booking, and it should not take away from what you and the other musicians are making.

So that's why you gotta agree in advance on having a profit margin built into your gigs. So on the next episode, I will share with you the strategy behind running effective Facebook and Instagram ads to get a private event. Super exciting stuff.

And if, if that freedom if that podcast episode goes well, I'm thinking of turning that into an actual like webinar where I teach you and show you on zoom it step by step how to set this up for yourself so that you basically turn it on and you get an unlimited stream of private event gigs, not just the $100 gigs and the tip jar.

So, hope you found this interesting. Hope you're really excited for the next episode. And thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

Remember, "You are just one gig away!".